My son Luke doesn’t really know how to lie. The whole concept is something autism won’t permit him to employ. Luke Carey for President! There will be many awful legacies we will have to deal with should the nation survive Trump as a going democratic concern. Very high on the list will be reestablishing at least an abiding demand for the truth. Trump lies as he breathes and that doesn’t seem to be an issue any longer. “Hey, that’s just him” is being put forward now even by otherwise voracious critics. Instead of a horrified gasp, we now get knowing chuckles across our political spectrum.
The President clearly lied about having business interests in Russia. He definitely lied about knowing Don Jr. met with Russian agents promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. It has been proven beyond question he lied about paying off Stormy Daniels as the general election approached in 2016. Of course,, he’s continued to hold ridiculously tight to the lie/delusion his inauguration crowd was the second coming. With the latest monstrosity of a White House budget, it’s clear he flat out lied about his determination to protect Medicare and Medicaid from deep cuts. The list is endless, and in fact, the Washington Post Fact Checker, probably journalism’s most important cottage industry right now, has cataloged near 10,000 flat out lies from the President’s yap since Inauguration Day. Needless to say, this is a practice that simply can’t survive his vile tenure if we are to continue as a pluralist republic.
Howard Schultz, the man who convinced us paying near $10 for a cup of joe is reasonable, wants to run for President. Yet and still, the Starbuck’s founder can’t be bothered with any party affiliation or, more importantly, the cumbersome nomination process such ties entail. So, like those of his 1/2 % ilk are prone to do, Schultz plans to use his money to forego such drudgery and run as his own entity. What does he have to offer? I suppose it can be called “common sense plutocracy,” gleaned from his “rags to riches” personal story. A filthy rich moderate with a heart; he’s one of us…. look at his bio.
Indeed, Schultz has created a personal brand that leans heavily on Horacio Alger to assure all he has the bona fides to empathize with struggles Americans at even the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder confront. He may be a billionaire now, but unlike the gilded devoid we currently suffer, his roots are true and assure a just perspective.
Schultz has claimed a tough-as-nails upbringing in the Brooklyn projects, a hell few but the most focused and determined could escape. According to Schultz, he hails from “literally the wrong side of the tracks.” Fights were commonplace, Schultz has recalled, only the relative scarcity of guns compared to today kept them from ending much worse…. but, stresses Schultz, “they were tough in their own way.” Yes, to hear Schultz tell it, the Bayview public housing project he was forced to endure stacked the deck against any hopes for achievement and future prosperity. Only his tenacious resolve, and a football scholarship to a midwest university his on-field feats earned him, separated Schultz from his destitute peers, who surely suffered as adults the same fate their deprived childhoods ensured. Not so fast.
Some excellent, very in-depth reporting by the Washington Post clarifies a much different picture. Turns out the Bayview housing project was more Rockwellian than dystopian, more middle-class than poverty ridden. Schultz’s peers laugh and then grow irate at his claims they all grew up in desperation. Apparently, Bayview was designed and continually administered to make sure the poor and destitute were actually excluded! Residents had to demonstrate they were on the way up, not down.
Former Schultz running mates describe a working-class, white, largely Jewish enclave, complete with playgrounds, basketball courts… even an elementary school. It seems residents attended to hunger pangs by visiting two wonderful kosher delis just across the street, and sunset walks to bordering Jamaica Bay relieved the stress of the day’s toil. One former resident put it succinctly: Bayview was “…a shiny, wonderful world… Everything was brand spanking new.” Schultz called Bayview “an urban melting pot.” Data from the mid-60s pegs the demographic makeup at almost 95 percent white. Turns out the pot actually contained one big solid chunk of Caucasian.
And the football scholarship Schultz earned that provided his ticket out off the mean streets? Er, not quite. In a 2007 interview, Schultz confirmed “a football scholarship” to Northern Michigan University got him out of Brooklyn. Since then the story has changed. Its current incarnation is that the impressionable youngster “misunderstood” and “convinced” himself he had a scholarship. Really?! According to the latest version of past reality, Schultz left home certain he had a scholarship, but quickly realized he wasn’t college ball material and ended up scraping by financially on a myriad of jobs he worked to pay tuition. Blah blah blah.
While there is little doubt Howard Schultz is a self-made man, indeed an astonishing success story, to coin the well-trod maxim: it’s the lying stupid. That Schultz has, throughout his adult life, seen fit to, not embellish, but lie about his narrative is disqualifying. Trump’s ascension to high office was fully dependent on the fiction he turned a one-time $1 million, promptly-paid-back loan into gold. Similar reporting by the New York Times proved conclusively the Donald instead failed constantly and was bailed out by his father to the tune of more than $400 million in today’s dollars. Just another obnoxiously coddled rich kid acting badly time and again. Of course Trump, fully aided by Fox/AM, long ago convinced his wretched core the NYT was “fake news,” except when it reports a story he likes. Such BS needs to end yesterday. Whatever Schultz’s spinners put out won’t do…. it’s fiction. Period!
The most ruinous legacy of Trump will be the absurd scale of his misdeeds we accepted. All followers will succeed a man who set standards for ugly malfeasance no one else’s worst can come near. Thus, the temptation will be to allow a Trump grading curve that forgives far more than we should, in effect obliterating where the bar was before Trump came on the scene. It’s easy to hear the argument now: “well, if we crush Schultz, where does it stop? Everyone has peccadillos!” That’s true, and each case is different. Perhaps the test should be whether or not they are capable of owning up to their frailties, coming clean. That’s a metric Trump fails on the hour. Judging from the tongue-tied spin coming from Schultz flacks, it’s a standard he doesn’t appear concerned about meeting, either. Enough! BC