We begin today’s roundup with an excellent editorial at USA Today about the Trump administration’s “let them eat cake” moment:
Does anyone in the White House understand the meaning of the word "empathy"?
It's bad enough that 800,000 government workers, and a million or more federal contractors, are about to miss their second paycheck because of the five-week partial government shutdown.
It's even worse that some of them are being forced to stand in food lines, or choose between medicine and mortgage payments.
Now the affluent within Team Trump are admonishing these workers that their plight is really no big deal.
Here’s Michelle Goldberg’s take at The New York Times:
[I]n purely financial terms, Trump is as elitist as they come. Though he campaigned as a candidate of (white) workers, he has governed as a shameless oligarch. He has proudly surrounded himself with millionaires and billionaires, seeing their wealth as evidence of their worth. At a rally in 2017, speaking of his economic advisers, he said, “But in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.” He has gone out of his way not to hire anyone who would actually understand the plight of the workers he’s holding hostage. [...]
Ordinarily, one might expect a presidential administration’s leading economic figures to understand something of these financial realities. But if they cared about people who aren’t rich, they wouldn’t be working for Trump in the first place. The shocking thing isn’t their indifference to the misery they’re causing. It’s that they can barely be bothered to hide it.
