TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “For Donald Trump, ‘elite’ used to mean a modeling agency. ‘She was with Elite,’ he said of Anna Nicole Smith four days after her death in 2007 in an interview with Howard Stern, the same way some might say a person had won a prestigious prize. ‘She had the best body. She had the best face. She had the best hair I’ve ever seen.’ In his long career as a celebrity businessman, Trump used the world ‘elite’ the way the agency did, as a bit of marketing boilerplate more or less interchangeable with ‘classy’ or ‘luxury’…Applied to people, it was an unvarnished compliment: Eli Manning was an ‘elite’ quarterback. This, however, changed abruptly in the summer of 2015. When Trump started running for president, ‘elite’ no longer was a thumbs-up affirmation. He had followed politics long enough to understand that it meant something else when said in front of a red-meat Republican crowd…And over the past year, as he has settled into the trappings of the presidency, he has begun to do something none of his populist forebears ever attempted. He has been reclaiming the word ‘elite’ with an almost vengeful pride. Having vanquished his opponents at the polls, having slammed the ‘elites’ as corrupt, incompetent and out of touch, Trump now has bestowed upon himself, as well as his most fervent supporters, the mantle of ‘elite’ as if it were a spoil of war.”
–Michael Kruse, “Trump Reclaims the Word ‘Elite’ With Vengeful Pride,” Politico, November 1, 2018