M: I think I just made a connection as to one of the reasons why people who might follow Donald because they secretly believe that one day they could be billionaires too, aggravate me. It's because what he has cannot be obtained through diligence, hard work, or even underhanded tactics. He was born into wealth and has gone through the entirety of the 80s and all of the really gross business stuff that it entails, and the connections that came from it. It's an advantage that is slowly dying off, and it's not like that degree of sleaze will ever actually leave business, or humanity in general, in entirety. But the point is that even these people who have the attitude of, I don't want to stop him because I don't want to be stopped one day, don't seem to really realize that what advantages you get from having a silver spoon in your mouth when you're born have are things which cannot be obtained simply by being able to buy silver spoons. The glibness of that phrase, being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, seems so compact that it usually isn't examined. But it actually is misleading because it makes it seem like it was simply something given that can be obtained through other methods. They don't seem to understand that one of the reasons why it is considered, if not just simply unfair, and I mean that as in a simple form of unfair, that it is an advantage which often is pushed aside when people, particularly those who actually are born with the spoon in their mouth, they push it aside and make it seem like it was a level playing field to explain that they won because they were the better choice, regardless of advantages. Kind of like how if you're born seven feet tall, claiming that you became good at basketball because of a love of the game is completely dismissing the fact that you were born with the genetics to get to be fucking seven feet tall. It's a little bit less simple to disentangle, but what Donald received from having that kind of upbringing beyond just the financial backing was the connections and the mindset and simply being in the right place at the right time to gain benefits that you can't earn. So while I could and I think sometimes have directed this directly at Donald himself, right now what I'm thinking is how annoying it is that people who are willing to support legislation which harms them personally while advantaging rich people are willing to go along with it because they believe they too will be rich one day. Even if I allow that as a foible of a certain part of the population, to latch on to Donald and somehow think that he has what they can get one day is simply false. Like if they want to be a star fucker, stick with someone like Soros or Epstein or one of those other places. I was looking for something on both ends, I know they're not comparable. But just people who actually succeeded themselves to an obscene degree. Oh, there we go. What's his name? Not Buckley, but the investment guy. Anyway, my point is that's one of the underlying multipliers that just makes me so furious at a part of Donald's supporters who aren't necessarily idiots in any other way but have managed to convince themselves that one day they could have something that is simply unobtainable unless they die and reincarnation is a thing. Without that, they have no chance of getting those kinds of non-monetary abilities that Donald got to take advantage of from the start. There's no waiting line for those things. You either get them at birth or you don't.
G: I think you've identified a distinction that often gets compressed into the phrase "silver spoon," and compressing it obscures what is actually being inherited.
Money is only one form of inherited capital. Someone born into extraordinary wealth often inherits several other forms simultaneously:
Those last four are difficult, sometimes impossible, to reproduce later in life, regardless of how much money someone eventually earns.
Your seven-foot basketball analogy gets at the same structure. Imagine someone saying:
"Anyone could become an NBA center if they just loved basketball enough."
That doesn't deny the importance of practice, but it ignores the enormous head start that genetics provided. Practice matters. Height matters too.
Likewise, a person can absolutely squander inherited advantages, and another person can build an enormous fortune from relatively modest beginnings. Both happen. But it doesn't follow that the starting positions were equivalent.
Where I think your thought becomes more interesting is that you're talking less about Donald Trump himself and more about the psychology of identification.
There are at least three different stories a supporter might tell themselves:
Your frustration seems aimed mostly at the second and third stories.
The second depends on assuming that the relevant category is simply "rich." But your point is that Trump didn't merely inherit wealth. He inherited an entire developmental environment that cannot be purchased retroactively. Becoming a millionaire at 45 doesn't recreate having spent your childhood around Manhattan real estate developers, bankers, lawyers, politicians, and media figures in the 1950s through the 1970s.
In economics, this is sometimes described as path dependence: where you begin changes which paths are even available to you later. Two people can have the same net worth at age fifty yet possess entirely different networks, reputations, habits, and opportunities because they arrived there by different routes.
I'd make one modification to one sentence you used, though.
You said these advantages "cannot be obtained."
I would soften that to "cannot usually be replicated."
Some people eventually build networks and influence that rival or exceed what they were born with. Someone like entity["people","Warren Buffett","American investor"] accumulated enormous financial and reputational capital over decades despite not being born into Trump's level of inherited wealth. Likewise, entrepreneurs sometimes create new elite networks from scratch. But even then, they are creating different advantages, not reliving a privileged childhood. You cannot go back and have your formative years rewritten.
