Mean Mr. Mustard sleeps in the park, shaves in the dark, tryin’ to save a buck, sings John Lennon. “Mean” in Britain doesn’t mean nasty alone, but also miserly. Scrooge was mean. One of the least attractive traits of the Trump administration, its cabinet of billionaires, and the Republican donors who power the party is their meanness.
It isn’t enough that they have more money than any person, family or dynasty could ever need, it’s apparently vital to keep any of it from slipping away, being taxed, being shared with others, unless there’s a charitable tax break to profit by. They view everyone else as marks to be exploited or parasites to be exterminated. Mitt Romney’s division of the world into Makers and Takers was just the tip of the elitist iceberg, and Trump’s Mar-A-Lago is the prow of the entitled administration’s Titanic.
Meanness on such a grand scale ought to be a liability in a democracy, and it is unless it can be disguised. Trump ran on a pseudo-populist pledge to use the wiles of a billionaire to rig the game in favor of his less prosperous followers for a change. Naturally enough, that was a self-serving lie, the Trump University of electoral politics. His plutocratic policies have enriched his capitalist cronies at the expense of everyone else.
Bring this up and you are called a socialist, sneered at for having worked as a bartender instead of as the dauphin of a crooked real estate empire. You are accused of class warfare by people dedicated to nothing but rigging the game to favor their class. Struggling ordinary people have a right to ask: If there’s a class war, who started it? And to wonder what the capitalism of people like Trump, Betsy DeVos and Wilbur Ross has done for them lately.
The ruling class counts on no one looking too closely at the budgets they propose or the policies they actually pursue. They rely on a smokescreen of divisive rhetoric to obscure the reality. So Trump invites his fans to fear caravans of drug mules posing as babes in arms seeking asylum, and to condemn greedy foreigners in Puerto Rico from expecting help from America for a hurricane they caused.
But every so often the mask slips and Scrooge and Mean Mr. Mustard are revealed at their day job – feathering their own nests by inflicting malign neglect on the poor, weak and defenseless. So, Betsy DeVos drew the short straw and was expected to defend the mean budget devised by Mick Mulvaney — Tea Party-Freedom Caucus Zealot/Budget Director/Chief of Staff. It proposed for the third year in a row to zero out funding for the Special Olympics — a whopping savings of $18 million.
How low can they go? Pretty damn low. DeVos, an Amway pyramid scheme heiress worth $5 billion, could personally fund the Special Olympics with less than four-tenths of one percent of her wealth, not even close to what churches expect their flock to tithe. Trump claims to be worth $10 billion. If so, he could keep the Special Olympics operating in perpetuity for one percent of his wealth.
Instead, the Special Olympics has got to be slashed, along wth all the other socialist do-gooder parts of the budget, like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, education aid, environmental protection, medical research, food and drug inspections, health and safety monitoring. None of those will make America any greater for the monied elite. They’ve got theirs, Jack.
Once the Republicans pretended such cruel cuts were the price of a balanced budget, but they no longer even pretend to care about fiscal responsibility. Cutting stuff for the disadvantaged and hard-working classes is needed not to build a wall to keep out dusky people nor to defend a country against people like Putin and Kim Jong Un. They love those guys. Oligarchs do deals to launder money. No, the budget cuts are needed to fund even bigger tax cuts for the one percent. They’re suffering through a shortage of gold toilets or, like DeVos, the struggle to get by with only a half-dozen yachts and a brace of helicopters.
To be fair, Trump has promised to make Republicans the party of healthcare, again. See, he isn’t against the little guy. Or maybe he knows healthcare polls as the number one issue on the minds of the other ninety-nine percent. That’s why he promised in the 2016 race to repeal and replace Obamacare with something cheaper, better, shinier.
But wait, his own party with a majority in both houses couldn’t repeal it and had no plan with which to replace it, which is why they no longer have a majority in both houses. Still Trump claims this time will be different. Just re-elect him in 2020 and give Republicans a majority in both houses and healthcare will suddenly occupy all their waking thoughts.
If you believe that, you haven’t been paying attention. The Mr. Mustard party is planning more tax cuts for themselves, not healthcare or jobs or eduction for losers. Meanwhile, Mean Mr. President holds rallies like you’ve never seen, always shouts out something obscene. Such a dirty old man. Dirty old man.