Scaife paved the way for Donald Trump
You can place the blame for Donald Trump on Dick Scaife. Not entirely, course. Scaife, the late publisher of the Tribune-Review, had plenty of help from fellow billionaires like the Koch brothers.
Collectively, over the years, they nurtured an anti-government crusade that has now led to the emergence of The Donald.
Along the way, Scaife and his brethren in wealth engineered what at one time was impossible to imagine: admiration, in political terms, for the really, really, really rich.
It’s the oligarchy as populists.
Jane Mayer, a muckraking reporter for The New Yorker, lays it on the line in “Dark Money,” her new book that traces the rise of the moneyed elite in American politics.
She managed, in the course of reporting the book, to unearth an unpublished Scaife autobiography in which the scion of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest families admitted to lavishly financing a plethora of right-wing political action committees disguised as think tanks.
One of her subtexts is the uses made of U.S. tax laws by Scaife-size family foundations in the furtherance of political goals.
Scaife’s largess amounted to the lion’s share of funding for the influential Heritage Foundation, starting in 1975 with a donation of $195,000. By 1998, Scaife had provided Heritage with some $23 million.
He also provided the bulk of the money for the American Enterprise Institute as well as other purveyors of the notion that American business was over-regulated and America’s rich were overtaxed.
In all, Scaife spent $1 billion over a span of 50 years on philanthropic pursuits. Of this figure, $620 million was devoted to making Americans believe that the right was right on a host of issues.
Adding cash to the conservative pot were the likes of Charles and David Koch and Joseph Coors. The Kochs were responsible for the libertarian Cato Institute while Coors first breathed life into Heritage.
But always there was Scaife, whom one admirer likened to Santa Claus.
“He’s the originator,” said Christopher Ruddy, the author of reams of anti-Clinton broadsides at Scaife’s behest during the eight years of the Bill Clinton presidency. “I don’t know anyone who did what he did before.”
David Brock, who eventually reversed course to become a shill for the left, argued that Scaife was “the most important single figure in building the modern conservative movement and spreading its ideas into the public realm.”
Starting in the shadow of the conservatism’s greatest debacle — Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for president — Scaife, in partnership with other rich people and their adherents in the media and academia, managed to convince a whole lot of Americans that the conservative mantra that the federal government was either useless or despotic (and sometimes both) was correct.
“One measure of the movement’s impact,” Mayer summarizes, “was that starting in 1973, and for successive decades, the public’s trust in government continually sank.
“If there was a simple, unified message pushed by those financing the conservative movement, it was that government, rather than business, was America’s problem.
“By the 1980s, the reversal in public opinion was so significant that America’s distrust of government for the first time surpassed their distrust of business.”
And this brings us to Trump, the core of whose candidacy is premised on the notion that the government in Washington is incompetent, and that the people in charge, from the highest elected officials to the lowest bureaucratic functionaries, are inept, ineffective, in a word, pathetic.
Sad, as the candidate himself might say.
Conversely, because business people actually get things done (politicians never do), he, as one of the nation’s great businessmen, is uniquely qualified to steer America back to greatness, or its equivalent, profitability.
“We’re going to make so many great deals,” Trump has said. “Really, really great deals. You’ll love it. I promise.”
Naturally, there other reasons for the rise of Trump, including in reaction to Barack Obama. Where the president is cool, The Donald is hot. Where Obama is cerebral, Trump swings from the heels.
And there’s more than one reason that the American people hate both politicians and Washington, D.C. For at least a generation they’ve had political ads blasted at them that more or less declare: my opponent is a crook; or, my opponent doesn’t “share our values,” (the inference being that he/she harbors some other, no doubt alien, values).
Is there any wonder why politicians, more than is normally the case, are mistrusted and voters — some of them, anyway — are drawn to a strong, authoritarian figure like Trump?
Dick Scaife died a couple of years ago. He was a strange case, and it’s impossible to know what he would think of Trump.
But that Scaife created one of the important conditions for Trump’s fevered run for the White House, there is little doubt.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.