Lordling

 Yesterday, the New York Times published an analysis article that places a few recent items of Trump's behavior in telling juxtaposition. 

Let's see, he is obsessed with funding his ballroom construction project at the White House. He has used the privileges and powers of the White House to enrich himself and his family. He has publicly announced that he "doesn't think" about "Americans' financial situation" at a time of rising prices for basic commodities as a result of his war in the Middle East. 

Indeed, Trump reportedly dismissed the toll of his war in the form of higher gas prices and grocery bills as "short-term pain" and "much less than people thought."

I am reminded of what Bertrand Russell wrote about the costs of war, in his World War I-era book, Justice in War-time: 

It is common to speak of economic evils as merely material, and of desire for economic progress as grovelling and uninspired. This view is perhaps natural in well-to-do people, to whom economic progress means setting up a motor car or taking holidays abroad instead of at the seaside. But with regard to the poorer classes of society, economic progress is the first condition of many spiritual goods, and even often of life itself.

Putting it all together—does it perhaps reveal Trump to be a billionaire who is "out of touch" with the problems facing ordinary Americans, the Times article queries? 

Or could we perhaps put it a bit more strongly—and say that it reveals in all his stark nakedness a sociopathic mass murdering narcissist who displays no sense of compunction whatsoever about the effects of his actions on other human beings? 

In Trump's mind, it appears that Americans—and people around the globe—exist only to suffer and die in his wars, pay the cost at the gas pump and the grocery store and through our tax bills for his adventurism and bellicosity, and toil for his own enrichment and the expansion and improvement of his various real estate holdings—among which he now appears to count the White House itself as personal property.

His view of the rest of us is rather like the one Robert Burns described: 

How pamper'd Luxury, Flatt'ry by her side,
The parasite empoisoning her ear,
With all the servile wretches in the rear,
Looks o'er proud Property, extended wide;
And eyes the simple, rustic hind,
Whose toil upholds the glitt'ring show
A creature of another kind,
Some coarser substance, unrefin'd
Plac'd for her lordly use thus far, thus vile, below!

  

And yet, as Burns elsewhere wrote in a different poem: 

If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave, 

By Nature's law design'd, 

Why was an independent wish 

E'er planted in my mind?