First of all, the chance that a person who meets the government’s definition of poor will be nominated and confirmed to serve in any U. S. president’s cabinet is too outlandish to consider.
President Donald Trump said at a campaign stop – yes, a campaign stop – in Iowa last week that he wouldn’t want a poor person in certain positions in his administration. “I love all people, rich or poor, ” he explained, “but, in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person, does that make sense?”
First of all, the chance that a person who meets the government’s definition of poor will be nominated and confirmed to serve in any U. S. president’s cabinet is too outlandish to consider. Even if you go with a more commonsense definition of what it means to be poor, the idea that somebody who isn’t at least comfortably middle class serving in such a capacity is too far-fetched to contemplate.
His making a big to do about it may be different, but if Trump’s cabinet is off limits to poor people, then it’s not different from any other president’s cabinet. So what’s the point of Trump’s announcing that poor folks should look elsewhere? It’s how he defends having put together the richest administration ever. As The Washington Post reported in December, President George W. Bush’s cabinet had a combined net worth of $250 million, but you’d have to multiply that number by 10 just to reach the net worth of Wilbur Ross, Trump’s secretary of commerce.
If it takes 10 Bush cabinets to equal one member of Trump’s cabinet, then maybe Trump has a skewed definition of what it means to be poor. Maybe, in his world, a poor person is anybody who isn’t at least a millionaire.
But Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine suggests that something else is going on when Trump is defending filling up his administration with the wealthiest of the wealthy. He is showing us that he subscribes to social Darwinism, the belief that good people become wealthy as bad ones languish in poverty.
Chait: “Social Darwinism is a philosophy that treats the market as a perfectly efficient and moral mechanism for allocating wealth. Just as natural selection favors those species best adapted for survival, the theory goes, capitalism rewards the smartest and most deserving among us. It is the intellectual scaffolding, constructed by writers like Ayn Rand and various Austrian economists, behind the vision of conservatives like Paul Ryan and David Koch. Trump may not have read up on the theory, but he understands it viscerally. His father, Fred, inculcated his son with the unshakable belief that his own greatness would lead to enormous wealth.”
For all his perceived differences with the Republican establishment, Trump is now leading a party, Chait writes, that has the same core philosophy as he does: If you’re wealthy, then you’ve obviously done good, and the government should help you amass even more wealth. If you’re poor, you’re obviously losing at the game of life, and the government should make it even more difficult for you to make it.
The two big items on the Republicans’ agenda are replacing the Affordable Care Act with something less helpful to poor people and then giving relatively wealthy Americans a tax break. These two agenda items together, Chait writes, “would constitute the most sweeping upward redistribution of resources in American history.”
The irony, of course, is that Trump did a better job appealing to working class voters (well, the white ones, at least) than his opponent Clinton did. To hear him tell it, Clinton couldn’t be trusted to advance the interests of common folks because she had been paid handsomely by Wall Street to give speeches to Wall Street. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over (Ted Cruz) , ” he said in February 2016. “Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.” Then, after all that bashing, he went and chose former Goldman Sachs partner Steve Mnuchin for secretary of the treasury. Steve Bannon, whom Trump named his White House chief strategist, worked at that firm for 17 years. Gary Cohn, a former chief operating officer for Goldman Sachs, is Trump’s top economic advisor.
So apparently, it’s an outrage for other candidates – no matter the party – to have ties to Wall Street, but it’s appropriate for Trump to turn to them to stock his cabinet because, you know, poor people, sad.
” I don’t think either party particularly cares about helping poor people, ” Ohio’s Republican Gov. John Kasich said on CNN Sunday morning, a rather odd statement considering that Kasich has been pleading with his fellow Republicans not to rollback Medicaid expansion, which Democrats passsed in the face of unanimous Republican opposition.
At this moment, Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate. After last year’s elections they controlled the governor’s mansion and both legislative chambers in 25 states. Therefore, if Republicans were the only party that cared about poor people, it would be enough. Kasich doesn’t need Democrats to help him preserve Medicaid expansion. He needs the members of his own party.
But why care about poor people when you can, instead, convince them that with a little more grit on their part that they can be rich and that then, and only then, can they expect the government’s help.
Jarvis DeBerry is deputy opinions editor for NOLA. COM | The Times-Picayune. He can be reached at jdeberry@nola.com or at twitter.com/jarvisdeberry .
