We’re all for free speech, but maybe the height of a global crisis isn’t the best time to “floss” your $8 billion net worth like you’re making a cameo in a Cash Money Records music video.
That’s the lesson someone should have told DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen, who pissed off the world when he posted photos of his “quarantine” on his superyacht on Instagram last week. Geffen posted photos of his yacht, which according to the Washington Examiner, cost $590 million, accompanied by a caption that said:
“Sunset last night…isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”
Social media users instantly became outraged with Geffen, pointing out that his post was “tone-deaf” in light of the hardships that many people dealing with the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. are facing.
The View co-host Meghan McCain tweeted: “David Geffen is worth 8 billion dollars! For God’s sake help this country get ventilators, our health workers masks and the medical supplies they need! Or no, just stay on your f—ing yacht instagramming. This is just shameful and grotesque.”
New Yorker writer Lauren Collins tweeted out Geffen’s photo with one word: “psychopath”.
Film producer Robby Starbuck asked: “Is anyone shocked that Democrat donor David Geffen posted such an out of touch photo? He might as well have take a picture flipping everyone in America off.”
Starbuck continued: “David Geffen’s thought process: ‘Hey you know what, millions are losing their jobs, can’t pay their rent and they’re worried about a deadly pandemic, I bet they’d love to know how I’m doing. Fire up the copter so we can take some more pics of my yacht! They’ll love this!!!'”
Blog site A.V. Club destroyed Geffen, writing last week: “It’s getting to the point where it almost feels like some sort of cash-induced brain disease, a hideous and infectious need to say something about their vast reserves of wealth, safety, and power, when “nothing” would certainly have sufficed.”
Geffen has now locked down his Instagram account, but of course, the damage has already been done. With forward thinking and impeccable timing like that we’re surprised Geffen isn’t working at a portfolio manager at one of Wall Street’s “forward looking” long only funds.
The Voters Propelling Trump’s Populist Movement
They failed to consider how grotesque Clinton herself appeared to these same Republican women. The authors quote pollster Wes Anderson to establish a point that sums up these voters and their decision process: “These women may not have decided to vote for Trump until late in the race, but most had decided much earlier that they were definitely not voting for Clinton.” For many, Clinton’s stances on issues like abortion and gun rights ruled her out from the beginning. Many others were repelled by her inauthenticity and dishonesty.
It is difficult to describe Trump as a workingman, but he sounds like a workingman.
.. The man had inherited millions and was worth billions, but somehow he sounded like he understood the plight of people whose pleas were not heard in Chappaqua. Meanwhile, the Democrats increasingly became associated with the non-working class, identifying more with the lifelong welfare recipient than with the worker whose taxes pay for that government program.
.. “I used to think that the Republican party stood for country-club folks in nice suburban homes who talked about bottom lines and stock prices. Not anymore; they are for the blue-collar worker, they are for me, and the irony is not lost on me.”
.. “Big banks, big media, big corporations, I want nothing to do with them,” one man said. Another linked the what Justice Louis Brandeis called the “curse of bigness” to a culture of dependency: “We are Americans, that means something, that means figuring it out without the government giving us free stuff, without the big banks and big companies making us need them so much, and not feeling as though we are entitled to something once we get it.”
.. The confusing part for those who do not buy it is that it makes Trump the representative of the little guy. That is harder to swallow than William Jennings Bryan’s leadership of the 1890s populists. It clearly wrong-footed the Clinton camp, as evidenced by the supreme effort taken to remind the voters just how often Trump had shortchanged, bamboozled, and defrauded various little guys in his long business career.
.. With Clinton as the obvious representative of the Left’s establishment, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and the rest as representatives of the Right’s establishment, and Trump as the eager antagonist of both, the answer was clear to many forgotten men and women: This guy, whatever his past, is in my corner.