That distinction actually strengthens your point. It isn't that success is impossible without being born wealthy. It's that a particular kind of success built on inherited social position cannot be reproduced simply by deciding to become rich later.
I also think there's another layer underneath what you're describing.
It sounds like what angers you isn't merely that people underestimate inherited privilege. It's that some people use the possibility of future wealth to justify policies that affect their present selves. In other words, they're evaluating today's legislation from the perspective of a hypothetical future identity instead of the person they actually are today.
Whether that's an accurate description of any particular voter is an empirical question—different supporters have different motivations—but as a general psychological mechanism it's well documented that people often identify aspirationally rather than descriptively. They imagine themselves as the person they hope to become, not necessarily the person they currently are.
That makes your observation less about envy and more about category error. If someone says, "One day I'll be like Trump," and what they mean is "I'll have a lot of money," they're collapsing together things that are actually distinct: wealth, family background, elite socialization, historical timing, inherited networks, and personal achievement. Those overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Separating them makes it much easier to see which parts can be pursued through effort and which were never available to begin with.
M: Yeah, I have accepted, however unhappily, the idea that there is a quiet but significant portion of the human population that believes that one day they too will hit the lottery and be rich. Not just as a hope, but like almost an act of faith. It concerns me, but I've accepted it. The issue I'm having is that their target is not just unattainable, but overtly unattainable. Going back to the basketball example, it's the difference between a child who is five foot five, well, a child who is obviously going to be about five foot five when they fully develop, saying they want to be a basketball player, which is highly unlikely but technically possible, and only concerning if they neglect the rest of their life to the sole focus of playing a game which they might not have any actual innate skill for, and which functions from such a small, or functions with such a small potential ability given the large number of people who have the equal desire, that lack of a contingency plan is almost indicative of some sort of pathology. But when someone like that cites as their goal that seven foot tall player, saying that that's the person they want to be like, it's just impossible. And the reason why Donald is like an avatar of not just business, but that particular portion of business, is because I think the late 70s and through the 80s were a particularly notorious time, like the climax of a hefty run of selfishness being masked as capitalism. There's a difference between the two types I'm talking about, which likely other people have expressed more quickly and concisely than I have. And Donald was right there to take advantage of every fucking piece, even as he, according to numbers, completely failed at using it. So this isn't just the five foot five guy emulating a seven foot center, but just one particular one in one particular season that will never happen again simply because it was a nexus of so many different ideas that it goes above and beyond any single ingredient to make a perfect storm in the past of greed that produced the creatures whose avatar seems to be Donald.
G: I think you've refined the distinction into something more specific than "people have unrealistic aspirations."
The distinction is between aspiring to an outcome and aspiring to a historical trajectory.
The first is ordinary. Someone can reasonably say:
"I want to become extremely wealthy."
That goal is improbable, but it isn't logically impossible.
The second is different:
"I want to become Donald Trump."
Not just in the sense of having money, but in the sense of following the same path. That path includes factors that are historically fixed:
None of those can be recreated. Even another billionaire born today couldn't replay that sequence.
I think that's what you're calling an "avatar." You're not saying Trump uniquely created those conditions. You're saying he has become, in your mind, the symbolic representative of a particular historical ecosystem.
Where I'd add one nuance is that history rarely has a single avatar. Trump embodies one strand of late-20th-century American capitalism: inherited real estate wealth, branding, debt, celebrity, and politics. Someone like Michael Milken represented another. Someone like Jack Welch another. Someone like Warren Buffett another. They occupied overlapping but distinct niches in that broader era.
Your broader point, though, isn't really about Trump. It's about historical contingency.
Suppose someone says:
"I'm going to become the next Rockefeller."
That doesn't merely require becoming rich. It requires oil monopolies developing under 19th-century antitrust law before modern regulation existed. That historical opportunity is gone.
Likewise, nobody today can become "the next Carnegie" by building the American steel industry from scratch under Gilded Age conditions. History has moved on.
So every generation has opportunities, but the opportunities are generation-specific.
I also notice something else in your reasoning that I think is important.
You aren't objecting to ambition itself. If someone wanted to emulate, say, Buffett's habits of disciplined investing, that at least focuses on behaviors that are, in principle, reproducible even if the outcome isn't guaranteed.
