TRUMP

30 ANATOMY OF A MONSTROSITY
wealthy people even wealthier. Thus there become two classes of people:
the small group of billionaires at the top, and everyone else. And
the small group of billionaires keeps telling people that if they just
work harder and keep handing over their earnings, perhaps they, too,
can join the billionaires.
A photograph taken in 2014 shows this contrast well. 57 It depicts
a street in Mumbai, in which the emaciated and impoverished live
in squalor beneath an enormous billboard advertising a new Trump
Tower. On the billboard, a grinning Trump sits in an elegant wingback
chair, in his gilded penthouse. The caption beneath Trump reads:
“There is only one way to live—The Trump Way.” Of course, the photograph
demonstrates that there are, in fact, at least two ways to live:
the Trump Way, and the way street children in Mumbai must live. But
Trump offers people a cruel false hope, with no acknowledgment of
the reality of their conditions.
Trump surely does not see his Mumbai billboard as taunting the
poor, but offering them a vision of the lives they could have. We know
that he has little sympathy for people who remain impoverished. As
Trump says of people who experience multi-generational poverty:
I’ve watched politicians bragging about how poor they
are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents
and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can
stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn’t the
kind of person we want to be electing to higher office…
How smart can they be? They’re morons. 58
To Trump, then, the suffering of the poor is just a sign that they’re
not very smart, or haven’t tried very hard. Show Trump a photo of his
billboard in Mumbai, and he won’t see rich and poor, he’ll see a winner
and a bunch of losers.
If we had to isolate the quality about Donald Trump that is most