That’s rich!

Reader question:

Please explain “that’s rich” in this:

Donald Trump dressed like a garbage man. That’s rich!

My comments:

That’s ridiculous!

It’s too much!

Donald Trump, if you recall, once donned a bright orange vest – the kind sanitation workers wear while at work – and climbed onto a garbage truck.

He did so in a publicity stunt to show solidarity with the country’s working men and women after Joe Biden, then the President, appeared to have called Trump’s supporters “garbage”. Biden has hence said he was misunderstood and apologized for his poor word choice.

That was in October, 2024 actually, right before Trump won the election to become American President for a second time.

So Trump’s little garbage truck stunt must have worked, right?

Well, maybe. But that is neither here nor there. For us here and now, we’re focused on the colloquial expression: That’s rich.

Let’s use Donald Trump as an example. Trump is not a friend of the working man, never has been. He’s filthy rich and is ready, any day, to call poor working people losers.

So, for him to suggest that he’s on the side of the working men and women is ridiculous.

In other words, that’s rich.

Here, “rich” does not mean “wealthy” as in: Trump is a billionaire and, hence, a very rich man. Here, instead, “rich” means “fat” as in, fat food that is too rich in oil and grease.

Or deserts that are too rich in sugar, cheese and butter.

Too rich and sweet, in other words, to be tasteful.

It is from this that the expression “that’s rich” derives.

And it means just that: too much, too excessive, too exorbitant and, therefore, tasteless and despicable.

In the case of Trump dressed as a garbage man, too ridiculous.

Too ironical.

Too amusing.

Too amusing, that is, to be funny.

All right?

All right, for increased clarity, let’s read a few media examples of “that’s rich”:

1. In an interview with the Guardian, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said that consumers shouldn’t be able to keep drones for their personal use, because of potential problems they might cause.

“You’re having a dispute with your neighbor,” he said. “How would you feel if your neighbor went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?”

Schmidt makes a good point: Drones have the capability to be seriously invasive. But that’s a bit rich coming from the Executive Chairman of Google, the company that was responsible for snagging data from wi-fi networks with its Street View cars, and has already tested self-driving vehicles. Never mind Google Glass, which straps a camera to the side of a user’s face, earning it a ban from a pair of Seattle businesses.

But as Bill Gates pointed out earlier this week, drones have the potential to be a force for good. It’s easy to see how drones could benefit rural communities, where a neighbor’s cup of sugar could easily be a few miles away.

It’s also entirely possible that Schmidt just wants to make sure the skies are clear for the upcoming drone war between major Internet and logistics companies. Google is reportedly also working on testing drone delivery for its services, a move that would compete with Amazon’s recently announced (but not yet realized) PrimeAir service. If average consumers are out flying their own drones, that could cause traffic jams or collision problems for commercial deliveries.

Still, it seems like this is the old maxim “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” in action. Schmidt, who’s known for wanting to keep his personal life private, feels like he can trust Google and other large companies not to abuse their drone privileges, while private citizens seem less trustworthy. Whether or not those citizens trust Schmidt is another story.

- Eric Schmidt says consumers shouldn’t have drones, even though Google wants to use them, GeelWire.com, December 6, 2013.

2. It’s quite something, really, to organise an event that’s all about diversity, inclusion, freedom and equal rights, and then to charge an entry price that will shrink participation and scare away a number of demographics. But Manchester Pride appears to have pulled this feat off, having just announced ticket prices for this summer’s event – these have, shall we say, not proved popular. A so-called Rainbow Pass, covering the whole of Pride weekend, has gone on sale for ￡64.50 (￡70.95 including booking fee, which by the way … no, I’m not going to get started on booking fees). For last year’s event, weekend passes maxed out at ￡30.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the protests in New York that proved the catalyst for the LGBT+ rights movement to take off in the United States and globally. It is perhaps also the year that the LGBT+ community says enough is enough over the growing commercialisation and gentrification of Pride events. Disgruntlement, sadly, is rife.

In Manchester the chief executive, Mark Fletcher, defended the ticket rise by saying this year’s event was a “festival”, and the live music performances are to be moved to a bigger site (a former train depot … oh, the glamour) and that it would be “the biggest lineup of artists we’ve ever had”. It is also true there is a strong rumour that one of the world’s best-loved pop stars, Ariana Grande – who has developed a special bond with the city after the terrorist attacks at her 2017 concert – will headline. But at this point Grande is just a rumour. And ￡70 is a lot of money for a rumour.

