Here’s another example of how the champion of the working man Donald Trump is filling cabinet with robber barons and their henchmen (and women.)
Over the past six years, Pam Bondi has worked as a Washington lobbyist for one of the top firms in the country, representing corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Uber.
Now, some of the same clients her firm represents are squaring off against the Department of Justice she’s poised to lead. And corporate interests are cautiously optimistic that her selection will shepherd in an administration more friendly to their interests than President Joe Biden’s.
Her appointment, lobbyists say, could be a win for major U.S. corporations that find themselves crosswise with the Justice Department, including health care giant UnitedHealthcare and social media company TikTok. Those companies have paid tens of thousands of dollars this year to Bondi’s current employer, Ballard Partners, according to lobbying disclosures.
Bondi’s confirmation as attorney general would also pose a myriad of ethical questions about what kind of access she will grant her firm and whether she will recuse herself from issues involving Ballard.
She’s not one of the 14 billionaires he nominated. She just does their bidding. No wonder the Big Money Boyz are so excited. And she will never recuse. Trump considers that a personal betrayal.
On every level this is the beginning of a new gilded age. As Brian Beutler wrote:
Taking Republicans literally, and watching Trump build a government, the incoming administration really does seem to want to establish a new Gilded Age. To shed Reagan-era pretenses of top-down prosperity and just loot the place.
“The change in ideology is clear from Trump’s cabinet picks,” wrote the historian
Heather Cox Richardson. “While the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million, Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report noted, a week ago she estimated the worth of Trump’s roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number did not include his pick for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find.”
And of course Trump’s cabinet doesn’t include his interloping co-president, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. When Musk isn’t fusing his business interests to Trump’s political ones—hectoring and threatening critics, steering contracts his own way—he’s drawing up plans to cut trillions of dollars out of health-care spending for poor and working class people.
[…]
Robber Barons—not as hyperbole, but in their self-conception. Trump in particular seems to valorize the Gilded Age (or what he knows of it) because the industrialists who purchased the government back then lived opulent lives in gaudy mansions. As best I can tell, that’s why he says silly things like, “in the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was.”
And, I think it’s no coincidence that the GOP’s new appeal to voters is largely bereft of Reaganite cliches. They’ve turned the clock back a century further than that. They don’t talk about freedom or liberty. The speak instead in the language of fiat, coercion, zero-sum conflict, and sacrifice. (Other people’s, naturally.)
Well at least the bathrooms will be safe from trans people. Apparently, that’s the most important issue we face.