MUCH to the discomfort of global warming enthusiasts, at the moment quietly lying in their shadowy corners, France is under dark clouds today with temperatures well below zero in most of the country and snowflakes beginning to cover the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Now that the 45th President of the United States has been sworn in, the topic of a heated pre-dinner discussion in the living room of Count André de la Roche is how the Americans are going to handle a billionaire in the White House.
We’re a bit surprised when Jean Lauvergeat, the Loire Valley journalist, announces that despite his wealth Donald Trump remains far from being the first ever super-rich leader, ‘neither in America nor anywhere else.’
“In France we’re in the habit of comparing the values of other countries with the standards we have set for ourselves”, he explains, adding “…because we strongly believe money is bad for politics, so much so that our President François Hollande’s election slogan five years ago was ‘my greatest enemy is finance’.
“Nevertheless it is foolish to believe after having put our own king and queen under the guillotine, not to speak of thousands of aristocrats following the French revolution, and after having banned religion from politics, we have become the ideal of democracy.
“Think of England which has protected its royal family and its House of Lords, and of Italy, the world’s capital of Roman Catholicism. Are these countries any less democratic then we are?”
Lauvergeat continues: “And speaking of wealth, with his 3.7 billion dollars made after nearly a century of hard work by his father and by himself, Donald Trump is no comparison to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who almost effortlessly earned 84.2 and 53.8 billion dollars respectively.
“But, coming back to political leaders, think of the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko ($1.3bn), Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi ($5.9bn), former president Sebastian Pinera of Chile ($2.4bn), Thailand’s Taksin Shinawatra ($1.7bn) and former Georgian prime minister Bidzina Ivanichvili ($4.6bn).
“But we’re talking here of the White House. Let me reveal to you the wealth of some of the American presidents. The first, none else than George Washington, possessed 580 million and the third US President Thomas Jefferson was worth 34 million dollars, both in today’s currency value. Among modern former presidents, to take only a few examples, Lyndon B. Johnson owned 108 million, John F. Kennedy 100 million and Bill Clinton 75 million dollars.
“President Trump’s strategy of repealing the near totality of financial regulations approved during the past eight years is apparently his first step in the list of his promises to let off the hook America’s growth and create a huge number of jobs.
“Then he has a few super-rich people in his administration too. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Special Counsellor Carl Icahn are all billionaires. One cannot help thinking Donald Trump knows what he is doing.
“The economic revolution promised by Trump and his advisers goes even further. Commercial giants like Boeing, Microsoft, General Electric, Apple and Pfizer have as much as 2,600 billion dollars stashed away in European and other foreign bank accounts. The new President has promised to bring all that money back home by offering comfortable tax reliefs.”
Jean Lauvergeat suddenly turns to his right, looks through the window at the slowly disappearing figure of Eiffel Tower behind the snowfall and desperately drops his hands to his knees: “Oh, I think I have talked too much. I need to sit down next to the fireplace and have a drink.”
André’s golden retriever Schweppes, who is lying very close to the flames, raises his head, gives out a sharp bark of approval and goes back to sleep.
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris
Published in Dawn, January 22nd, 2017
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