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https://www.alternet.org/americas-story/
alternet
Trump has offered extreme versions of America's four basic stories
Robert Reich December 12, 2024
Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Trump Republicans have succeeded in framing issues to their advantage. While it’s true that Kamala Harris lost by a small margin, the overriding reality is that through many elections, Democrats have failed to speak to America in ways that most Americans understand.
The challenge facing Democrats is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. To win back the heart and soul of America, Democrats must retell the four basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats did this instinctively. But in this century, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms, giving Republicans — culminating in Trump — the dominant political narrative.
I want to tell you about how the four basic American stories have been told and explain why it’s urgent that the real story of our era be told: that wealth and power concentrated at the top are corrupting American democracy and shafting most working people.
There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.
The Triumphant Individual. This is the tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor.
It’s the story of self-made people who buck the odds, spurn the naysayers, and show what can be done with enough gumption and guts. They’re plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in their ideals — underdogs who make it through hard work and faith in themselves.
Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The same story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”
The identical theme was captured in Horatio Alger’s hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It’s celebrated in the tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it’s found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich. The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.
Trump wants Americans to think of him as the Triumphant Individual, and he has extolled others, such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as similarly triumphant.
The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good.
Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630 — a version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be “as a City upon a Hill,” “delight in each other,” and be “of the same body.”
Similar communitarian and religious images were used by the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. “I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low,” said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community.
The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another’s barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell’s paintings and Frank Capra’s movies. Consider the last scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when George learns he can count on his neighbors’ generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.
Trump Republicans have distorted the story of the Benevolent Community to show what America would be without “woke”ism, Critical Race Theory, transgender kids using bathrooms or being on high school sports teams inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth, “cat ladies” who choose not to have children, and other cultural bogeymen.
The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders.
Daniel Boone fought Native Americans — white America’s first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. The same story is found in the Whigs’ anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the anti-immigration harangues of the late 19th century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism.
It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to Cold War tales during the 1950s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy, and subsequently of “evil” empires and axes.
The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.
Trump and his Republican enablers have emphasized this story to scare Americans into believing we’re being overridden by undocumented immigrants and taken advantage of by foreign nations who are allied with us and major trading partners.
The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It’s a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places — of conspiracy against the common citizen.
It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government — mostly with distrust.
The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King’s Men, Lionel Barrymore’s demonic Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the antagonists who hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.
Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics — from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts.
The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s.
Trump and his Republicans have used this story against government workers, civil servants, independent agencies, the FBI, and other examples of a so-called “deep state.”
Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding — the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones.
These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow, because people don’t think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they’re to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into these larger stories about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we should be going.
Major shifts in governance — in party alignments and political views — have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.
In the early decades of the 20th century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes.
They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy.
During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson (who also promoted racism) promised to wage
“a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please.”
The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than “a second struggle for emancipation,” by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy.
Wilson’s Mob at the Gates was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to “defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces” that rendered peace impossible.
Theodore Roosevelt shared Wilson’s antipathy toward trusts, but by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was okay with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came.
Like today’s Trump Republicans, the GOP’s approach to foreign policy through most of the 20th century was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates — close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation.
They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn’t champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the 20th century.
The Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories.
By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against “economic royalists” who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less than the “survival of democracy.”
To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. “I see one third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as “extending to our national life the old principle of the local community.” “We are determined,” Roosevelt said, “to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern.”
The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family’s breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings.
Then came Adolf Hitler’s war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country — over the objections of Republican isolationists — into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered.
Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the Cold War with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions — the GI Bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights.
Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as “the finger in the dike” holding back the Soviets.
Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons.
While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies — such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio — Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.
In the 1960s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.
This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed by the huge postwar market.
Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle.
For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)
The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats’ confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob.
After President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves.
In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking about both the Rot at the Top and the Mob at the Gates and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.
Tomorrow, in Part 2, I discuss why the Democrats left Trump to tell his fake version of the Rot at the Top, not the real one.
NOW READ: A reckoning is coming for the people who didn't care about their country
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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https://www.alternet.org/news-politics/clarence-thomas-2663174649/
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series: Friends of the Court: SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors}:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decades-long friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation's highest court.
During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.
Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:
At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.
This accounting of Thomas’ travel, revealed for the first time here from an array of previously unavailable information, is the fullest to date of the generosity that has regularly afforded Thomas a lifestyle far beyond what his income could provide. And it is almost certainly an undercount.
