Just a few months ago, Donald Trump was saying things about Wall Street and the big banks that sounded, well, downright progressive.
During an appearance on CBS'
Face the Nation, for example, he accused the "hedge fund guys," as he put it, "of getting away with murder."
Trump continued this line of attack in his final
ad before election day, going after the "economic power structure" that he said was robbing the country blind and enriching the wealthy at the expense of working Americans.
My, my how things have changed. Instead of fighting the banksters, Trump is putting them in charge of the economy, and I mean literally putting them in charge of the economy.
His pick for Treasury Secretary is a guy named Steven Mnuchin, the living, breathing embodiment of the "global power structure."
Not only is Mnuchin a hedge fund manager who worked for George Soros, he's also a second-generation Goldman Sachs banker who made a killing during the housing crisis when he and his buddies bought up a bank called IndyMac, renamed it OneWest, and then resold it for a whopping $3.4 billion after foreclosing on thousands of homeowners.
Needless to say, this isn't the kind of person most Trump voters thought they were putting in charge of the government when they cast their ballots on Election Day.
And Mnuchin is just the beginning.
Trump has also picked debt financier Wilbur Ross to be his Commerce Secretary.
He's picked Medicare privatizer Tom Price to be his HHS secretary, after running a campaign that explicitly ruled out cuts to Medicare.
He's also reportedly considering Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn as his budget director.
The list goes on, but the big picture is pretty clear: instead of draining the swamp, Trump is refilling it with alligators: the exact same type of corporate insiders he railed against during the campaign.
So at what point are Trump voters going to realize they've been scammed?
And what are they going to be about it?
-Thom
(What do you think? Tell us
here.)
