You start with a huckster, braggart, draft-dodger, and brothel-runner from Germany.
Then you go to the next generation, the German man’s son - an Outer Boroughs NYC real estate developer who takes advantage of government policies, gets connected to local political machines and organized crime, and engages in fraud, tax evasion, and blatant racial discrimination in housing - among other brazen, shameless, criminal practices that collectively make him and his family very wealthy.
Finally, you get to the next generation - specifically the real estate developer’s second son and fourth child, who is even more of a fraud, con man, and braggart asshole than his father and grandfather. This particular individual’s specialty is obviously not money (he always loses it) but media manipulation, bringing the crime family business to Manhattan and to the country and world as a whole, with the help of vicious tabloids and the same Roy Cohn who proudly guided Joseph McCarthy and mobsters alike in their sociopathic, career-and-life destroying legal and political battles.
From real estate business to show business to fraud business to foreign business and the inevitable corruption, criminality, and potential for blackmail, this third-generation con man braggart/malignant narcissist has become a shameless - always shameless - political operator, engaging in the most blatant racism, misogyny, and character assassination yet to be seen in the Republican Party. The consequences for him? The Republican presidential nomination and US Presidency itself.
Did he get to the Presidency legitimately? Considering his own personal and family history and the contemporary Republican Party’s absolutely cynical, anti-democratic views of politics, perhaps the more important question is: What is “legitimacy” to a man and a political party that rejects the legitimacy of democracy itself? The question answers itself. Proof of legitimacy is power itself - specifically THEIR power, attaining and holding it by any means necessary.
Neither Freidrich nor even Fred could have imagined it. I wonder if they would be proud, or jealous.