While some of the hospitality, such as stays in personal homes, may not have required disclosure, Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets, according to ethics experts.
Perhaps even more significant, the pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”
This year, ProPublica revealed Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow’s generosity toward Thomas, including vacations, private jet flights, gifts, the purchase of his mother’s house in Georgia and tuition payments. In an April statement, the justice defended his relationship with Crow. The Crows “are among our dearest friends,” Thomas said. “As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips.”
The New York Times recently surfaced VIP treatment from wealthy businessmen he met through the Horatio Alger Association, an exclusive nonprofit. Among them were David Sokol, a former top executive at Berkshire Hathaway, and H. Wayne Huizenga, a billionaire who turned Blockbuster and Waste Management into national goliaths. (The Times noted Thomas gives access to the Supreme Court building for Horatio Alger events; ProPublica confirmed that the access has cost $1,500 or more in donations per person.)
Records and interviews show Thomas had another benefactor,oil baron Paul “Tony” Novelly, whose gifts to the justice have not previously been reported. ProPublica’s totals in this article include trips from Crow.
Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascendedto the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.
The total value of the undisclosed trips they’ve given Thomas since 1991, the year he was appointed to the Supreme Court, is difficult to measure. But it’s likely in the millions.
Huizenga sent his personal 737 to pick Thomas up and bring him to South Florida at least twice, according to John Wener, a former flight attendant and chef on board the plane. If he were picked up in D.C., the five-hour round trip would have cost at least $130,000 each time had Thomas chartered the jet himself, according to estimates from jet charter companies. In February 2016, Thomas flew on Crow’s private jet from Washington to New Haven, Connecticut, before heading back on the jet just three hours later. ProPublica previously reported the flight, but newly obtained U.S. Marshals Service records reveal its purpose: Thomas met with several Yale Law School deans for a tour of the room where they planned to display a portrait of the justice. (Crow’s foundation also gave the school $105,000, earmarked for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund,” tax filings show.)
Don Fox, the former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the senior ethics official in the executive branch, said, “It’s just the height of hypocrisy to wear the robes and live the lifestyle of a billionaire.” Taxpayers, he added, have the right to expect that Supreme Court justices are not living on the dime of others.
Fox, who worked under both Democrat and Republican administrations, said he advised every new political appointee the same thing: Your wealthy friends are the ones you had before you were appointed. “You don’t get to acquire any new ones,” he told them.
Thomas and Novelly did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. Huizenga died in 2018 and his son, who is the president of the family’s holding company, also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a statement to ProPublica, Sokol said he’s been close friends with the Thomases for 21 years and acknowledged traveling with and occasionally hosting them. He defended the justice as upright and ethical. “We have never once discussed any pending court matter,” Sokol said. “Our conversations have always revolved around helping young people, sports, and family matters.”
“As to the use of private aviation,” he added, “I believe that given security concerns all of the Supreme Court justices should either fly privately or on governmental aircraft.”
The justices have said they follow court rules prohibiting them from accepting gifts from a group of people so frequently that “a reasonable person would believe that the public office is being used for private gain.” But what actually constitutes a gift under those rules is ambiguous and, in practice, justices have few restrictions on what they can accept. Other members of the court have accepted travel underwritten by wealthy businessmen and speaking invitations at universities. Stephen Breyer accepted a flight to a Nantucket wedding from a Democratic megadonor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tour of Israel and Jordan paid for by an Israeli billionaire. Those gifts are public because Breyer and Ginsburg disclosed them.
Thomas, however, is apparently an extreme outlier for the volume and frequency of all the undisclosed vacations he’s received. He once complained that he sacrificed wealth to sit on the court, though he depicted the choice as a matter of conscience. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” he told the bar association in Savannah, Georgia, in 2001, “but it is worth doing for the principle.”
To track Thomas’ relationships and travel, ProPublica examined flight data, emails from airport and university officials, security detail records, tax court filings, meeting minutes and a trove of photographs from personal albums, including cards that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, sent to friends. In addition, reporters interviewed more than 100 eyewitnesses and other sources: jet and helicopter pilots, flight attendants, airport workers, yacht crew members, security guards, photographers, waitresses, caterers, chefs, drivers, river rafting guides and C-suite executives.
ProPublica has not identified any legal cases that Huizenga, Sokol or Novelly had at the Supreme Court during their documented relationships with Thomas, although they all work in industries significantly impacted by the court’s decisions.
