At a time when too many Americans increasingly struggle to maintain their current standards of living, facing swelling basic expenses:

When the world’s wealthiest people reflexively dodge their responsibility to pay taxes to sustain the societies on which they prey:

DT proposes to build an exorbitant offshoot of Versailles next to the White House. This thing was initially expected to cost $200 million (contributed by private parties, who would no doubt expect ‘access’ in return). It is now projected for $1 billion, and taxpayer funded. How’s that for brazen bait-and-switch? And for tin-eared cluelessness about life’s harsh realities – especially for many of his own voters?

What must happen before DT, and others of stratospheric wealth, grasp that they are drilling into the lava dome of a rumbling volcano? They act as if presume the ‘volcano’ is a dumb beast that either won’t notice, or can be easily diverted. But eventually they will drill too deep, cross some hyper-sensitive threshold, and all that enormous power will burst free like the force of Nature it is.

Then, like the regime of Pre-Revolutionary France, the heedless, hyper-privileged caste will learn that in refusing to give a little, they are apt to lose all. It is coarse, short-sighted hubris, by people who consider themselves hyper-sophisticated.

If they won’t pay to help keep civilization functioning, they may have to taste more deeply than most what happens if it stops doing so. As the courtiers at Versailles did when the Revolution came to (and for) them.

Unfortunately, such upheaval will impact more people than just themselves. But then, when have most Plutocrats ever cared about anyone else? Just aspiring to, let alone ruthlessly achieving, unnecessary, excessive wealth suggests pathologically – and quite possibly, self-destructively – unrestrained self-involvement.

My focus here is DT’s ballroom. But it reflects a problem – accelerating use of Reason to overfeed sub-human appetites, instead of nurturing genuinely (evolved) human attributes, like Empathy – that is global in scope. It’s just appearing so floridly in America because material success has for so long been our quasi-State Religion, practiced by following the Via Dollar-osa.