Critics of the Trump regime have been amused to liken them to the Romanovs or, even more unkindly, his sons to Uday and Qusay Hussein. This is a bit over the top, but is in keeping with the complaint that Trump and his clan seem uninterested in, and even unfamiliar with, Democratic norms that we are taught to take for granted.

But Trump is only the latest manifestation of a perpetual backsliding from the idea of an all-men-are-created-equal, town hall meeting republic. Like the election of Andrew Jackson before him, Trump’s election was a kind of backwoods backlash against uppity Eastern (in our day, bi-coastal) elites. But Old Hickory, like the Virginia patricians that preceded him and the English gentry they imitated, was a member of a country squirocracy whose wealth came from the labor of serfs.

In the Gilded Age, America was largely ruled by elected courtiers who answered to the Robber Barons who put them in office and who maintained their power through a spoils system. The presidency has only gotten more imperial over time. Even up-from-nothing strivers like Nixon, Clinton and Reagan are soon hobnobbing with oligarchs and beholden to them.

In a country that fought a revolution against monarchy and aristocracy on behalf of the common man, the present deformity of our political culture seems grotesque. But the celebration of the self-made man soon leads to the creation of a system designed to permit getting ahead. This in turn breeds a ruling class dedicated to perpetuating its place at the trough from one generation to the next. So, we have long had corporate and political dynasties—Addams’s, Roosevelts, Kennedys and Bushes.

The Trumps aren’t new. Their predecessors were just more circumspect about flaunting their wealth and punctilious about exercising their power, sometimes going so far as to regard public service as a sort of noblesse oblige that shouldn’t serve their class alone, so long as the leveling didn’t get out of hand.

It should come as no surprise, in our times of what Paul Fussell called ‘prole drift,’ that a Trump should come along. Today, aristocrats get drunk in public and make sex tapes, while nice upper middle class scions sport body art and piercings. You once could at least tell a Skull and Bones man from a proletarian pirate by his tailor. No longer.

Now the flamboyant Trump’s populist pose is transparently a fiction, an act to please the rubes. His populism, like much of the charitable giving of the very wealthy, is both good for business and a way to deflect attention from the self-aggrandizing reality behind the curtain.

Much of this can be traced back to the hated monopolist John D. Rockefeller after his storm troopers killed three striking miners and set fire to their tent city which killed another 55 women and children. His pioneering P.R. man Ivy Lee had Rockefeller rehabilitate his reputation by carrying a pocketful of dimes and handing them out to street urchins in a grandfatherly way.

Trump promises to protect the social safety net for the working class and bring back good jobs while his policies do the opposite. Few are fooled. Perhaps because, these days, the attitude seems to be why bother with the façade. The suckers regard their president as an episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” or the “Spoiled Housewives of Washington.”

Hillary Clinton was loathed as a hypocrite by some for pretending to sympathize with the poor while cashing in on public service, raking in millions in speaking fees to the likes of Goldman Sachs. But others seem to feel that’s just how the game is played. They’d cash in too, if they had the chance. Hillary certainly doesn’t seem to have learned the lesson. In her new book, she tells how she decided to run in 2016 — while lolling around the Mediterranean mansion of the Oscar de la Renta fashion clan. Doesn’t everyone?

Billionaire Trump sees no reason not to behave like royalty. He’s never been anything but a spoiled princeling, and has been outspoken about the inferiority of government-issued amenities, calling Air Force One a comedown after his own jet and the White House a dump. He has also seen no reason to appoint commoners to his cabinet which is chockablock with the monied elite who behave in accordance with their aristocratic lifestyle. Why should a brief government gig subject them to the inconveniences the hoi polloi suffer?

So, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin traveled to Kentucky to watch the solar eclipse, from New York to Washington on $25,000 an hour government planes, and even tried to use the same service for his honeymoon to Europe with his trophy wife, Marie Antoinette.

HHS Secretary Tom Price has cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands for two dozen chartered jet flights, including one costing $25,000 for the 139-mile trip from Washington to Philadelphia. It was urgent that he arrive since health industry oligarchs were anxious to give him their orders for reduced regulation of their industry.

And EPA chief Scott Pruitt has repurposed eighteen government pollution investigators as his own around-the-clock team of bodyguards. Doesn’t everyone behave like this? The only thing missing is snappy uniforms, like the Vatican’s Swiss Guards.

Trump himself has put unprecedented strains on Secret Service manpower and budgets by requiring protection not just for himself and his current wife and young son, but for fifteen other Trumps including three adult children, their spouses and children and a couple siblings. It’s a wonder he isn’t seeking government protection for his previous wives and harassment victims as well.

We are a long way from Abe Lincoln’s log cabin, but not far from the days of the ancien regime or the 19th century when the façade of democracy barely disguised the reign of landed aristocrats and industrial titans who sent their lesser heirs to government to protect their interests or simply bought and paid for legislative lackeys.

Is it really a shock that Trump treats Senators and Congressmen like members of the servant class and is outraged when they don’t get his order right? Don’t they know their place? Nor is it a surprise that the Trump family behaves less like the usual First Family and more like what it is – a business dynasty, like the Kochs or the Mercers (who funded Trump’s run) or the earlier Rockefellers or Morgans.

To them, the presidency, like everything else, is something to monetize, as well as golden opportunity to enact policies, regulations and tax laws that benefit them and their class. Welcome to Trump USA, Inc. Great Again. And if you have any complaints or questions, simply leave a message at the help desk. Or if you’re a donor, call the contributor hotline.