In a small-circulation biography given to Huizenga’s friends and family, Thomas acknowledged that he and Huizenga discussed some of the billionaire’s companies but said their relationship was never transactional. “It wasn’t that kind of friendship,” he told the interviewer. The justice said they’d prefer to go to a small restaurant in a strip mall or sit on the billionaire’s lawn and drink tea or diet soda.
“We are in a society where everything is quid pro quo,” Thomas said, but not with the Huizengas. “I don’t do anything for them and they can’t do anything for me.”
“Four Lucky Couples”
On Labor Day weekend 2019, Thomas boarded a private plane in Washington, D.C., for the first leg of a sojourn out West. The vacation had been months in the making and, thanks to Sokol, it was all taken care of. He’s hosted the Thomases virtually every summer for a decade.
The first stop was the Great Plains. It was the home opener at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which Ginni Thomas had attended before transferring. The Thomases were joined there by other couples, including one of the justice’s most vocal advocates, Mark Paoletta, who then worked for the federal government, and his wife.
Sokol, a major university donor who graduated from the Omaha campus, arranged for the group to attend the football and volleyball games with all-access passes. Clarence Thomas met with the football team the day before the game. The group walked out of the tunnel before kickoff. During halftime, they stood on the sidelines to watch the marching band perform, at one point posing for a picture in the end zone: “The Sokols took four lucky couples to the first Nebraska footbal game of the season,” Ginni Thomas wrote in one of the card captions.
Sokol runs a private equity firm and now also chairs a holding company that owns large international shipping and power utility corporations. He resigned from Berkshire Hathaway in 2011 amid an internal investigation by the company that found he had violated its insider trading policy. (At the time, Sokol denied wrongdoing and said his resignation was unrelated to the episode; he was never indicted.)
That Saturday, the group watched both the football and volleyball games from luxury suites. The football skybox, which typically costs $40,000 annually, belonged to Tom Osborne, a former Republican congressman who was also the head coach of the team for 25 years. Hosting the Thomases had ripple effects. A local priest requested a ticket for his 87-year-old mother, but the volleyball coach had to tell him none was available. “All of our tickets have been taken for Clarence Thomas and his group,” the coach wrote.
The Thomases have been treated to at least seven University of Nebraska-Lincoln games — five arranged by Sokol — in recent years. The Times first reported on Thomas’ appearances at some of them.
Thomas has never reported any of those tickets on his yearly financial forms. Judiciary disclosure rules require that most gifts worth more than $415 be disclosed. “It’s so obvious,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “It all has to be reported.” ProPublica identified more than 60 federal judges who disclosed tickets to sporting events between 2003 and 2019. In 1999, Thomas disclosed private flight and accommodations for the Daytona 500 but hasn’t reported any other sporting events before or since.
In a statement, Osborne confirmed Thomas has “watched a couple of football games” in his suite, which the university had given to him. He said he is “taxed” for the use of the suite but did not answer whether Thomas has ever reimbursed him. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln did not respond to requests for comment.
On Sunday, the morning after the football game in Nebraska, Sokol flew with Thomas by private jet to Sokol’s Paintbrush Ranch just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The property, valued in the low eight figures, sits in the foothills of Shadow Mountain. A local radio personality said of the estate: “This is the ultimate home and it has the most iconic view of the Tetons I’ve seen. Ever.”
Sokol also owns a waterfront mansion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, currently worth $20.1 million, where he’s hosted the Thomases as well, according to photos of the visits. The 12,800-square-foot property includes a home theater, elevator, walk-in wine cellar and yacht docking. (In addition, Sokol and Thomas have shared an opulent lodge together while vacationing at Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, in the Adirondacks.)
In Wyoming, the Thomases fished, rafted on the Snake River and sat by a campfire overlooking the Teton Range with the other couples. At one point, the Paolettas serenaded the justice with a song they wrote about him.
Like Thomas, Paoletta did not disclose the trip on his yearly financial filings. At the time, Paoletta was general counsel and the designated ethics official at the Office of Management and Budget. In a statement, Paoletta said he wasn’t required to disclose the trip because he had reimbursed Sokol, but he did not say how much or provide documentation of those payments. “I complied with all ethics laws and regulations,” Paoletta said.
Details of the vacation to Nebraska and Wyoming were drawn from photographs, trip planning emails and social media posts, as well as interviews with airport workers, local residents and others familiar with the travel, including river raft guides.
Since 1990, Sokol and his wife have donated more than $1 million to Republican politicians and groups, along with smaller amounts to Democrats. Last October, in New Orleans, Sokol made a direct reference to a pending Supreme Court case while addressing a group of former Horatio Alger scholarship recipients. (Thomas was not in attendance.)
