A surprisingly slipshod story in this morning’s Washington Post was headlined, “Donald Trump is assembling the richest administration in modern American history.”
The print edition (corrected, without notice, in the online edition) identifies Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos as the daughter of Amway co-foundrer Richard DeVos; she’s actually his daughter-in-law. It quotes an academic saying Trump “won’t be able to draw on the same sort of life struggles that President Obama did, in crafting policy to life poor and middle-class Americans.” Then it mentions the possible appointment of fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, who grew up never attending school in the fall because he traveled with his Oklahoma family south to Texas and Mexico to pick cotton — which sounds like a bit of a “life struggle” to me.
The article quotes another academic as saying “the research really says that when you put a bunch of millionaires in charge, you can expect public policy that helps millionaires at the expense of everybody else.” That sounds like propagandistic hooey.
There have been plenty of “millionaires” in every administration — and note that any successful professional in coastal metropolitan areas is likely to have home equity approaching $1 million — and there is plenty of room to argue about whether public policy “helps” particular groups of people. With a few phone calls, a reporter can get such quotes from left-leaning academics, but they don’t prove much of anything.
There’s an interesting story to be written about the backgrounds of Trump appointees, but I got the impression that the Post reporters got the assignment late in the day and pasted together this story in haste.
