Cheap shots: Old Man Trump

"Blue-Collar Billionaires" in contemporary romance by Minx Malone.

And have we possibly at last reached peak Halperin?

Great line: @DonaldJTrumpJr calls his dad @realDonaldTrump a "blue-collar billionaire" @SHO_TheCircus @Showtime

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) March 21, 2016

Yes, yes, great line.

Uh, meaning what?

I guess meaning very different from young Don:

Don, lending his prestige to the Glennfiddich. The glass of fashion and the mold of form.

CNBC's Blue-Collar Millionaires are, Dr. Google tells me, rugged exponents of the American dream who have built themselves up out of nothing with a tattoo parlor, a waste-hauling company, or a roofing business. Donald Senior, as is well known, built himself up out of a "small loan of one million dollars" from his dad—oh, plus a job in 1968, at 22, at his father's company in Brooklyn and Queens, which he took over as president in 1974, simultaneously using the small loan to create his own business turning Manhattan into an isle of joy ("It was good for me," Donald later commented. "You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself.")

What's blue-collar about Donald Trump, Mark? I can only assume Halperin is adverting to his unspeakable bad taste, under the false impression that that's a working-class thing. And a vote-getter. Because Halperin shares Trump's—and the Republican establishment's—utter contempt for the working class.

The blue-collar dude at the left is the poet, musician, and Marxist Woodie Guthrie, who was, oddly enough, Fred Trump's tenant at the Beachhaven complex in Brooklyn in 1950-51. Image via Gawker.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in 1954, William F. McKenna, appointed to investigate "scandals" within the FHA, cited Fred C. Trump and his partner William Tomasello as examples of how profits were made by builders using the FHA. McKenna said the two paid $34,200 for a piece of land which they then rented to their corporation for over $60,000 per year in a 99 year lease, so that if the apartment they built on it ever defaulted, the FHA would owe $1.5 million on it. McKenna said that Trump and Tomasello then obtained loans for $3.5 million more than the apartments cost. ^[7] Trump testified before the Senate Banking Committee the following month as it investigated "windfall profits." He said that builders would not have built apartments under an expired post-war loan insurance program if regulations had set inflexible limits on loans issued by the FHA.^[8] In September 1954, following Trump's testimony, 2,500 tenants of the Beachhaven apartments sued Trump and the FHA, claiming the builder made windfall profits and that the builder had received loans for $4 million more than the construction actually cost, and that rents were consequently inappropriately inflated. (Wikipedia)

Showing his feelings about the working class and government, too, by legally ripping off World War II veterans (that's who the housing was designed for) and the FHA. Of course he also kept the apartment complexes segregated. Woodie Guthrie wrote,

I suppose
    Old Man Trump knows
    Just how much
    Racial Hate
    he stirred up
    In the bloodpot of human hearts
    When he drawed
    That color line
    Here at his
    Eighteen hundred family project ....