The speech veered into territory that made many of those in attendance uncomfortable and left others appalled, emails and others messages show. Sokol, who has written extensively about American exceptionalism and the virtues of free enterprise, minimized slavery and systemic racism, some felt. He then criticized President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, arguing Biden had overstepped the government’s authority, according to a recording of the speech obtained by ProPublica.
“It’s going to get overturned by the Supreme Court,” Sokol predicted, echoing a common legal commentary.
He was right. This summer, the court struck down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Thomas voted in the majority.
Deep Sea Fishing in the Caribbean
Nearly every spring, Novelly, a billionaire who made his fortune storing and transporting petroleum, takes his two yachts on a fishing expedition to the Bahamas’ Exuma Islands. Photographs from the trips show porcelain beaches, cerulean waters and fresh mahi-mahi. Friends and family come and go for days at a time.
Three of Novelly’s former yacht workers, including a captain, told ProPublica they recall Thomas coming on board the vessels multiple times in recent years. Novelly’s local chauffeur in the Bahamas said his company once picked Thomas up from the billionaire’s private jet and drove him to the marina where one of the yachts, Le Montrachet, frequently docks.
Le Montrachet, named after the premium French wine, is a 126-foot luxury vessel complete with a full bar, multiple dining areas, a baby grand piano, accommodations for 10 guests and a handful of smaller fishing boats and jet skis. Novelly charges about $60,000 a week to outsiders who want to charter it.
Another past guest on Novelly’s yacht is “Alligator” Ron Bergeron, one of the biggest land and roadway developers in Florida.Around 2018, Novelly and Thomas went to Bergeron’s private ranch on the edge of the Everglades — a sprawling, gated estate with centuries-old cypress trees and an 1800s-style saloon on site. He described Novelly as a man who likes to share his success with others. “He’s very generous with all his friends,” Bergeron told ProPublica.
Bergeron said his conversations with Thomas at the ranch were strictly about charity work and not business. “You’re talking about a great man,” Bergeron said, “who gives his time to make a difference for America.”
Since 1999, Novelly’s family and companies have publicly disclosed at least $500,000 to conservative causes and Republican candidates in federal elections. (Before then, he had given to both parties.)
Novelly, who recently stepped down from his CEO roles, ran his business affairs aggressively, ending up on the wrong side of the government in at least two cases. He spends much of his time between St. Louis and Boca Raton, Florida, where he has a 23,000 square-foot palatial estate appraised at $22.2 million. In 2002, Novelly established residency and a holding company in the Virgin Islands. During a hearing with local officials, Novelly described the arrangement there as a “quid pro quo,” meaning the U.S. territory received a boost to the local economy in return for offering substantial tax breaks. The IRS would later call it an “abusive tax avoidance scheme” and pursued Novelly for millions in back taxesand penalties. Novelly denied the characterization and eventually settled with the government for a negotiated amount.
There’s no evidence his friendship with Thomas helped Novelly in one of his most significant disputes. In 2005, the Justice Department sued Novelly’s company, Apex Oil, because its corporate predecessor had contributed to a massive groundwater contamination beneath an Illinois village and then Apex refused to help with the cleanup. Apex argued the spill had occurred before the company went through a bankruptcy years earlier. Several judges ruled against Apex, which eventually appealed to the Supreme Court in 2010. The justices declined to hear the case, and the company had to pay about $150 million to help remove oil from the soil.
It’s not clear how Thomas voted in the case because such votes are not typically public. The vacations ProPublica identified appear to have occurred after the case was resolved.
In 2020, Apex Oil, Sokol and Crow helped fund a documentary defending Thomas as a response to an HBO film that was critical of the justice. Sokol called the HBO movie a “Molotov cocktail into our homes” and a prime example of America’s eroding civility.
The “Most Coveted” Invitation in the World
Thomas’ first billionaire benefactor is likely H. Wayne Huizenga, believed to be the only person in American history to build three separate Fortune 500 companies. One of the three was AutoNation, which Huizenga founded in 1996 before building it into the largest car dealer in the country. Between 1998 and 1999, Huizenga’s holding company spent $500,000 lobbying federal agencies that regulate the automotive industry,according to OpenSecrets data. Over the years, the Huizenga family and companies gave millions to state and federal Republican candidates and once threw a fundraiser for the Florida GOP that helped keep the party afloat for months.
