President Donald Trump outside the White House, January 10, 2019.(AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin)
The biggest lie ever told in American politics is the claim that Donald Trump cares about working people.
He never has. He never will.
As a bankruptcy-prone business mogul, Trump has always financed his lavish lifestyle at the expense of the workers and contractors he screwed over. Now he is doing the same thing as president, having engineered a government shutdown that on Friday denied 800,000 federal employees their paychecks.
“Cheating, scamming, and ripping off workers is a Donald Trump tradition that goes back decades. Federal workers are just Trump’s latest victims,” says Public Citizen president Robert Weissman. “For decades, Trump repeatedly didn’t pay those who worked for him, and now that he’s in the White House, little has changed. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers and employees of federal contractors are suffering the same fate because of the Trump shutdown.”
This shutdown, says Paul Shearon, the president of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, is “completely unnecessary.”
“The real problem is that President Trump has shut himself down and he’s refusing to do his job as chief executive,” says Shearon, whose union represents judges in US immigration courts, scientists, engineers and technical workers at NASA, and highly skilled workers at the EPA and NOAA.
The human cost is severe for federal workers who, as American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox Sr. says, have take home pay of about $500 a week and in many case “struggle to make ends meet even without a missed paycheck.” Yet Trump is “holding employees’ paychecks hostage over demands for a border wall.”
Trump presumes that unpaid federal workers can just “make adjustments,” while claiming that he “can relate” to the difficult circumstance he has imposed upon them.
This, says Weissman, “is pretty rich coming from a six-time bankrupt real estate mogul who inherited his daddy’s fortune. Working families who are living paycheck to paycheck and can no longer afford to pay for rent, groceries and medical bills because of Trump’s reckless shutdown have every right to be furious at the president’s oblivious and patronizing remarks.”
Trump promised during the 2016 campaign that “the American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.”
That was a lie.
We hope you enjoyed the story you just read, just one of the many incisive, deeply-reported articles we publish daily. Now more than ever, we need fearless journalism that shifts the needle on important issues, uncovers malfeasance and corruption, and uplifts voices and perspectives that often go unheard in mainstream media.
Throughout this critical election year and a time of media austerity and renewed campus activism and rising labor organizing, independent journalism that gets to the heart of the matter is more critical than ever before. Donate right now and help us hold the powerful accountable, shine a light on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and build a more just and equitable future.
For nearly 160 years, The Nation has stood for truth, justice, and moral clarity. As a reader-supported publication, we are not beholden to the whims of advertisers or a corporate owner. But it does take financial resources to report on stories that may take weeks or months to properly investigate, thoroughly edit and fact-check articles, and get our stories into the hands of readers.
Donate today and stand with us for a better future. Thank you for being a supporter of independent journalism.
Thank you for your generosity.
As Weissman says, Trump has as president “betrayed workers at every turn.”
“From rolling back health, safety and wage protections to misleading coal miners to tax giveaways for billionaires and big corporations that left most Americans with a pittance,” he explains, “it should be obvious by now that Trump holds working people beneath contempt.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.