US president-elect, Donald Trump is reportedly facing senate backlash over ‘cabinet of billionaires’. The businessman Cvm politician -has so far nominated a number of billionaires, three Goldman Sachs bankers and the chief executive of the world’s largest oil firm to senior positions.
Responding to liberal consternation at the sheer wealth of the prospective appointees, Trump told his audience: “A newspaper [the New York Times] criticised me and said: ‘Why can’t they have people of modest means?’ Because I want people that made a fortune. Because now they are negotiating for you, OK? It’s no different than a great baseball player or a great golfer.”
Trump’s cabinet, which is not yet fully filled, is already said to be worth a combined $14bn – the richest White House top table ever assembled. His team – if all are confirmed by the Senate – will be worth 50 times the $250m combined wealth of George W Bush’s first cabinet, which the media at the time dubbed the “team of millionaires”.
For Trump, those figures are simply a confirmation of competence: in Trumpian politics, the richer you are, the better you must be at cutting a deal. And “deal-making” is what the next White House will be all about.
According to Peter Henning, a constitutional law professor at Wayne State University, appointing business leaders to top political positions has become the norm in American politics, but Trump’s nominations were “unique in the volume of people with minimal, if any, government experience”.
“I am always wary of people who say ‘we have to run the country like a business’ – businesses aren’t responsible for defence or caring for the elderly,” he said. “Businesses are driven with one guiding principle – to make the most money – and that should not be the role of the government.”
The backlash has begun in earnest. The criticism Trump objected to in Des Moines came from a New York Times editorial questioning the Trump administration’s seeming lack of interest in vetting nominees for potential conflicts of interest. Top Democrats and leading ethics and constitutional law experts have also raised concerns about Trump’s selection process.
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who campaigned for the Democratic nomination and promised that, if elected, he would redistribute the vast wealth of the 1% to poorer families, has dubbed Trump’s top team the “cabinet of billionaires”.
Other controversial big business appointments include Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs’s president and chief operating officer, named as director of the National Economic Council – or, as Trump put it, his “top economic adviser”.