The billionaire was known to regularly lavish gifts and perks on those in his orbit. He routinely took friends on opulent vacations. He paid his employees handsomely and sometimes covered their bills and personal expenses. On a whim, Huizenga once handed box tickets for the opera, which were worth thousands, to his caterer, Bob Leonardi.
“I led the life of a multimillionaire without being one,” Leonardi said.
For 20 years, Thomas benefited from Huizenga’s attention as well, availing himself of the billionaire’s fleet of aircraft and other luxuries. Huizenga took Thomas to see the Miami Dolphins and Florida Panthers several times between the mid-’90s and mid-2000s, according to interviews and photographs. Huizenga owned both teams at the time.
Executives saw Thomas around Huizenga’s office often. Richard Rochon, the former president of Huizenga Holdings, saidThomas once shadowed the billionaire during meetings. “He just wants to see what I do every day,” Rochon recalled Huizenga saying.
On at least two occasions, Thomas attended Huizenga’s birthday and Christmas parties, which the billionaire held inside his private hangar at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Van Poole, a lobbyist and former chairman of the Florida GOP, recalled riding down the elevator at the nearby Hyatt Pier 66 hotel — which Huizenga also controlled — when the Thomases stepped in with a security detail. The group discussed college sports and then traveled to the party together, Poole said.
Thomas occasionally flew on Huizenga’s helicopters, sometimes taking off from the roof of the corporate headquarters, and at least one of his Gulfstream jets around Florida, according to his former pilots. But the billionaire’s most luxurious planes were a pair of 737 jets he had retrofitted like a lounge, complete with recliners, love seats, mahogany dining and card tables and gourmet food.
At least two times in the mid 2000s, Huizenga sent one of them to pick up Thomas and deliver him to Fort Lauderdale, said John Wener, the flight attendant on board.
Wener recalled chatting with the justice about his nomination to the Supreme Court and the tumultuous Senate confirmation hearings after Thomas’ former aide, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment. “He said, ‘Just imagine a job interview and you’re in front of 100 people that hate you,’” Wener recalled Thomas remarking. “‘How would that interview go?’”
In the early 2000s, Huizenga gave Thomas something that was priceless at the time: a standing invitation to his exclusive, members-only golf club, the Floridian. Designed by golf legend Gary Player, the course was lined with cottages for Huizenga’s friends, a yacht marina for them to dock and a helipad if they wanted to fly in. One family friend told the Huizenga family biographer that the Floridian was “the most coveted private golf invitation in the world.” Those who worked and played there said the membership rolls were a Rolodex of the rich, famous and powerful: From Michael Douglas and Rush Limbaugh to Michael Bloomberg and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Donald Trump once asked to be a member but Huizenga spurned him, according to three of Huizenga’s former employees.
All 200-plus members were “honorary” and didn’t pay dues — Huizenga covered everything. “It was a little slice of heaven, a magical place,” former media personality Matt Lauer told the biographer. “You drove through the gates and it was this fairytale land that he had created.”
It’s unclear if Thomas was a member or Huizenga’s frequent guest with similar privileges. The billionaire’s former personal photographer and two former golf pros at the club recalled seeing Thomas there multiple times over the years. One of Huizenga’s helicopter pilots said he had picked the justice up from the property. And a fifth employee, a former waitress and concierge, said she once served Thomas and Huizenga, who were wearing golf attire, as they dined alone in the enormous waterfront clubhouse for lunch. “Have you met a Supreme Court justice?” Huizenga asked the waitress before she took their order. “This is Clarence Thomas.”
Today, the Floridian, which the Huizenga family sold in 2010 before it underwent renovations, has a $150,000 initiation fee.
Paying for Access to the Supreme Court Chambers
Thomas first met Huizenga at a formal gala in Washington, D.C., in 1992, when they were both inducted into the Horatio Alger Association.Henry Kissinger and Maya Angelou were among the other honorees that year. The organization, named after the 19th-century novelist who popularized rags-to-riches folklore, gives millions in college scholarships each year and also brings together some of the country’s wealthiest, self-made business tycoons for opulent events. (In real life, Alger was a minister on Cape Cod who resigned from his parish after he was credibly accused of molesting boys.)
“We were proud to honor Justice Thomas more than 30 years ago,” an association spokesperson said in a statement, “and remain grateful for his continued involvement in our organization.” She said Thomas spends countless hours mentoring scholarship recipients.
Thomas appears to have met Huizenga, Sokol, Novelly and Bergeron through the organization. Several of Thomas’ trips to Florida in the 2000s appear to have been connected with the association. In that time period, he joined Huizenga at Horatio Alger scholarship ceremonies in South Florida, travel that the justice disclosed in several of his yearly financial filings.
