Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called out President Trump on Monday for choosing Cabinet nominees that he argued undermine the populist promises to “working America” Trump made on the campaign trail.
“The president uses populist rhetoric to cover-up a hard-right agenda,” Schumer said. “His actions as president don’t match up with his campaign promises.”
The New York Democrat said the slate of Trump nominees the Senate will consider in the next few weeks are the most “anti-working class … we’ve ever seen,” he said.
The choice of Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, Andrew Puzder for Labor secretary and Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., for Office of Management and Budget director, are part of a “slew of nominees” who have spent their “whole careers sticking it to the working man.”
Mnuchin, Schumer said, wants to “eviscerate” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the “one agency that sticks up for consumers.” Puzder, he said, couldn’t be more “anti-labor” and has called the minimum wage a big mistake, and said he preferred robots to workers because “they’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, they never slip and fall or file an age, sex or discrimination case.”
“A president who is a true champion for working America would never consider a man like Andrew Puzder to head the Labor Department,” Schumer said.
Schumer took Mulvaney to task for his support for privatizing Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. Mulvaney’s congressional career, Schumer said, “is a direct rebuke to key promises candidate Trump made to working America.”
“Candidate Trump promised that he was ‘not going to cut Social Security like every other Republicans, and I’m not going to cut Medicare and Medicaid,'” Schumer recalled. “But who does he choose for OMB? A pick who has relentlessly argued to cut both of these programs, including bill after bill that would end both Medicare and Social Security as we know it.”
“Reading the tea leaves of the first weeks [of the Trump administration], working Americans are going to be deeply, deeply disappointed,” he said.
