Donald Trump's mother, Mary McLeod, came from a line of hardily independent Scottish farmers; his grandfather, Friedrich, was born into a proud family of German vintners. European agriculture and rural life were substantial parts of Donald Trump's savage heritage. Nothing of the American country town figured in that experience. Indeed, unlike Thorstein Veblen's Norwegian parents, who came to America in search of agricultural opportunity, Donald's mother and grandfather immigrated to the United States to escape farm life. Donald himself never knew anything but the city; he had few if any direct encounters with America's country towns until he ran for president, and then he saw many of them at their economic worst. Donald grew up in the privileged Queen's New York household of Fred and Mary Trump, closely observing his father's success as a Brooklyn builder of apartments for the working class. Fred never experienced country life either. And yet, if Veblen is right in his weighting of country- town habits in American culture, they inhabited Donald's striving ancestors in America and they shaped him too. As Donald himself might put it, such habits and skills found their way into his “gene pool.”

On its face, this is a puzzling hypothesis. To say that it seems stretched is probably generous; to label it absurd might not be far- fetched. Veblen notwithstanding, it would seem that dead institutions do not animate the living. The great American farmland, its high point dated somewhere around 1870, played no role in Donald Trump's upbringing. And his success as entrepreneur, celebrity and finally as politician came from a life he pursued almost exclusively within the confines of his native Manhattan habitat. At last sight, nothing of the country town is to be found at the intersection of 56th street and 5th Avenue, where Trump Tower rises to the sky. The burden of proof hangs heavy here. There is, of course, the fact of Donald Trump's unusually high popularity in rural America. That could be explained by his blustering posture of defiance against the Washington “swamp.”