‘I can relate,” vowed Donald Trump early last week when he went on television to address the loss of income being involuntarily suffered by likely millions of American workers and their families when the government shutdown entered its third week.
“I’m sure that the people on the receiving end will make adjustments. They always do,” he added. “Many of those people who won’t be receiving a paycheck . . . agree 100 percent with what I’m doing.”
On Friday, as I write, Trump added reassurances to federal employees that “it’s for a good cause” and they should “hang in.”
But, interestingly, what the Washington Post calls Trump’s “go-to arsenal of bluster, falsehoods, threats and theatrics” isn’t working. The shutdown is now beginning its fourth week, the longest such government shutdown in American history. And for our president to say he “relates” is just so much poppycock. Either our president is delusional – or he’s lying through his teeth.
I opt for the latter.
Donald Trump doesn’t – and can’t possibly – “relate” to working people who are now going without paychecks. Who will apparently, thanks to him, continue to be without them in the immediate future.
And I seriously doubt his contention that many of those payless, struggling Americans agree with whatever he thinks he’s doing. Not when the choice is between the president’s obsession with an ill-defined “wall” on our southern border and their paychecks.
A wall, let us remember, Trump now demands that American taxpayers pay for, despite his repeated campaign pledges that any wall would be wholly paid for by Mexico. And to build that wall he has decided to hold hostage innocent Americans who have nothing whatsoever to do with that wall.
Apparently Trump – as he has never ceased reminding us during and since his presidential campaign – is a billionaire and as such need not be consistent. “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich,” he repeatedly bragged during his campaign.
He doesn’t really understand or care about the struggles of others because he is a man who has never known want – not even for a nanosecond, much less for a day – in his life.
He’s the son of wealth, his path paved by the largesse of his doting real estate developer father, Fred Trump, who in his lifetime – as the New York Times last year documented in an exhaustively researched exploration of Trump’s career – contributed today’s equivalent of at least $413 million to son Donald’s often failing businesses.
The younger Trump has been on a glide path since the day he was born. A man notable for his lack of empathy, he cannot possibly “relate” to those with little or nothing.
As I write this, about 800,000 federal employees are without paychecks. More than half are still working, albeit without pay, and the rest are at home and scrambling to figure out how they can pick up quick cash while they wait – hope – to go back to work.
They, at least, may be paid when, eventually, the government reopens.
Hundreds of thousands more people – contractors, cleaners, small-business owners and local merchants who aren’t federal employees but whose jobs depend on an open, functioning government – are also going payless. And most of those people will never be compensated for this gratuitously cruel closure.
But Trump – the man who started this whole mess, the president who bragged that he “relates” – doesn’t care.
He told us so on Dec. 21, when he sat down with congressional Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who wanted to forestall a government shutdown over illegal immigration.
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck,” Trump told them. “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.”
Now, of course, he does not want to “take the mantle” for the shutdown. And he does want to blame the Democrats.
But he made it evident then, in December, that he was eager for a shutdown, perhaps to divert attention from his other cascading woes, from the anticipated report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to the unraveling of international alliances that responsible leaders of this country have carefully built and maintained over the last 70 years.
Now, we are told by the man occupying our Oval Office, he’d happily let this pernicious shutdown continue “for months or even years.”
The next casualty of the impasse? According to the Department of Agriculture, the availability of food stamps in the near future is in doubt. More than 39 million people, most women and children, depend on food stamps to eat.
The protracted shutdown ensures that more and more people will find themselves choosing between food and shelter. Promises won’t pay mortgages or rent, despite what Trump says.
A week ago in the White House Rose Garden Trump assured reporters that “as a landlord” he knows landlords view people with hardships with sympathy. “When you see their problems, their difficulties out there, landlords work with the people,” he said.
Again, blather and nonsense. Both Trump and his father were notorious for their determination, using dubious tax schemes and shadow corporations, to soak their tenants for every penny, as the New York Times investigation amply proved.
Now Trump talks of declaring a rare national emergency to build his wall with taxpayer money and without congressional approval. And so the impasse continues . . .
Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, an official Coast Guard support group offered a tip sheet suggesting that Coast Guard families who found themselves short of funds during the shutdown could consider holding garage sales, baby-sitting, dog-walking or serving as “mystery shoppers.”
Bankruptcy, it suggested, is only a “last option.”
Cheerfully, it said, families can “stay in charge by getting a clear understanding of what’s happening.”
Well, at least that’s reassuring.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)