“Some day, it’ll become time for [farmers] to leave this beautiful earth, and they’ll be able to leave their farm, without taxes, to their children. I got rid of the ‘death tax’ on farms so that when you do pass away, on the assumption that you love your children, you can leave it to them and they won’t have to pay tax.”
“But if you don’t love your children so much and there are some people that don’t — and maybe deservedly so — it won’t matter, because, frankly, you don’t have to leave them anything. Thank you very much. Have fun.”
There was a lot of speculation that he was talking about his own kids. Maybe he and Ivanka are on the outs? Eric made a bad deal somewhere? But as Philip Bump explained, he made that video after a stop in Iowa where he was bragging about his great accomplishments for farmers and he made a joke about not loving their kids and got a laugh from the crowd. He’s trying out new material.
But as Bump also points out, there is a ton of intergenerational friction in our culture right now and there are plenty of older Trump voters who don’t get their kids at all. Of course, there’s nothing new in that. Plenty of today’s older folks had knock down drag outs with their own parents. But it is an political fissure today and Trump is playing to it with his MAGA followers.
But my favorite part of that quote is the “have fun” at the end, which Bump characterizes as migrating “from his day job of hosting visitors to Mar-a-Lago.” Lol. The man truly is a piece of work.