Of bigots, billionaires and blowhards
No one is surprised when billionaires say or do bigoted things. The fact that they’re also blowhards is written into the job description. This week, America has witnessed the battle of two blowhards, but only one of them is a bona fide billionaire — Mike Bloomberg.
The other, Donald Trump, is likely a billionaire on paper only and a heavily leveraged one at that. Of course, a look at his tax returns would settle the question once and for all, but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon given the crushing humiliation of being sent to the back of the bus with all the other mere millionaires once his true net worth is revealed.
Mr. Trump’s bombast is much bigger than his wallet when it comes to measuring his wealth against Mr. Bloomberg’s. The crippling insecurity caused by the vast disparity in the only category he cares about has caused a man already suffering from arrested development to resort to ironic schoolyard taunts.
Mr. Trump’s nickname for Mr. Bloomberg is “Mini Mike.” This is acknowledgment that the only advantage the insecure commander in chief truly feels he has over the former New York City mayor is height and presidential incumbency.
“We know many of the same people in N.Y,” Mr. Bloomberg tweeted after one of Mr. Trump’s tweets needling him about his height. “Behind your back they laugh at you & call you a carnival barking clown. They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence. I have the record and the resources to defeat you. And I will.”
Of all the things ever tweeted back at him, Mr. Bloomberg’s verbally restrained, but calculated tweet hit the center of Mr. Trump’s fragile ego more effectively than any opponent he’s ever sparred with.
That’s because the far wealthier Mr. Bloomberg is the very face of the Manhattan elite Mr. Trump has struggled to join for decades. The idea that the New York elite who have treated him like a vulgarian for decades are still laughing at him cuts deep with a man with few friends to begin with.
This isn’t to say that Democrats should be carrying Mr. Bloomberg on their shoulders anytime soon. Mr. Bloomberg is cut from the same cloth as most plutocrats, as we learned from recently recirculated comments about neighborhood redlining, the effectiveness of “stop-and-frisk” and his membership in racially discriminatory country clubs.
Still, Mr. Bloomberg is second only to Joe Biden among the Democratic presidential candidates in attracting African American support among older voters. Black millennials still go for Bernie Sanders.
It’s not that black folks are ignoring the revelations about Mr. Bloomberg. The operating assumption among black people is that all billionaires are bigoted blowhards.
The only question is whether they’re repentant or not.
Since he announced his presidential bid, Mr. Bloomberg has become self-aware enough to repent of his once enthusiastic support of stop-and-frisk as a tool of social control. His comments about redlining as a rational way to deny bank loans to minority home buyers will also soon be walked back. He’ll probably quit his racially exclusionary clubs, too.
Black people are pragmatic. No one wants to defeat Donald Trump more than black people, so they’re more than willing to line up behind a guy, no matter how diminutive, who vows to spend $1 billion to throw the incumbent out of office.
This is the logic in a nutshell. While Mike Bloomberg has given lip service to racially discriminatory practices like redlining, Donald Trump and his late father, real estate mogul Fred Trump, have actually practiced it.
The Trump organization was sued for housing discrimination in the early 1970s by the Nixon administration for refusing to rent to blacks and other minorities in the postwar years. They were determined to keep their vast apartment holdings in Queens and New Jersey white as long as humanly possible.
So who is the bigot? The one who rationalizes his bigotry in sterile, technocratic language or the one who practices it? Both, but the one who repents of redlining and stopand-frisk will get the benefit of the doubt if he’s the lesser of two billionaire evils.
The next time Mr. Trump laughably accuses Mr. Bloomberg of being a “terrible bigot,” it will be helpful to ask oneself if the president still believes the Exonerated Five (re: Central Park Five) should be executed for a crime they didn’t commit.
Meanwhile, former Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden continues to exemplify the cluelessness of the party’s moderate wing. Mr. Biden’s inability to emerge from the stale air of mid-century American nostalgia is depressing.
Recent stories about his paternalistic take on black parenting and whether black parents can even read, paint him as a man of his time — which is the problem. Mr. Biden may have imbibed too much of the milk of casual racism that was common to his generation to make an effective leader for these times.
Like Forrest Gump, Mr. Biden has found himself either adjacent to or at the white-hot center of many of the nation’s hottest cultural and political controversies. While present during many transformative moments — including eight years as the vice president to the nation’s first African American president — he doesn’t seem to have translated that advantage into a politically coherent mandate for his own presidency.
If anything, Mr. Biden comes across as an accidental bigot. He is not the active, raging bigot that Mr. Trump is or the cynical, repentant bigot Mr. Bloomberg may, be according to his statements. He is merely a reflection of the casual bigotry of the times he grew up in. All three are blowhards.