Yes, he is the “elite”
by digby
He keeps telling his foolish cult followers that he (and they) are the real “elites”:
“We’re the elite. You’re smarter than they are, you have more money than they are, you have better jobs than they do, you’re the elite,” he told his audience. “So let them have the word ‘elite’, you’re the super elite, that’s what it is. I always hate when they say ‘Well the elite decided to not to go to something I’m doing’. Right the elite?
“I say, ‘Well, I have a lot more money than they do, I have a much better education than they have, I’m smarter than they are, I have many much more beautiful homes than they do, I have a better apartment at the top of Fifth Avenue’. Why the hell are they the elite, tell me? Because you’re the elite, just remember that.
Sure, he can say that his followers are just like him. But let’s faec facts. Only very wealthy playboy heirs to greatfortunes are able to do things like this
The federal campaign finance and tax evasion case that is embroiling the White House began in the unlikeliest of places: the world of supermarket tabloids.
It is populated by porn stars and Playboy models, shadowy “story brokers” and the ultra rich and powerful, who can buy back their secrets on an underground exchange run by gossip scribes who set the rules, the prices and, frequently, the reputational toll.
That world has now come to life on the stark pages of federal court documents that detail violations of campaign finance and tax laws, implicating President Trump and reprising Watergate-era talk of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and possible impeachment.
In laying out the charges to which Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday, the documents filed in New York also entangle several unidentified people in Mr. Trump’s business and from his campaign.
The anatomy of the crime the court papers describe — stemming from hush money payments to two women who claimed they had sexual encounters with Mr. Trump — has a reality-television twist that has come to typify the Trump presidency. One of the women, the pornographic film star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, went public with her story earlier this year in a media blitz, and she was represented by a brash lawyer who says he now is considering running for president.
“You have to go back to Watergate-era scandals to find similarly colorful and outrageous events,” said Daniel A. Petalas, a former head of enforcement at the Federal Election Commission and a former Justice Department public corruption prosecutor. “When political figures are engaged in conduct that might be tawdry or salacious, it’s not unusual that the other participants have colorful histories and backgrounds themselves.”
Like so many political scandals before it, this one began with a typical worry for some candidates: that their history of extramarital affairs and other sexual behavior could undermine a bid for office.
The trouble for Mr. Trump, some of which was first disclosed just before the 2016 election, began a decade earlier, shortly after the birth of his son with Melania Trump. Mr. Trump allegedly began affairs with Ms. Clifford, whom he met at a celebrity golf tournament; and Karen McDougal, then a Playboy model he met at the Playboy Mansion while filming an episode of his NBC hit “The Apprentice.”
Mr. Trump had an ally in the nation’s biggest tabloid news publisher, American Media Inc., which controls nearly every gossip magazine on checkout counter racks throughout the country, and is a magnet for people with embarrassing tales to sell about the rich and the famous.
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Its flagship, The National Enquirer, proved in 2008 that it could be as threatening to a politician as to a Hollywood star, when it uncovered an affair that John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, had with a campaign worker that resulted in the birth of a child. Political supporters of Mr. Edwards helped finance the cover-up, leading to an unsuccessful yet groundbreaking campaign finance case that created a template for the charges against Mr. Cohen.
These elites don’t have those kinds of problems:
