In a culture of sound bites and memes, one conservative trope that has strangely stuck to liberals and Democrats is that of “coastal elites.” It’s a phrase frequently used by talking heads and Twitter bots alike to describe wealthy, aloof snobs who live on America’s East and West coasts — far away, in spirit and distance, from the real, land-locked people of middle America. The Notion came up recently in the debate over the Republican tax bill: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, seemed positively giddy to announce taxes would only go up for “rich people in Manhattan and San Francisco.” Except the idea that the right hates coastal elites is a farce. President Donald Trump and his ruling clique — his family, advisers (and family-advisers), staff (and family-staff), and cabinet — are themselves the exaggerated, cartoonish personification of the coastal elite. The Republican government, in other words, is being led by the very same folks the right wing has been warning its followers about for years. Say a novelist concocted a story about a wealthy, white billionaire who lives in a gold-plated penthouse with his third wife, 24 years his junior, overlooking Manhattan, who surrounds himself with filthy rich mansion dwellers from up and down the East and West coasts, and then convinces middle America to vote him into the presidency on a rising tide of hating coastal elites, from which he comes. Such a tale would seem so far-fetched and preposterous that it would be considered some type of dystopian fiction. Trump, son of rich parents, father to rich children, once owned a yacht with 210 telephones. His private jet, said to be like “floating on a cloud of opulence,” has gold-plated seatbelt buckles, faucet knobs, and table legs. He has spent a full third of his presidency hobnobbing at his palatial resorts, which have locations in the poshest coastal destinations, from Palm Beach to Hawaii. The coastal elitism of this White House does not begin and end with Trump, though. He has surrounded himself with the coastal elite. It’s who and what he knows best.

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Louise Linton, Sec Mnuchin's wife, posts photo that tags Hermes/Tom Ford/Valentino as she leaves Air Force Jet then replies to a critic pic.twitter.com/Uhjc7qBiEA — Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) August 22, 2017