I didn’t grow up in a wealthy family, and I mean no disrespect to those who did when I say that the qualities that matter in people – that is, the lessons that we hope our kids absorb – have nothing to do with earning power. People can get rich even if they are foolish or immoral or ignorant.
Which brings me to the people currently running the government of the United States, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, both of whom are all of those things – very rich, quite foolish and by all appearances immoral. And I’d say ignorant, too, in the sense that they seem to be unaware of how badly they are bungling what they claim to be their goal.
Let’s take that last point first, because it’s the easiest to prove. One of the key points that got Trump elected was his promise to bring down prices. Remember that a year ago people were telling pollsters that inflation was a key reason they couldn’t support Joe Biden for another term, and in the campaign against Kamala Harris, Trump promised to bring down prices – “rapidly,” he said, in fact.
Well, new data reveals that inflation actually has risen, not fallen, since Trump returned to the White House. Now, there are a lot of factors leading to higher prices that are outside the control of the president -- as everybody who wasn’t campaigning for Donald Trump was noting a year ago. But chalk that up as one campaign promise Trump already has broken.
And imposing steep tariffs on everything from other countries, as Trump has promised he will do, will make prices higher for everybody. The president of Ford Motor Company, for example, has warned that the tariffs Trump intends to impose on Canada and Mexico will, in his words, “blow a hole” in the U.S. auto industry. Remember how unaffordable cars were because of the supply chain interruptions caused by the Covid pandemic? Welcome to the Trump pandemic: a widespread sickness prevalent over the whole country.
So if Trump is ignorant of economics, as his tariff proposals suggest, what about his push to reduce the deficit? That’s why he has given Elon Musk license to run all over Washington with his band of young techies, wreaking havoc on federal agencies – right? Well, his approach might be, in fact, foolish.
Take the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Trump aides say had to be gutted because it cost too much – it had “conflicting, overlapping and duplicative functions,” according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the USAID budget is only $40 billion – which is 0.6 percent of government spending. That’s not going to do anything to save taxpayers money. What not spending that money will do, though, is reduce America’s influence in the developing world, where we need friends. And it will cut humanitarian programs – like, those that pay for polio vaccinations in nations where the disease is still a big threat, and that provide food in countries where people are starving.
USAID is contracted to pay $450 million to American farmers, for food that can feed 36 million people. It is supposed to be providing water supplies for 1.6 million people displaced by war in Sudan’s Darfur region. So who is going to make up that lost income for our farmers? Who is going to save those thirsty people in Africa?
No, getting rid of USAID is clearly foolish. Or might it more appropriately be considered simply immoral?
If Donald Trump was serious about wanting to cut this year’s $1.83 billion federal deficit, or if he wanted to begin to reduce the $36.2 trillion accumulated federal debt, here’s a first step: Get rid of the $4 trillion hole that the tax cut he pushed through in 2017 will add to the nation’s debt over the coming decade. Those tax cuts primarily benefit the wealthy – including, of course, the president and his pal, the world’s richest man.
Here’s the problem we face as our careless billionaire president puts an un-elected reckless billionaire mogul in charge of most of his agenda: These aren’t the people we can trust to do what’s right for ordinary Americans; they aren’t conservative or patriotic, no matter what their spineless defenders say. Consider the words of perhaps the most conservative Republican presidential candidate of the 20th century, Barry Goldwater, who warned, “Small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.”
That pretty well defines the people running our country just now: small men – rich men – who are revealing themselves to be foolish, ignorant and, in fact, immoral.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.