Government Sachs is alive and well: Paul Brandus

I’ve seen more than a few comparisons between President-elect Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan, a president who also came to Washington intending to upend the status quo. Some Trumpsters — notably Vice President-elect Mike Pence — like to say he and the president-elect have a Gipper-like mandate to make sweeping changes.

That bit of self-inflated delusion is easy enough to debunk. Reagan crushed President Carter, winning the popular vote by 8.3 percentage points and winning an overwhelming 91% of the Electoral College (489 of 538). That, my friends, is a mandate. Not only did Trump lose the popular vote by more than 2 points, his Electoral College percentage (56.9% or 306 votes) is only 46th best out of 58 elections.

But there is one striking similarity at this point between Reagan and Trump: the tenor of their Cabinet picks. Reagan is reported to have had seven millionaires in his Cabinet, establishing a deep-pocketed trend that has continued up to the present. George H. W. Bush had six, Bill Clinton seven, and George W. Bush had as many — 13 — as the two of them combined. Barack Obama, no pauper himself, also moved into the White House with a long line of millionaires in tow.

Yet President-elect Trump, who promised to look after the little guy, has taken it up a notch. He is stocking his government not with mere millionaires (and let’s face it, a million bucks ain’t what it used to be) but with several billionaires: incoming Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, Education secretary Betsy DeVos and Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon. Also a member of this elite club are Ross’ would-be deputy, Todd Ricketts, and Carl Icahn, tapped as Trump's special adviser on regulatory issues.

Then there is the president-elect himself, who brags about being a multibillionaire, though this has not been conclusively proven.

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To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the incoming administration will be a government of the super wealthy, by the super wealthy and — perhaps — for the super wealthy.

Are we really expected to believe that these folks are going to change the very system that has been so good to them? Billionaires don’t become billionaires by acting like Mother Teresa. They do it by ruthlessly watching their own bottom line and taking advantage of every rule that can be fudged, every corner that can be cut. And when the rules aren’t helpful enough, they work the system to change them. They’re the very embodiment of what Trump attacked during the campaign: the "global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”

Voters quickly forget what a man says, Richard Nixon once wrote. Trump’s campaign promises today seem of a bygone era.

Friend of the little guy? Some 1,300 Carrier jobs are still going to Mexico, while 800-plus are temporarily saved. (Carrier’s parent company says some of those jobs will eventually be killed by automation anyway.) And then there's the news that Trump will hire 64 more foreigners to work this winter at Mar-A-Lago. Trump always says he can’t find Americans to hire, though the Bureau of Labor Statistics that he’s about to control notes there are 481,763 jobless people in Florida.

Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” talk singled out one firm in particular: Goldman Sachs. The fact that it employed Sen. Ted Cruz's wife and gave Hillary Clinton six-figure speaking fees was proof enough, he insisted, that they were villains. So what’s the first thing he’s done? Load up the West Wing with Goldman alums.

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I’m more bothered by the hypocrisy of Trump saying one thing and doing another than by Goldmanites at the White House. These are smart people who know how things work. They’re just like Trump himself: wealthy, connected, brash, consummate deal-makers. Like Trump, they know how capital flows, companies prosper and economies move ahead (on that last, at least Goldman does, though Trump’s commerce-killing tariff talk makes me less convinced about him).

In fact, Trump’s love of Goldman Sachs reminds me of another inexperienced guy who beat the odds to become president: Obama. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had financial ties to the firm going back years — and the firm was “the single largest private donor to Obama's (2008) presidential campaign,” notes Mother Jones.

For all his past talk about the evils of Goldman, Trump can count his own Treasury secretary (Steven Mnuchin), National Economic Council director (Gary Cohn) and chief strategist (Stephen Bannon) as alums of the firm. And on Jan. 4 he named Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton, who has advised and represented Goldman, to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission. Together, they’ll have a say in everything from government spending and taxes to banking and financial regulations.

“Government Sachs” is alive and well; the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Paul Brandus, founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports, is the author of Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidencyand a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter @WestWingReport.

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