Catching up on Trump's populist wave
by digby
In case you were wondering about where Trump stands in his crusade to help the blue collar workers of America, Joan Walsh did a little survey:
The so-called champion of the working class is assembling a gilded cabinet. Not only will it be the richest, ever; it features plutocrats who’ve presided over the hollowing out of the working class Trump pretended to care about. Party leaders should be shouting about this from every imaginable platform.
The Treasury secretary appointed after a campaign spent demonizing Wall Street and “hedge-fund guys” is a former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge-fund guy, Steve Mnuchin, whose bank foreclosed on 37,000 homeowners after the housing crash.
Trump’s reported choice for labor secretary is the minimum wage–opposing, job-killing fast-food mogul Andrew Pudzer, who talks fondly about the day robots will replace workers at his restaurants. Pudzer has been a leader of the corporate fight against the Fight for $15…
Then there’s the billionaire nominee for Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, who owned the deadly Sago Mine in West Virginia when 12 workers were killed in a 2006 explosion. Three years later, he closed the mine. Trump, you’ll recall, has promised to “bring back coal” and “bring back miners.” How will coal country feel about Secretary Ross?
Meanwhile, Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is a climate-change denier who has sued the EPA as Oklahoma attorney general.
His Health and Human Services nominee, Representative Tom Price, opposes the Affordable Care Act and wants to privatize Medicare. Price once claimed it was impossible that any woman would be unable to pay for her own birth control…
Then there’s Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson, who has zero experience in housing or urban development and appears to oppose Fair Housing laws.
Betsy DeVos, the pick for education secretary, is yet another billionaire. She sent her children to private schools and has crusaded to privatize public education.
And that was written before he floated the idea of appointing the CEO of Exxon-Mobile as Secretary of State.
No one can possibly be surprised by this. Before the election it was known that he routinely duped working people out of their hard earned money either by refusing to pay them for their work and telling them to hire a lawyer if they didn't like it or through simple grifts like Trump University which did result in lawsuits all over the country.He sold people Trump branded condos that went bankrupt before they were built and he kept the money. His companies went bankrupt four time times leaving all the small business people along with the banks holding the bag. How anyone would have thought this man gave a flying fuck about workers is beyond me.
I don't know how many of the working class voters who chose Trump even knew about all this. They were living in a wingnut fever swamp of fake news stoking their febrile imaginations about the witch Hitlery and probably didn't hear about it. But all those so-called establishment moderate Republicans knew about it. So maybe this was the reason they all came home to Trump? After all, screwing the worker is their raison d'etre so they may have recognized that he really was one of them. Sure he's a little crude and stupid. But as long as he'll put rich greedheads in charge of the details, they're all good. Hell, they don't even care if he winds up being blackmailed by Russia. That national sovereignty stuff is just for the rubes, anyway. Everybody knows that multi-national corporate sovereignty is where it's at, amirite?
He'll deliver some populism for the folks don't worry. He'll crack some heads and put some people in their places and that'll put a thrill up their legs. But he won't do anything for their wallets, that's for sure.
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