Trump plutocracy for free#

He only cares about being popular with his base.

Opinion Trump doesn't care about governing or being re-elected. It thus cannot be reassuring that the leaders in the executive branch seem to be people who have no conception of the household realities of anyone who is not a multimillionaire. (That’s indeed what Trump did when the Taj Mahal, his garish Atlantic City casino, was ailing prior to its 1991 bankruptcy his father, Fred Trump, bought $3.5 million in chips and walked out without gambling at all.)Īcross America, 800,000 federal workers - and thousands more government contractors - have been pinching pennies while Trump left them with no idea when the end to the government shutdown might come today's announced deal is a temporary reprieve but not yet a permanent solution to the impasse. “He thinks they can just ask their father for money, but they can’t,” she said. Pelosi, to her credit, has kept her caucus firmly in hand, visited an impromptu food kitchen created by humanitarian chef Jose Andres, and called out the robber-baron coldheartedness of the administration. It says something about the sheer ineptitude of the various plutocrats that make up the Trump Cabinet that they’ve made House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the consummate Washington insider, look like a salt-of-the-earth everywoman. It has, presumably, been quite some time since he visited a Safeway. Trump, notably, is 72 years old and, since leaving the opulence of his Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago homes (except for the odd weekend), has had his food served to him by “chefs and servants” at the White House. In comments broadcast on Thursday, he suggested that grocery stores would “work along” with federal employees during their weeks of travail, presumably giving away food on the promise of future credit. The president himself evinced even less understanding of the consequences of his own actions. Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, called a month of no pay “a little bit of pain.” And Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economic adviser, described federal employees working for no pay under pain of losing their jobs as “volunteers.” (Kudlow’s net worth is estimated at around $25 million.) (The average American is already saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt the Washington Post reported that the Department of Commerce’s own credit union is charging 9 percent interest on emergency loans for employees who are missing their second paycheck today.)

Trump plutocracy for free#

This week alone, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross - a man with a $150 million art collection and a penchant for customized, $600 “smoking slippers” customized with the Department of Commerce logo - said he “didn’t quite understand” why federal employees were lining up for free food at soup kitchens and suggesting they take out loans instead.

Opinion Trump's government shutdown is not a 'vacation' for federal workers like my husband

This week, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi evoked her most famous - and apocryphal - quote, “Let them eat cake,” to describe the attitudes of the Trump administration towards federal workers furloughed during the longest government shutdown in American history. While she churned a little, possibly inedible, butter in her pleasure dairy, the last of the milk curdled in jugs across France, and women rioted over the price of bread. But the laiterie d’agrément was one of two dairies on the grounds of Versailles: Not wishing to eat their own mock-preparations, Marie and her confidantes ate the butter, milk and ice cream prepared by real dairy workers at a separate, and far less ornate, facility on the palace grounds.Ĭenturies after her summary execution at the age of 37, Marie Antoinette remains a symbol of profligacy and scorn of the common man. There, the queen and her ladies would dress as dairymaids and pretend to make butter and ice cream the pleasure dairy had “fixtures of white marble set against walls painted with trompe l’oeil to resemble marble,” according to “Butter: A Rich History” by Elaine Khosrova. Marie Antoinette had a fake dairy - a laiterie d’agrément - on the grounds of Versailles.