When Donald Trump started rolling out his Cabinet appointees, people – especially curious reporters – noticed that he was assembling a band of billionaires.
So Trump, ever helpful, explained to CNN why he had assembled one of the wealthiest Cabinets in history.
“I love all people – rich or poor – but in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person,” he said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “Does that make sense? If you insist, I’ll do it – but I like it better this way.”
He singled out especially Wilbur Ross, who made his fortune buying up dying companies and selling off their parts for big bucks and who’s now Trump’s commerce secretary.
“Somebody said, ‘Why’d you appoint rich a person to be in charge of the economy,’ ” said Trump, a billionaire himself. “I said, ‘Because that’s the kind of thinking we want.’ They’re representing the country. They don’t want the money. They had to give up a lot to take these jobs,” he said.
At the time Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey rejected Trump’s logic about rich people running the economy. “Being rich doesn’t mean that you have wisdom. It doesn’t mean that you have compassion. It doesn’t mean you understand the lives that most Americans are living,” Markey told CNN.
In other words, being rich doesn’t give you empathy – the ability to put yourself in another person’s position, to see from someone else’s point of view.
Particularly if that person is someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, which is the plight of perhaps half of all Americans – including recently furloughed workers and the millions of others whose livelihoods are dependent on business with the federal government.
Markey is being proven right – in spades – right now. In fact, Wilbur Ross is a poster boy for the inability feel empathy. In an interview with CNN Ross said he was disappointed that some air traffic controllers – unpaid for more than a month but still required to report to work – were visiting food banks.
“I really don’t understand why,” he told CNBC. They should instead just apply for loans from banks and credit unions! Even if they have to “pay a little bit of interest.” He neglected to mention that interest on short-term loans from the Commerce Department’s own credit union is running at about 9 percent – and that’s considered a bargain.
Then came Larry Kudlow, a longtime television financial guru and, now, Trump’s top economic adviser, who dismissed the shutdown as “just a glitch,” although he added that “I fret about the hardship” of furloughed workers.
He proceeded with an impromptu chat with reporters: “Am I out of touch? I don’t think I’m out of touch. I’m addressing the problem. I’ve met with my individual staff members and God bless them. They’re working for free. They’re volunteering. But they do it because they believe government service is honorable and they believe in President Trump.”
Uh, Larry, they are not “volunteering.” They are federal employees who were, thanks to the shutdown, not being paid. And, yes, you are seriously out of touch.
Our president, though, leapt to the defense of his aides. Perhaps, he suggested, they “should’ve said it differently” but their hearts were in the right places. He went on to say that beleaguered workers would be given breaks by local businesses – you know, just go to the grocery store and “work something out. People do that all the time.”
“Local people know who they are, when they go for groceries and everything else,” Trump said. “They know the people, they’ve been dealing with them for years, and they work along.”
Methinks Trump has seen It’s a Wonderful Life a few too many times. I seriously doubt any out-of-cash federal worker can waltz into, say, Hannaford, explain his plight and get a discount on his grocery tab.
Then Trump added his own take on unpaid workers. “I love them,” he said during a meeting in the Cabinet Room. “I respect them. I really appreciate the great job they’re doing. Many of those people that are not getting paid are totally in favor of what we’re doing.”
It should be noted that the president offered no evidence to support that statement.
Maybe Trump, Kudlow and Ross should just go to the nearest unemployment office and toss rolls of paper towels at all the applicants. It worked so well for Trump in Puerto Rico.
The tone-deafness of the president’s battalion of billionaire Cabinet secretaries has not, needless to say, gone without notice from his political opponents, who these days are well represented by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who clearly drives Trump nuts and knows it.
“Is this the ‘Let them eat cake’ kind of attitude?” Pelosi asked Thursday. “Or, ‘Call your father for money’? Or, ‘This is character-building for you. It’s all going to end up very well just so long as you don’t get your paychecks’?”
Late Thursday afternoon, Trump sought to tamp down talk that his administration lacked empathy, singing the praises of federal workers. But – given the vigor of his attacks on those same federal workers, both during his campaign and his administration – his praise was seriously hypocritical, to put it mildly.
Peter Wehner, a Republican who served in three former GOP administrations, pretty much summed things up. The president, he said, is “lacking an empathy gene. This is a man who hasn’t shown empathy throughout his entire life, so to expect him to show empathy toward federal workers who are suffering is just not going to happen.”
As Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) asked on Twitter, “Have none of these people ever known someone who was broke?”
The answer seems to be: Nope.
As if to prove it, White House chief economic adviser Kevin Hassett argued that the shutdown was in fact a boon to government workers. After all, having all that time off with the promise of back pay someday is like having a free vacation without having to use vacation days.
“They’re – in some sense they’re better off,” he said.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)