However, he never identified Huizenga in any of his disclosures. The association spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that the billionaire hosted those events “and covered all costs involved.”
Experts said that means Thomas’ disclosures would be, at a minimum, incomplete and misleading because the rules require federal judges to identify the source of the gifts they receive. “Source means the person or entity that paid for it,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics authority at Washington University in St. Louis.
Belonging to the association has had its privileges. As part of a board meeting, the Thomases once went on a lavish trip to Jamaica, where they were hosted by a wealthy donor who owned a luxury hotel atop a former sugar plantation. Johnny Cash performed. Horatio Alger Association membership itself is worth at least $200,000, according to the organization’s meeting minutes in 2007, a sum that those who nominate a new member are responsible for raising in that person’s honor. The association spokesperson said there was no requirement to raise money for new members back when Thomas was inducted.
Thomas has likely helped the group earn many times that figure since then. Every year, the justice hosts an event for members inside the Supreme Court’s Great Hall. The Times previously reported that the event afforded the Horatio Alger Association unusual access to the court.
ProPublica examined boxes of the association’s historical archives, including financial records that show the group has required donations of at least $1,500 — $7,500 for nonmembers — to attend the Supreme Court event. In 2004, those who donated $100,000 for a table at the main ceremony got 10 seats inside the Supreme Court.In the judiciary’s code of conduct — which is general guidance that does not apply to Supreme Court justices, though they say they consult it — there is explicit language advising federal judges against using their position to fundraise for outside organizations.
But that’s what Thomas has done, said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in administrations of both parties and reviewed the association’s financial records at ProPublica’s request.
“To use the Supreme Court to fundraise for somebody’s charity is, to me, an abuse of office,” she said. Canter acknowledged the organization may do good work, but that’s besides the point, she said, because wealthy donors aren’t supposed to be able to pay thousands of dollars to visit a justice inside the courthouse walls.
“It’s pay to play,” Canter added, “isn’t it?”
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cLARENCE THOMAS’ CONNECTIONS to wealth and expensive vacations run deeper than billionaire businessmanand Nazi-enthusiast Harlan Crow.The New York Timesreports that Thomas has milked relationships with the rich he made through the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, a scholarship association, to benefit himself and his wife.
Because of their Horatio Alger connections, Thomas and his spouse, Virginia,have been invited to join luxurious vacations and parties in addition being granted V.I.P. access to sports events. Thanks to the association, Thomas also rubbed elbows with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Ed McMahon during a lavish three-day Montana birthday party for billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington.
But the connections Thomas made through Horatio Alger have benefitted him beyond lavish trips. Thomas’ Horatio Alger contacts — including Washington as well as investor David Sokol, formerly of Berkshire Hathaway — helped fund a documentary that painted him in a heroic light after the premiere of an HBO movie that depicted Anita swHill during his confirmation hearings making sexual harassment allegations against Thomas. The Sokol family also hosted Thomas and his wife at their Montana ranch and their waterfront Florida estate. According to the Times, Thomas has not reported many of the benefits and gifts he has received from his rich and well-connected allies. The justice also declined to answer questions from the paper about the matter.
Early in his SCOTUS tenure, Thomas did report a number of personal gifts he received, including flights on private planes, cigars, and clothing. But after 2004, when The Los Angeles Times reported on his disclosures, Thomas ceased reporting to the court certain gifts and benefits he received. A ProPublica investigation in 2023 uncovered the justice’s close relationship with Crow, a GOP megadonor with a large collection of Nazi memorabilia and Hitler paintings, including trips on Crow’s private jet and yacht totaling tens of thousands and Crow’s purchase of the house where Thomas’ mother lived. Crow even paid tuition for Thomas’ nephew, who the Thomases were raising. After his relationship with Crow came to light, Thomas justified his lack of disclosures, claiming that “colleagues and others in the judiciary” advised him he did not need to report trips of “personal hospitality” from friends.
thomas has not only accepted benefits that granted him access to places he otherwise may not have gone, he also hosts the Horatio Alger Association’s induction ceremony for new members in the Supreme Court’s courtroom, which the Times notes is “unusual access” for an outside group. The association has parlayed the access Thomas gives them to fundraise for scholarships and events, per fundraising records reviewed by the Times.
The court this year updated its disclosure rules to mandate justices report private jet travel and comped stays at hotels and resorts, but there is an exception for “personal hospitality,” meaning food, accommodations, or entertainment that is not related to business.
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