By now, you're likely aware of the New York Times' 13,000-word expedition into Donald Trump's finances, which goes into excruciating detail about the constellation of Byzantine tax avoidance schemes—at best, "dubious," and at worst, "literal fraud"—that clan patriarch and noted race discriminator Fred Trump employed in his diligent efforts to preserve the family wealth. It is the most American story, because the best part about being born as a rich person in this country is how difficult it is for you to ever be anything else.

It is hard to pick a single illustrative example of the story's inherent depravity: Donald Trump, our blue-collar billionaire president, received nearly $500 million dollars from his dad over the course of his lifetime. In today's dollars, he borrowed nearly $150 million, most of which he never repaid. He was a millionaire by age 8.

But the most striking revelations, I think, are all the ways in which the father made sure that none of his son's myriad failures would ever cause him to fail. Fred Trump infused Donald's drowning business ventures with cash, and erased outstanding loan debts with unreported gifts. In 1990, as the due date approached on a casino bond payment Donald couldn't afford, his paternal benefactor sent a trusted accountant to Atlantic City to buy $3.5 million in chips without placing a single bet.

The promise of America is that it's a true Darwinian meritocracy, built around an agnostic free market that rewards good choices and punishes bad ones. It is this idea that allows us to accept all outcomes as just, attributing wealth to the good characteristics of those who stockpile it, and destitution to the personal shortcomings of those who live in it. But when you are rich, and have never been anything but rich, bad choices do not entail painful consequences, because there are so many tools available to you for avoiding facing them. (You may never be aware that your bad choices were, in fact, bad.) Some of these tools are illegal. Most of them are not. None of them are available to anyone else.

Our civic institutions coddle the systems that coddle the wealthy. Prosecutors, wary of dedicating limited resources to cases that may drag on for years before ending in high-profile hung juries, have little personal incentive to pursue white-collar criminals. The IRS is a lumbering, overburdened bureaucracy ill-equipped to flag all the iterations of fraud that come before it. The tax code is far more generous to corporations—things created and controlled by rich people for the purpose of preserving wealth—than it is to anyone or anything else.

Rich people have responded to the IRS' very existence by funding an industry of professionals who categorize and recategorize income, move money from one designated account to another, and identify the smartest, cheapest ways for their clients to avoid paying taxes and avoid scrutiny for avoiding paying taxes. Other, smaller industries, composed of friendly appraisers and skilled accountants and clever consultants, spring up to support this industry. This is all perfectly legal.

In the rare instance that a case is so outrageous—when its brazen perpetrators are too brazen, even to authorities who would prefer to do something, anything else—it is adjudicated under laws and regulations written by other rich people, who are sympathetic to the plight of their own, and who understand that while good rich people may sometimes go astray, punishing them is not the answer. (Because they would not want it to be the answer for them or their families, if the roles were reversed, which they may very well be in the future.) When authorities discovered that $3.5 million chips buy, which constituted an illegal loan under New Jersey gaming law, they imposed a civil penalty of $65,000.

The president is not a self-made billionaire. But he is also not all that different from so many other rich people in this country, who benefit once from the fortune they inherit, and then, over and over again, as many times as they need, from the guardrails in place to ensure its continued existence. The Times conducted its investigation of Donald Trump because he is the President of the United States. If he weren't, though—if he'd been content to live out his life as a very wealthy person who did the same things for his children that his father did for him—no one would ever have known about any of it.