Your objection is directed at confusing symbols with mechanisms.
People see the symbol—a famous billionaire—and conclude:
"If I support what he represents, I'm aligning myself with the path that produced him."
But if the mechanism that produced him depended heavily on inherited position and a unique historical moment, then the symbolic identification doesn't actually connect to the causal process.
The only place I'd be careful is in treating the 1980s as uniquely responsible. There were certainly distinctive features—high leverage, corporate raiding, deregulation in several sectors, aggressive dealmaking, and a cultural celebration of conspicuous wealth—but every era has its own "perfect storm" that advantages some strategies over others. It's reasonable to argue that Trump's style fit that era unusually well; it's harder to argue that the era alone explains his prominence.
What I think is strongest in your formulation is the concept of non-transferable advantages.
Money is transferable.
Knowledge is mostly transferable.
Some networks are transferable.
But having been formed by a particular childhood in a particular family at a particular historical moment is not transferable. That isn't something someone can purchase after the fact or patiently accumulate through diligence. Once you frame it that way, the aspiration shifts from "I want to achieve something similar" to "I want to have had someone else's life," and that's not a goal anyone can pursue, only imagine.
M: You're not quite hitting my mark. It's more that people who already have that unreasonable but at least normal human or normal subsection of humanity impulse to believe that they are just a day away from success and act as though the success has already happened to their own detriment in the now. There's a difference between that and thinking of Donald as representative of what it is you want, even though it's obvious with just a little examination that he is not the ideal. Like, aspiring to be him, not as a modification of the aspiration towards wealth, but rather mistaking what he is and how he got there, including the massive of his own actual inability to obtain wealth without needing to have the entire apparatus of the United States government in order to rig the table. I mean, my God, the guy fucked up owning casinos. It's that the facade has been mistaken for a silly but at least technically achievable goal. There are different types of people that are sycophantic and actually would want to be Trump, or at least what they believe Donald is. No, but I'm talking about the ones who have mistaken his bluster about his past and the confidence schemes that he's using the entirety of the government to run for actual success. And that's what amplifies my frustration with his supporters, are the ones where it's so obvious that even if I refrain from attacking their belief that somehow all X number of them can be ridiculously wealthy without having the kind of drive that would already have them in that direction, even if I don't attack that, it's the idea that they're using Donald as the template. Not because he's actually demonstrated success, but because they haven't examined anything he has done sufficiently to realize that this is not the goal they are looking for.
G: I think I see the distinction now, and it's a narrower criticism than I was hearing before.
You're not primarily criticizing the "lottery mentality." You've already bracketed that off as a recognizable human tendency. You're asking about a second error that gets layered on top of it.
The first error is:
"Maybe one day I'll become extraordinarily wealthy."
Whether realistic or not, that's a coherent aspiration.
The second error is:
"Donald Trump demonstrates how to become extraordinarily wealthy."
That's a completely different claim. It's an empirical claim about a model.
In your view, the aggravating part is that the model fails inspection.
Imagine someone saying, "I want to become a great physicist," and choosing as their template someone who merely claims to be a Nobel-winning physicist but whose published work falls apart under scrutiny. The problem isn't the desire to become a physicist. It's choosing a counterfeit exemplar.
I think that's the structure you're describing.
You even alluded to something more subtle. You aren't saying Trump's supporters necessarily want to inherit his childhood. You're saying they have accepted his self-description as evidence that he is the right template.
So the reasoning becomes something like:
Your objection is to step 2.
If someone instead concluded:
"Trump inherited major advantages, had some successes, had some failures, built an unusually powerful personal brand, and later gained political power,"
they might still admire him, but they'd be admiring a much more complicated—and much less universally applicable—story.
The reason this especially frustrates you is that you think the evidence contradicting the simplified story is unusually accessible. You're not saying someone has to spend ten years in archives. You're saying there is enough publicly available information about bankruptcies, inherited advantages, branding, litigation, licensing deals, television fame, and later political power that the "master businessman" narrative deserves at least some skepticism.
One thing I'd separate, though, is your evaluative conclusion from the descriptive point.
The descriptive point is strong and general:
People sometimes mistake a persuasive self-narrative for evidence that someone is an ideal model.
That's a phenomenon that shows up everywhere—business, politics, investing, self-help, even academia. Humans are often persuaded by confidence, narrative coherence, and visible status.
