Pathology of Privilege: Trump as Once and Future King
By Brenda Peterson | November 7, 2024
“The Destiny of Man is to unite, not divide.”
— The Once and Future King, T.H. White
I’d never met an entitled, rich kid until third grade when my family moved from the West Coast to Boston. We didn’t know we were poor, a family of four kids in a rundown Revere Beach apartment. Like Fisher Kings, we ate lobster from the nearby fish factory because we couldn’t afford hamburgers. Our playmates were the Puerto Rican kids whose patriarch was a professional wrestler — WWE, the original reality show. Sometimes we skipped school to ride a rollicking subway into the big city.
It was on one of those egalitarian trains that a boy in private school uniform shoved me aside like a rag doll to claim my pole.
“Outta my way!” he shouted.
I was no stranger to bullies and pushed him right back. I surrendered the pole because my parents had taught me that rudeness, like boredom, was a sign of a small mind.
But what the boy said next was not only small-minded, it was shocking. “You’re nothing,” he sneered.
Nothing? I suddenly saw myself through his eyes: white anklets slipping down over my worn Keds, cheap cotton pedal-pushers with a patch or two, fingernails chipped from beachcombing, and curly hair with the family cut — a bowl over my head as my father snipped away with kitchen scissors. I didn’t yet fully understand the limits of caste or class system, but I knew enough to recognize that I was, as my favorite Dickens novel Oliver Twist had taught me, a commoner, maybe even a peasant. Could I ever hold up my cup and ask for more?
“Just because that bully has money,” my Southern-bred mother reassured me, “doesn’t mean he’s got any manners — or real talent. He’ll have to make his way, like anybody else. It’s all about what you make of yourself — and do for others.”.
But it’s also about what is given to us, I would realize years later when I was a twenty-something staffer at The New Yorker magazine. In those quirky, classy halls, I met more rich kids, some financed by trust funds. They were not arrogant — especially if old money had mentored them to care about those less fortunate. Some of them were remarkably generous and “woke,” as some say now. Their ancestors had founded hospitals, research institutes, libraries, and international wildlife sanctuaries. At this prestigious magazine, we were the very few young, devoted servants of our elderly superiors — editors who saw everyone under thirty as apprentices. Our wait to rise in the literary stratosphere would be long.
When an editor complimented me on a new silk blouse, I gushed, “I saved for six weeks and bought it on sale at Lord and Taylor.”
Stunned, the editor held her manicured hand to her bosom. “You don’t mean to say that you . . . live off your salary!”
Who didn’t live off their salaries? Who didn’t have to work for a living? To fathom this class system, I always turned to my best friend, a benevolent heiress, whose father would later lose his family’s fortune when he fell prey to Alzheimer’s-induced bad investments.
After explaining to me that some people were so privileged they never had to work, to budget, to lower their expectations, she mused, “But I envy you . . . whenever I wanted anything, a toy or a trip, it was just given to me. I never had to wait or wonder about it.” She paused and admitted, “It crippled my imagination.”
I was so struck by her insights I scribbled them down in my novelist’s journal. Like every other underpaid, hopeful staffer, I was still unpublished, working on my first book. And I was still a poor kid, living in New York City’s 92nd Street Y, though I wasn’t Jewish; the influential father of another friend had helped get me into that heady, intellectual dorm because I knew the Hebrew Bible better than many of the Israeli students.
Another of my thoughtful magazine co-workers continued my education in privilege. “When you’re born into wealth,” she taught me, “you don’t recognize the same limits or rules as others. You don’t have to be too curious or listen. Wealth gives the illusion that we are insulated, so we can deny — or disbelieve — what other people suffer.”
These days of such drastic income inequality, I’m reminded of those wealthy and, yes, sometimes wise friends. They first schooled me in the real lives of the 1 percent. Even though Americans criticize rigid caste systems and privilege in other countries, America has its own rich ruling class. Greed in this century is not a deadly sin — it’s a business plan.
Once again, we’ll have Trump, an entitled president, driven as much by self-centered avarice as power. Many in Congress are millionaires. The working-class, uneducated, and poor who just restored Trump to power will be those who suffer most under Trump’s tyranny. Latino men who aligned with Trump’s bro-bravado and misogyny — who refused to vote for a woman president — may soon be racially profiled and deported with their mixed-status mothers and sisters and wives. Trump cares nothing for rural people; he sees them as simply peasants under his reign. We will all bear the burdens of Trump’s tariffs passed along not to importers, but to us consumers.
