This college admissions scandal is a real head scratcher. I mean, is an Ivy League diploma worth committing a felony for? Apparently, for some, it is.

The big deal is power and being part of a ruling elite. Go back almost a century when the underclass of America included the Irish, the Catholic Irish. Millionaire plutocrat and gangster Joseph P Kennedy Sr. got his sons into Harvard. With the Harvard degrees came recognition, connection, access to the powerful and power itself.

We talk a good egalitarian game here in America, but who really wants to be equal? We want to be better, to have an advantage, to get priority seating, an upgrade.

No sooner does the government mandate equality than a law adjudicating advantage accompanies that law. It’s called Affirmative Action. It proves the Orwellian dictum from Animal Farm.

“All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

When a brash, intelligent and highly successful oaf enters politics, gets elected President of The United States, then makes the Pedigreed Elite look impotent, their grip on power is weakened, undermined. Donald Trump is merely the latest example of a man who shows that power in a political system based on individuals voting gives no inherent advantage to an elite. Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln were two other examples. They completely revolutionized American politics. Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were others.

The mass media, America’s propaganda infrastructure, claims to control those “masses”, but they have been showing only limited success with increasing frequency. Nobody wants to spend big money on instruments of fallibility.

Trump happens. Oh well. But the nagging fear of the hierarchy is that there are other Trumps, more Trumps, even smarter Trumps, who have no need of their artificial prestige. Nobody wants to be a laughing stock because their claim to power is as empty as, say, the British aristocracy.