At least $83 million.
That's how much Donald Trump's political action committee, Save America, has spent, according to FEC records, on attorneys and attendant expenses to defend the former president from lawsuits and criminal charges.
"The Trump-aligned PAC has shelled out an average of nearly $4 million a month on such costs since July 2022," the Associated Press recently reported.
Yet, unlike a petty thief, Don the Con has yet to spend a single night in the hoosegow.
Compare his streak of good fortune to 3,200 people arrested in the U.S. this spring demonstrating against the war in Gaza, according to the AP.
Spark a riot to steal an election and you're free to run again. Organize a nonviolent protest and it’s going on your permanent record. Of course, it’s doubtful protesting college students received the same pedigree of multimillion-dollar legal counsel as everyman Trump.
This expresses a mundane reality most all of us already intuitively know: there’s a two-class structure to our society. If you or I did anything remotely close to what Trump's done his whole life, we'd be behind bars.
But don't try telling Orange Napoleon's eagerest toadies that. Back in May, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, joined by GOP U.S. Reps. Troy Nehls and Ronny Jackson, showed their solidarity outside the New York City courthouse where Trump had to put in an appearance.
"They want to send [Trump] to jail," Patrick said, "because they know he's their biggest danger to taking the ruling class down."
A reporter promptly asked Patrick an obvious question: ”Isn't Donald Trump part of the ruling class?"
"Donald Trump is not the ruling class," Patrick dutifully replied, and former deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka interjected, "Would a member of the ruling class be facing 730 years in prison ... and he's a member of the elite? That's pathetic. You're not a journalist.”
But wouldn't any non-elite actually be serving those 730 years?
"The greatest trick the president and elites who support him ever pulled was convincing a large swath of the American public that they aren't members of the ruling class," Conor Friedersdorf wrote for The Atlantic in 2019.
What makes the denialism especially weird is, I'm old enough to remember 2016, when the barstool argument for Trump was that he alone could fix the rigged game precisely because he's a member of the ruling class,.
We're still waiting on that. Instead of draining the swamp, Trump stacked his cabinet with billionaires: Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos. His signature legislative achievement was a gigantic tax giveaway, over 80% of which went to the richest among us.
By any colloquial definition, Trump was born with a silver spoon up his ass. A real estate tycoon and a reality TV celebrity, he didn't just win the lottery, he can leverage an extensive network of financial connections. That's why the checks for his legal bills clear while half of cancer patients in this country go broke. If Trump's not ruling class, who is?
Getting labelled a “class warrior” would have induced fainting spells in Reagan-era Republicans. As early as 2010, though, right-wing talk radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh could write the intro to a book titled The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.
In the year 2000, the first chapter of the first book written by former Fox News loudmouth Bill O'Reilly was titled The Class Factor. And the day before the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson — then the most popular cable news broadcaster — declared, ”A vote for Trump is a voting against the ruling class."
Odd then that 54% of voters making more than $100,000 annually cast a ballot for Trump, according to exit polls.
On Aug. 14, the Bolsheviks over at Forbes magazine ran a cover story finding that Trump's "26 biggest billionaire backers, worth a combined $143 billion” had so far dumped $162 million into his reelection bid.
What's a matter with Wall Street? Why back a candidate who's so clearly intent on "taking the ruling class down?” Aren't they voting against their own interests?
"For the billionaire donor class," Timothy Noah explained in The New Republic, this election is "about keeping rich people's taxes low."
That's a bit simplistic. Whether the ruling class is best thought of as a coordinated elite conspiracy or as competing managerial teams trying to kneecap each other, class domination is primarily about the preservation of the system.
"What the ruling class does when it rules is not to make, as a compact unit, all important decisions in society,” sociologist Göran Therborn wrote in 1999. “The ruling class of a given society is the exploiting class."
Earnest conservative Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact magazine, has tried like hell to pull the GOP toward the working class. He described a recent interview between Trump and an unabashed union-buster named Elon Musk as "chuckling along with an oligarch about how [Musk] came in and fired employees.”
"This is hideous. And it makes it harder and harder for me to try to imagine wringing genuine populism out of Trump 2024,” Ahmari wrote.
Indeed, to court megadonors, there's every indication Trump is scurrying away from even the semblance of the economic populism he once touted, anti-monopolist watchdog Matt Stoller wrote for Lever News.
Trump isn’t ruling class because he's obscenely rich, nor is he ruling class because he mostly does what the top 1% wants him to do. He's ruling class because he's a vehicle for the status quo. He can quell striking workers or throw protesters in prison without the slightest pang of conscience.
The United Auto Workers didn’t need Professor Therborn's academic lingo to express the same basic point in a recent online ad: "Donald Trump is a scab."
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