According to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, “The results of the 2024 election have confirmed a reality that is too frequently denied by Democratic Party leaders and strategists: The American working class is angry — and for good reason. They want to know why the very rich are getting much richer, and the CEOs of major corporations make almost 300 times more than their average employees, while weekly wages remain stagnant and 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.”
In what seems like a case of “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” however, President-elect Trump’s nomination of corporate titans, tech tycoons, TV celebrities and his family members to lead the government exposes his naked intention not to restore democracy but to further entrench corporatocracy. Yet throughout the land not a peep of protest has been raised by the angry working class.
Consider that Trump-whisperer, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world but with no experience in government, has convinced the President-elect to install him and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswami to oversee DOGE, a fake Department of Government Efficiency that nevertheless wants to act like a legitimate government agency–only without the troublesome background vetting, Senate confirmation, and ethical guardrails that might raise questions about conflicts of interests, including Tesla and the Department of Transportation, the Department of Defense with SpaceX, and the Department of Health and Human Services with Neuralink.
Consider also that Musk’s social networking company, X, remains a source of pro-Trump political propaganda even as it competes with other independent media outlets.
Further, Musk admits his intention to cut $2 trillion of waste from the national budget will cause “temporary hardships.” For whom? Like his sabotage of the bipartisan deal to provide disaster recovery, relief for farmers, and paychecks for 875,000 federal employees, it’s evident the working classes, not elites like Trump and Musk, will suffer these hardships.
Similarly, most economists predict Trump’s pledge to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China will only boost profits for large corporations and “result in average estimated additional costs per U.S. household of between $1,700 and $2,350 annually.
Indeed, as with Trump’s first term tariffs, taxpayers will pay higher prices for lumber, beef, electronics, metals fruit and medicine, as well as the cost of bailing out tariff-impacted farmers. And though taxpayers can again expect to subsidize big business, the working classes have suddenly lost their angry tongues.
Likewise, Trump also intends to extend the 2017 tax cut that, according to the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center, will save the 1% wealthiest earners $60,000 but 60% of the bottom households $500 per year.
This obscene discrepancy between the benefits doled out between rich and poor has inexplicably elicited working class cheers, notwithstanding the trillions of dollars it will add to the national debt, which, I believe, Trump supporters once jeered.
Trump’s pick for Secretary of Interior, software executive and former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, intends to enable Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill” on public lands. According to U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, member on the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Burgum arranged a meeting in which Trump urged oil executives to make $1 billion political donations in return for pro-oil policies that will be very profitable for oil and gas companies, as well as for Burgum, who has oil and gas leases on his own land. Burgum never voiced an objection.
Though drilling for fossil fuels will be devastating for the natural environment and public lands already suffering the destructive consequences of climate change, greenhouse gasses, wildfires, heat waves, flooding, and drought; Trump has either convinced his supporters that climate change is a hoax and they shouldn’t believe their eyes, or that it’s smarter to prioritize their own immediate economic benefit over the health and well-being of their progeny. So much for family values.
And speaking of suspect family values, I guess that’s Trump’s flimsy justification for nominating his son’s ex-fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has no relevant experience, as U.S. ambassador to Greece; and his son-in-law’s father Charles Kushner, a businessman convicted of tax fraud, as ambassador to France; and his daughter’s father-in-law, billionaire Massad Boulos, as senior adviser on Arab and Middle East.
Trump also wants his daughter, Lara Trump, who also has no governing experience, to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate seat. Yet, despite this blatant parade of nepotism, there are no red-hatted protest rallies of the angry working class.
All irony aside, I’m sure everyone clearly sees that Trump’s masquerade as working-class savior amounts to a naked display of hypocrisy in support of an elite corporatocracy. But it also seems sadly clear that in all of Trumpland, perhaps only a child would declare that the emperor has no clothes.
Thomas Cangelosi is a retired teacher who lives in Avon.