Titles of Nobility and Donald Trump's Genius
September 16, 2025
by William P. Meyers

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Prelude: Donald Trump's perfect score

[per one of his siblings]

When Donald Trump was in his senior year at New York Military Academy, in 1964, he was having difficulty getting admitted to the better colleges his billionaire father wanted him to attend. One college said it would reconsider his application if he took an I.Q. (intelligence quotient) test to prove he was at least of average intelligence.

Donald took the test and anxiously awaited the results.

Coming home one day that summer, he was handed an envelope from the testing agency.

It said he scored 100.

He jumped for joy and danced around in front of his family.

"I got a perfect score. I got all the answers right. I got a one-hundred. I am a genius. I always knew I was."

And so he went to college, and then on to his storied career of genius.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.

How can we even begin to take power away from billionaires?

We might learn something by going back to the founding of our republic. While the new United States had its flaws, including racism, slavery, and sexism, it was agreed upon, by almost everyone, that we rejected the English practice of having an entitled nobility. No king or queen, dukes or duchesses, barons, knights or dames. In America any free person could rise up or sink down in the social order. We hoped for a merit-based society, though the definition of merit was left vague.

This social convention was enshrined when the new Constitution was approved in 1787. In Article 1, Section 9 we find: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States."

Technically that law is still upheld. We have no titled nobility in the U.S. We are all Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms. Egalitarian. True, some groups have tried to claim special status. Lawyers claim the title Esquire, PhDs and real doctors like to be called Doctors, politicians like the title of their office to proceed their names. But even in these cases the titles are neither noble nor inherited.

But we now have a practical nobility. We have billionaires, the latest manifestation of a problem that began corroding our society long ago. More generally the problem is inherited wealth, which actually is more unfair than the old inherited noble titles, which often came without much wealth attached. In the olden days the occasional Astor or Rockefeller could be a problem for democracy. With the possible exception of the environmental crisis, the concentration of wealth, and passing down billions of dollars of it within families, has become the greatest threat to our traditional republican values.

Attempts have been made in the past to deal with this issue, including strikes by workers to demand more pay and the setting of a national minimum wage [now unchanged for years and so inadequate]. The main change in the Constitution was Amendment XVI, allowing for a national income tax. Unfortunately Congress has kept the tax rate on rich people low, and offered many loopholes, so that the class of billionaires has greatly expanded. Even more detrimental, the individual (or family) wealth of some billionaires has grown far out of proportion even to the lowest ranking members of their own class. At the time of this essay the richest Billionaire is believed to be Elon Musk, at $428 billion [though that is based mainly on highly-inflated Tesla stock, which could crash at any moment]. In 2024 there were 813 billionaires in the U.S., according to Forbes.

Math note: it takes one-thousand (1,000) millions to make a billion.

One way to prevent the horrors of being a nation ruled by a hereditary moneyed nobility is an inheritance or estate tax. Congress has failed to make the estate tax effective for this purpose. For 2025 if the dead person's estate is under $13.99 million, there is no estate tax at all (but in a typical state, the sales tax is about 10 cents on the dollar). The maximum rate is 40%. Of course on a $1 billion estate that would be a $400 million tax. Lawyers can help avoid paying much of that. The important thing, when thinking about our democratic republic, is that the children (or designated heirs) of a lowly billionaire will get $600 million to divide up. So they are, for all practical purposes, little Lords and Princesses.

I think we need to take No Title of Nobility seriously. It means no billionaire class, and certainly no huge family inheritances. $100 million should be enough for anyone to inherit (or name your own figure). So we need to reinterpret the meaning of this sentence in the Constitution.

There has been tension about interpreting the Constitution from day one. Is it to be interpreted literally? Can an interpretation be expanded (usually by the Supreme Court) to take into account the sometimes vast differences between modern society (and economics) and the world in 1776?

The best way to change the Constitution is to amend it, but that is a very difficult process. Again, literalness can be the enemy of common sense. If we use the word billion, how can inflation (or deflation) be taken into account? Do we want to specify income tax rates, or capital gains tax rates, or estate tax rates, in the Constitution? I don't think so. But we have left these up to Congress, and clearly in the past few decades Congress has represented billionaires (and to some extent mere multi-millionaires), not ordinary people. Many people (and a few nonprofit groups) have said we need to get money out of politics. But how do you get money out, when it controls the media and the campaign funds of most of the politicians?

I think Congress should amend the tax code. The preamble of the law can say: whereas the Constitution prohibits the establishment of a hereditary noble class. Then it can set income tax rates at 90% for incomes over $10 million, a capital gains tax at the same rate only corrected for inflation, and a complete, 100% estate tax on estates over $100 million.

To get there the first step is kicking as many Republicans out of Congress in 2026 as possible. Then we need full Democratic Party control of Congress and the Presidency in 2028. That would require Democrats to exercise some common sense in their campaigns. We need the left to stop stabbing the Democrats in the back. And we need the working class and middle class to wake up and reject the lying propaganda of the billionaires.