Half the country who so hopefully voted to elect Kamala Harris “for the People,” now feel shoved out of the way by a bullying, self-absorbed president who inherited millions as a child, whose imagination, creativity, and curiosity are crippled by instant gratification and zero impulse control. Only a rich kid could cynically exult that he doesn’t have to pay hardly any taxes or live off a hard-earned salary, while enthralling millions of followers who do; and who have now naively made him monarch. Only a rich kid without conscience or real class decides kids without a country belong in immigrant cages. Another sad irony is that Trump’s core voters includes the least educated and often most hopeless populations. But their daily struggles are not his. Their real grief is not his grievance.
As Trump again ascends his American throne, as he taunts that he will escape any indictments or justice, we are set for an American tragedy. But as in most timeless tragedies, is it possible that some part of Trump’s soul, or his subconscious, is asking us to finally set some limits on him?
Psychologists note that when parents set limits for their children, this is also a form of containing, even holding their children within loving boundaries. We instinctively use the phrase, “hold accountable.” It is a not only about teaching limits, but also implies being held close. Trump has never been held back or contained, not by the recent Supreme Court’s immunity ruling and not by his own party; and after this 2024 election, not by the people or the DOJ. He is still unbound, unchecked. Unboundaried.
In his “Children of Crisis” series, The Privileged Ones: The Well-off and the Rich in America, Pulitzer-winning child psychiatrist and Harvard professor emeritus Dr. Robert Coles studied the impact of inherited wealth. If not raised with “the responsibilities of entitlement . . .The child has much but wants and expects more — only to feel no great gratitude, but a desire for yet more: an inheritance the world is expected to provide.” Coles calls this more pathological type of privilege, “narcissistic entitlement.”
Privilege without compassion in politics puts the self before the collective good, the personal will over any egalitarian checks and balances. Veteran reporter Bob Woodward once asked Trump, “Do you have any sense that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave . . . and I think lots of White privileged people in a cave have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain particularly Black people feel in this country?”
Trump’s unhesitating response was, “No, I don’t feel that at all.”
An elder once told me, “People born with great wealth or great beauty don’t really do their soul’s work until those blessings are gone.” Sickness, poverty, great loss, and debilitating limits — these are our most instructive life’s mentors. Because eventually, we all fall down.
Rulers rise, fall, and pass into the history they’ve earned. Even Trump will one day fall. For now, our country is experimenting with a boy-king of inherited wealth who was not raised to care about others, unless they serve his needs. A man who sees the presidency as a brand and government as a family franchise. Europe and much of world history has endured its sociopaths and dictators — is it our turn?
After re-electing Trump, what more will this king demand? Civil servants will take a litmus test for loyalty. revered generals like Milley and Kelley will face Trump’s Commander-in-Chief vengeance. America will be subjected to the minority rule and retribution of his MAGA base. Trump’s cult-like appeal has called forth a fundamentalist faith that defies all other spiritual truths, except Trump’s. Evangelicals flock to him as “The Chosen One”. Yet there are no merciful Sermons on the Mount. In Trump’s dogma, the meek never inherit the earth.
Greed in this country is not a deadly sin — it’s a business plan.
As a novelist, I always long for any corrupt, unchecked character’s comeuppance. The just and moral course correction of a compass finally set right. Trump’s shadow, like a tragic flaw, may illumine us. In Goethe’s Faust, when Mephistopheles is asked who he is, the Devil replies: “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”
This election is not simply about who we have again made our president. It’s about what we’ve made of ourselves — and of our children. About the good that may prevail if we do our work to resist this once and future king. Under this mad king’s reign, we must keep hoping for the “more perfect union” our country will become when Trump, like MacBeth, is “a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.”~
Brenda Peterson is a novelist, nature writer, and memoirist, author of over 20 books, including Your Life is a Book, selected by Oprah.com and the memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, an Indie Next, “Great Read” chosen by independent bookstores. Her work has appeared on NPR, in The New York Times, Orion, Tikkun, and Oprah magazine. Her new mystery novel is Stiletto; her most recent non-fiction is Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals.
For more: www.BrendaPetersonBooks.com
