When he announced he was running for the White House, Donald Trump sounded a note of economic populism, promising that he’d be a president for working people, bring back manufacturing jobs, and take on the economic forces in this country that were a persistent drag on middle-class wages and workers.
Now, however, three years into his presidency, we know that those promises were nothing more than hot air.
Trump’s trade war is raising prices on nearly everything we buy, we’re on the verge of a recession, and businesses are screwing over workers in new and increasingly barbaric ways.
It should come as no surprise that a man who made his name not paying his bills and stiffing contractors who did work for him is a nightmare as president. Here’s seven ways Trump has given the shaft to everyone who works for a living in this country, with a hat tip to New York Magazine:
1. Trump has denied guaranteed overtime pay to 12.5 million workers, essentially transferring $1.2 billion from their paychecks to their bosses’ bank accounts.
2. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to uphold the right of employers to include forced arbitration clauses in contracts, denying workers the right to have complaints against their bosses heard in a court of law.
3. Trump repealed a rule that required companies to inspect mines for any safety hazards — i.e. loose pieces of rock that might crumble and fall — before miners began their shifts.
4. Trump and his GOP allies in Congress passed massive tax cuts that were written specifically to allow owners of capital to pay much lower rates on their income than workers do on their wages.
5. Trump’s Labor Department proposed a rule that would allow restaurant owners to steal their workers’ tips, and then hid a study showing that this would cost waiters and waitresses billions of dollars a year.
6. Trump tried to throw millions of working-poor people off Medicaid. When that failed, the administration deliberately set in place an increase in health insurance premiums.
7. Donald Trump appointed a Supreme Court justice who once ruled that a truck driver could legally be fired for abandoning his broken-down vehicle, writing that he should have stayed and froze to death with the cargo he was hauling.
Donald Trump is not and never has been an economic populist. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and has even said there should be no federal minimum wage.
The next time you hear Trump say he cares about the average American, keep in mind the evidence suggests that’s one of the biggest lies he’s ever told.
Featured Image Via PBS