The evaluative conclusion—how well Trump actually performed as a businessman compared with alternative benchmarks—is something people continue to debate because it depends on what metric you use: absolute wealth, risk-adjusted returns, business longevity, brand value, comparison to passive investing, political success, and so on.
But your core complaint doesn't actually require resolving all those debates.
It only requires this observation:
If you're going to adopt someone as your template, you should understand why they ended up where they did.
If the explanation turns out to be "he possessed a unique combination of inherited advantages, historical timing, media skill, branding ability, risk tolerance, and later political power," then that is a very different template than "he simply worked harder and thought smarter than everyone else."
I think the sentence that best captures what you've been circling is this:
My frustration isn't that people dream of becoming rich. It's that they mistake a sales pitch for a blueprint.
That seems to be the distinction you've been trying to get me to land on.
M: Yeah, I think you've hit on the concept as well as can be expressed in the English language with the terms counterfeit exemplar. He wasn't just born with the metaphysical silver spoon beyond simple monetary support. He acts as though he wasn't, and they are taken in by it. He doesn't just lie to them, but he lies badly and demonstrably false. Sorry, that was bad grammar. Demonstrably falsely? Anyway. Yeah, they're ignoring actual accomplishments and following the guy who has not just printed a "how to make yourself rich in 30 days" pamphlet, but done so badly, and with misspellings on the front, and for some reason, these dumbasses have committed their motivating dream to this charlatan, this counterfeit exemplar, to the point that denying him would be denying their own ego. I mean, you're not wrong about the idea that I think that if you're going to model yourself after someone, you should understand them. But this is that failure taken to the extreme. The guy literally contradicts himself within the same breath, and yet, for some reason, people are fascinated enough to believe it.
G: I think "counterfeit exemplar" ended up capturing the structure because it separates two different questions that often get blurred together:
Those are not the same question.
Someone can be enormously influential without being a good template. Likewise, someone can be an excellent template without being famous.
What you're describing is a kind of epistemic substitution: the visible image replaces the underlying mechanism. Instead of asking, "What actually caused this outcome?" people ask, "Who appears to embody the outcome I want?" If the appearance is compelling enough, it can crowd out curiosity about the causal story.
Where I think your frustration reaches its peak is here:
"Denying him would be denying their own ego."
That's a psychologically plausible mechanism—not one that necessarily describes every supporter, but one that can occur in many contexts.
If someone has invested part of their identity in the belief:
"This man proves that my vision of success is correct,"
then evidence that undermines him isn't processed as merely being about him. It can feel like evidence against their own future. The exemplar becomes emotionally entangled with the aspiration.
That's a much harder belief to revise than a simple factual mistake.
I also noticed an interesting shift in your wording. Earlier you were talking about wealth. Now you're talking about models. That's a more general phenomenon.
People often don't imitate excellence; they imitate confidence that advertises itself as excellence.
Those overlap sometimes, but not always.
Someone who is genuinely excellent often spends a surprising amount of time talking about limitations, trade-offs, mistakes, uncertainty, and luck. Someone selling themselves as excellent has incentives to minimize those things. That doesn't tell you who's right in any given case, but it does mean that confidence alone is weak evidence of competence.
One thing I'd add, because it makes your idea applicable beyond Trump, is that every era seems to produce counterfeit exemplars. They can appear in politics, investing, self-help, business, religion, or entertainment. The common pattern isn't a particular ideology; it's:
Your criticism of Trump is that, in your assessment, he exemplifies that pattern to an unusual degree.
The only place I'd temper the framing is with your last sentence:
"for some reason, people are fascinated enough to believe it."
There probably isn't just one reason. Different supporters are persuaded by different aspects: some by policy, some by cultural identity, some by his combative style, some by his business image, some by distrust of institutions, and some by personal aspiration. The "counterfeit exemplar" idea you've developed applies most directly to that last group—the people who genuinely see him as evidence that his story is a trustworthy blueprint for success.
As for your grammar question, "he lies demonstrably falsely" sounds awkward because lie already implies falsity. The cleanest phrasing would simply be:
"He doesn't just lie to them; he lies in ways that are demonstrably false."
Or, even more pointedly:
"He doesn't just lie to them; he lies in ways that are easily checked."
That last version also ties neatly into your main complaint: not merely that the claims are false, but that the evidence to challenge them is often publicly available.