Bloodlines: A reprise
by digby
What with all the brouhaha about Elizabeth Warren’s DNA, I thought it might be a good day to reprise this post about Trump’s thoughts on the subject:
Friday, December 09, 2016
by digby
Actually, it’s MONEY through family but whatevs ..
I have noted this before but it’s worth looking at again. Trump is a eugenicist who believes that he and his family have superior genes and his wealth proves it. Remember this?
Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio explains that Trump was raised to believe that success is genetic, and that some people are just more superior than others:
“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development. They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
Huffington Post also took the liberty of compiling a whole bunch of times Trump suggested that genes are the main factor behind brains and superiority. Here are just a few choice quotes from good ol’ Trump:
“All men are created equal. Well, it’s not true. ‘Cause some are smart, some aren’t.”
“When you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse.”
“Secretariat doesn’t produce slow horses.”
“Do we believe in the gene thing? I mean, I do.”
“I have great genes and all that stuff which, I’m a believer in.”
Well, there’s actually a much better explanation for Trump’s success:
We’re in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of personality traits that lead to success. Entrepreneurship is on the rise, and more students coming out of business schools are choosing startup life over Wall Street.
But what often gets lost in these conversations is that the most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability. While it seems that entrepreneurs tend to have an admirable penchant for risk, it’s usually that access to money which allows them to take risks.
And this is a key advantage: When basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative; when you know you have a safety net, you are more willing to take risks. “Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” University of Warwick professor Andrew Oswald tells Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”
Trump has certainly been creative … in covering his ass. He managed to get bankers to keep loaning to him when he was clearly totally inept and repeatedly going bankrupts. It took them decades to catch on. He appears not to have paid federal income taxes for decades. And he just duped a large minority of Americans into believing that he was going to turn back the clock and make them all billionaires. So, he’s creative alright. The way the best con artists are creative.
But he couldn’t have done that without daddy’s money. Not in a million years.