…

It isn’t that straight people aren’t welcome at Pride. There would be zero progress without straight allies. That’s the whole point. And there is something, too, undeniably nice about seeing which bank logo looks best in rainbow colours, but it is galling to think that, though the biggest corporations are happy to cater to the pink pound, homophobic hate crimes in the UK have risen by 80% in four years and (according to a 2017 survey) half of trans pupils in the UK have attempted suicide; as money talks ever more loudly each year. But in truth the Manchester Pride ￡71 (with booking fee) fiasco is as much about general commodification of the everyday as it is specifically about the LGBT+ scene. As the bottom drops out of the retail sector, millennials in particular are being wooed by the prospect of “experiences”. That means charging full whack for people to get together and celebrate their identities as much as it means turning brunch into some sort of treasure hunt and packaging it into an event, or adding a glass of wine to an evening art class and charging a fortune via an app. Nevertheless, it really does need to be said that when it comes to LGBT+ rights, charging ￡71 for people to celebrate their being free is just, well, rich.

- Manchester Pride is charging ￡71 a ticket this year, TheGuardian.com, February 4, 2019.

3. In a case that was ostensibly about the Trump administration’s radical effort to end birthright citizenship, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court took a major step toward restraining the power of federal district court judges to put a hold on executive-branch actions via “universal injunctions” that apply nationwide. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion in Trump v. CASA, in which the other five conservative justices concurred. It cut right to the chase: “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” The decision provoked unusually bitter dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor (in which Justice Elena Kagan joined) and Ketanji Brown Jackson. It could represent the most significant decision of the current Supreme Court term, which ends today.

The decision did not address the constitutionality of the administration’s demand for an end to birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born is this country is entitled automatically to U.S. citizenship. Instead, the Court focused on the real goal of Trump’s lawyers in pushing this case: to rein in the many federal district court judges around the country who are trying to slow down the administration’s efforts to expand presidential authority, in cases ranging from deportations without hearings to mass firings of federal employees to usurpation of congressional spending authority. (Indeed, Barrett’s opinion noted that 25 nationwide injunctions were issued by district court judges in the first 100 days of the Trump administration.) This has often been a footrace between the administration and the judges, with the Supreme Court being the ultimate destination of an extraordinary number of legal disputes. Now the Court has given Team Trump a big advantage: Parties seeking judicial relief from executive-branch overreach will have to plod through multiple district courts or undertake the complicated process of putting together class-action suits. Many legal observers who might generally agree that individual judges have on occasion overreached their authority will be alarmed by the timing and practical implications of the decision, which is a precious gift to Trump’s lawyers.

But rather than viewing this as an emergency brought on by Trump’s power grabs, Barrett chose to view the situation as the result of a long, slow, and largely unwarranted expansion of the power of judges to issue injunctions, which the Supreme Court is finally and appropriately addressing. That it happened to benefit the power-hungry president who placed her on the Court was incidental.

Sotomayor’s dissent expressed impatience with any interpretation of the majority’s position as a dry and technical matter of civil procedure:

No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent.

Justice Jackson upped the ante in her dissent:

It is important to recognize that the Executive’s bid to vanquish so-called “universal injunctions” is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior. When the Government says “do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct,” what it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution – please allow this. That is some solicitation. With its ruling today, the majority largely grants the Government’s wish. But, in my view, if this country is going to persist as a Nation of laws and not men, the Judiciary has no choice but to deny it.

Barrett took great umbrage at Jackson’s language, and indulged herself in an aside that will almost certainly be featured in conservative takes on the decision:

We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.

That’s a bit rich given the conservative Supreme Court majority’s own remarkable willingness to exert its preemptive powers to give the administration a hand, as in the recent unsigned and silent order to let the federal government deport migrants to dangerous third parties without a hearing.

It’s unclear what the Supreme Court will ultimately do if and when the actual issue of birthright citizenship reaches the Court, along with the other sharp constitutional issues the Trump administration is creating with its authoritarian approach to the powers of the presidency. But it is very clear that in this and other cases, the Supreme Court has enhanced its own power and Trump’s, as well, at the expense of lower-court judges and the aggrieved parties that rely on the judiciary to slow down the runaway freight train of the 47th presidency.

- Supreme Court Curbs Judges’ Ability to Stop Trump Power Grabs, NYMag.com, June 27, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）