"Billionaire Time..."

What happens when you are so insulated from other people and their opinions you create your own time zone...A luxury, yes, but a potentially dangerous one.

Today I wanted to mention a slightly different thought about why Trump and Kushner were dangerous for America. It has to do with the dangers of being too rich before going into office: Reed Galen of the Lincoln Project asked me about this. And I hope you will listen.

Vicky Ward @VickyPJWard

Once billionaires begin to build their own time zones, they insulate themselves from having to consider other people and points of view. This distorted reality leads to incredible lapses of judgment. I discuss w/@reedgalen on the new @ProjectLincoln pod podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tru…

I wasn’t feeling great when I did this last week, having just broken my shoulder, falling on the ski slopes. (Yes, I am a terrible skier and I will not be missed on the mountain). Normally, for something like this, when I don’t know the subject ahead of time, I get anxious as to whether or not I’m completely up to speed on all the different current events in the world. I read as much as I can every day but even so, you can miss things, especially when you are working on a deep dive, which I have been these past months - and will be a little while yet. (I’ll tell you about that when I’m able).

But Reed wasn’t anxious in finding in what I didn’t know. He asked me to really think hard about what I did know! Obviously, I know a great deal about Jared Kushner’s role in the Trump Administration, given my 2019 book on the subject, and I also know a lot about Trump, having known him since 2008 and also written a book about the world of New York real estate in 2014, The Liars’ Ball.

The issue with real estate is that it’s an industry with very few rules and regulations. Unlike Wall Street firms which tend to have strong cultures, most developers just do whatever they want. It’s a ruthless world where one person’s victory is another’s loss, and where people lie frequently in order to re-trade a deal at a more favorable price or just to win. There’s a reason the annual industry party in New York, after which I named my book, is called by its own attendees “The Liars’ Ball.”

This was the culture that both Trump and Kushner grew up in and imported to Washington, DC. I reported in my 2019 book, Kushner, Inc., how when one prominent Middle Eastern financier, the former Qatari Prime Minister “HBJ” visited Trump in Mar-a-Lago early on in the Administration, he remarked afterwards he’d found our leaders “open for business….”

I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous it is when the people we elect to public office are bubble-wrapped from reality - or in the case of Trump and Kushner - from Washington rules and norms.

It’s one thing to be successful and rich: that’s the American Dream, or it used to be. I’d argue we want successful people in office. The idea being they’ve made their money and now they want to enter public service.

But we need to be more careful in selecting which very wealthy people have the character and judgment to be in office.

There’s a moral hazard in being rich.

Money can cut you off so severely from other people that you forget how everyone else lives, what choices they make. When you are so bubble-wrapped you literally create you own time. This is a subject I’ve often wanted to study because there’s something so extraordinary and fascinating about the idea a tiny elite group among us can literally create more hours in the day by cutting out mundane things that the rest of us have to do. They don’t have to stand in lines, go through security, take a train instead of a plane, drive themselves, ever lose connectivity - and so on.

“Billionaire time” is undeniably a luxury, but it can be very dangerous, too, because you lose the everyday friction that most of us need to establish judgement and character. You stop hearing opposing points of view and you can make bad decisions. I should add the caveat that I don’t think this happens to everyone in the uber elite. There are people in that class who are consciously on guard against it.

But I would argue that there were some dangerously bubble-wrapped billionaires floating around the Trump White House.

Please listen to the Podcast.