If you were on the internet at all this Christmas weekend, you heard about the 2017 version of a Christmas miracle: some holiday-inspired wag sending a Christmas-wrapped package of horse manure to Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. By the way, it turns out you can't send a box of horse manure to a fabulously wealthy Wall Street tycoon-turned-Treasury Secretary without somebody calling the bomb squad and turning it into a major police incident, because important people just don't appreciate getting large suspicious packages that smell of fertilizer these days.
The box was found Saturday at the home of Mnuchin’s neighbor in the wealthy Bel Air neighborhood in Los Angeles. The LAPD bomb squad responded to the package, which police say was marked as being from “the American people.”
While the gift was marked as being from "the American people," more specifically it now appears to be the work of Los Angeles resident Robert Strong, a county psychologist who says he intended the prank as an "act of political theater" intended to protest the manure-filled Republican tax cuts for the rich.
Strong downplayed the idea that the box could have alarmed Mnuchin or created a dangerous situation, saying it was “something a frat boy may do to another frat boy,” AL.com reported.
It appears Strong also earned a Secret Service interview for the prank.
If you're wondering how Mnuchin's fabulously wealthy neighbors are feeling about this act of civil disobedience against him—keeping in mind that nearly all of those neighbors will be getting gigantic tax cuts due to Mnuchin's devotion to the needs of his fellow Bel Airians—they don't seem to be brimming with sympathy. Mostly they seem peeved that the police response interfered with their weekend shopping.
“We have $50 million homes and we can’t move. We can’t get out,” von Anhalt, an entrepreneur and husband of the late actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, told the news station Saturday night. “That’s bad. They have to find another way.”
Mentioning the price of your home when explaining how police should be treating you is, of course another perk of the ultra-rich.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this story, though, is that it doesn't seem to have produced any publicity stills of Steve Mnuchin and his wife posing with a box of horse manure. They are a pair that, ahem, likes to be photographed; Strong probably should have chosen a more tony brand of wrapping paper? The store-bought stuff is, after all, a little gauche.
He probably should have sprung for the Tiffany’s horse manure; it’s pricy, but I hear they deliver it to you on the wings of tiny, stinky angels. You want a rich man’s attention in the Trumpian era of 2017, that stuff had better be harvested from Secretariat himself.