Trump, Ryan, Mulvaney, All of Them: Partners in Plutocracy - by Joy Ann Reid
The Republicans have been called the party that hates the poor. With this budget and this health care bill, it’s no longer just the poor.
JOY-ANN REID
05.26.17 1:00 AM ET
It may be too glib to say that Republicans hate the poor. After all, any political party is made up of lots of different people with differing views and priorities. But it isn’t far off to say that the Republican Party is at its core a collection of men (and women) who broadly believe that the poor should bear more of the burdens of funding the government, while the rich should enjoy more of its fruits.
Listen to Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s budget chief and a founding member of the House “Freedom Caucus,” bark into the camera about “fairness to the people who pay the bills” versus aid to the poor, or Paul Ryan giggle with delight at the prospect of throwing millions of people off Medicaid to make room for “tax reform” and you’ll get the idea.
Mulvaney and Ryan are proud architects of the deeply cruel, almost cartoonishly villainous Trump budget, unveiled this week amidst the ongoing swirl of Russiagate and Donald Trump’s variously weird and awkward travels abroad. But while many are attempting to label the budget a betrayal of the ideas Trump ran on, even a cursory inspection of his life proves that he does indeed buy into the Ryan-Mulvaney reverse Robin Hood fairy tale. And by the way, so do his voters, who almost to a person believe not only that the rich deserve more but that even the most draconian budget cuts will restore fairness to the system by cutting the undeserving—read “lazy minorities” and “illegals”—out of it.
These beliefs aren’t new. They’ve been nurtured among generations of young Republicans who devoured Ayn Rand novels in high school and who revere Ronald Reagan—not just the Reagan of the 1980s, but the one who in 1965 declared Medicare to be the first horseman of the socialist Apocalypse. They’re reinforced every Sunday by a conservative Protestant church that teaches that riches are a tangible sign of God’s grace, and that prosperity, not charity, is what the believer should aspire to. They’re backstopped by friends and neighbors and plumbers and store clerks who view wealth as a sign of intelligence, even when the tortured syntax of a rich man they revere renders that notion laughable. And they are redoubled by an American culture that almost since its founding has mistaken material success for achievement, and plunder for pluck.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/26/trump-ryan-mulvaney-all-of-them-partners-in-plutocracy
