Trump Has Handed Democrats a Fast Way to Build Some Working-Class Cred

One important point that gets lost in the avalanche of coverage about Donald Trump’s appalling Cabinet nominees is that they’re all (except the ones who withdraw) going to have to undergo confirmation hearings next year. Those hearings are a long way away—they’ll be held in February or March, mostly. By nominating all these people faster and earlier than usual, Trump has given Senate Democrats a long time to prepare and plot strategy.

The Democrats are not going to block any nominees. They don’t have the votes or the power to do that. But they can still ask tough questions; they can still command the stage with national attention focused on them. And there is an obvious way they can use that spotlight to do the one thing most observers think is their top priority: to rebuild some credibility with working-class voters.

Let me start by asking you this question: Looking over Trump’s nominees, what is the great unifying theme? No, it’s not that they’re all Trump loyalists. That’s true, but it was a given and is thus uninteresting. No, it’s not that they’re awful toward women. That’s true of some of them, but only some. No, it’s not that they’ve said and promised to do shocking things. That’s true too, and they should be questioned aggressively on those matters, but that still isn’t the great theme.

The great theme is how many of them are massively rich. I saw on Alex Wagner’s show Thursday night that the combined net worth of Joe Biden’s Cabinet was $118 million. That’s not chicken feed, and no doubt if we went back to late 2020–early 2021 we’d find a bunch of Fox News segments on what a bunch of hypocritical plutocrats Democrats are.

But the total net worth of Trump’s Cabinet? It’s at least $13.3 billion, and that’s not because there are just one or two really wealthy picks. Just-named Small Business Administration nominee Kelly Loeffler and her husband, for instance, are worth $1 billion. By Axios’s count, at least 11 billionaires “will be serving in key roles in the administration” if they’re all confirmed. That’s not even counting Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who won’t be official Cabinet members. If you throw them in, the total is $360 billion (the vast majority of which is Musk, the world’s richest man). And then, of course, there’s the billionaire presiding over all of them.

But let’s stick with the roughly $14 billion net worth of those nominees who’ll appear before the Senate. It’s a staggering figure. It’s often forgotten that one of the core characteristics of authoritarian regimes, along with extremism and nativism and so on, is corruption. Authoritarians are corrupt and self-dealing, from Hermann Goering’s art collection to Imelda Marcos’s shoes. And, accountability being a bourgeois democratic concept, it’s something they laugh at. It’s in their nature.

I don’t know how all these people made their money. I don’t quite agree with Balzac that there’s a crime behind every fortune, and of course there are certainly ways in which people who build large companies are to be admired because of their contributions to technological innovation or their communities or both. But I do believe two things.

One: The vast majority of great fortunes in this country in this day and age are made with a helping hand, somewhere along the way, from the federal government—a favorable agency ruling, a soft plea deal with a federal prosecutor for something or other, a government loan. Indeed, Tesla in 2010 got a whopping $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. Tesla, I should note, repaid the loan quickly, but still, the company apparently wouldn’t have been able to launch its successful Model S without Uncle Sam’s help.

Two: There may not be a crime on record, but there’s bound to be some kind of skeleton in almost any rich corporate closet. Labor violations, hiring discrimination, failure to pay certain fees or fines, price collusion or manipulation, lack of required legal transparency with consumers. Many companies—maybe most companies—engage in this kind of behavior to one degree or another. And the documentation is always there, for those with the capacity to dig.

So this tees up the Senate Democrats’ big job at these hearings. They have to make sure, when these hearings are over, and whether the nominees are confirmed or not, that America sees them through one lens only: as a bunch of out-of-touch plutocrats. They’ll need to pick their shots well, but surely they’ll be able to find three good cases in which these nominees have in some way made consumers’ lives a little harder than they needed to be. 

Senate Democrats need to bring that out fearlessly and plainly. We live in a country where, thanks to Fox News and the rest of them, your average person believes that the elitists in this country are people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Well, AOC doesn’t even have a net worth to speak of (needless to say, the right spread rumors not long ago that she was worth $29 million). The real elites are the kinds of people who’ll fill Trump’s Cabinet. If the Democrats use the hearings to advance this argument with evidence and put some of these people in uncomfortable positions with respect to their corporate track records, either because they hypocritically took government handouts of some kind or because they weren’t straight with consumers, they can start to reframe the debate in this country about who is an elitist and who is not.

Will they do it? The Democrats’ track record, alas, suggests they don’t have the stomach for this. But they’d better realize that they are in a precarious position. Kamala Harris lost more working-class voters than Biden. Among non-college voters overall, Trump beat Biden by just 50–48; he beat Harris 56–43. Among non-college, nonwhite voters, Harris still won with 64 percent, but Biden won with 72 percent. 

Maybe Harris just lost working-class support because of inflation. I think that’s probably the case. But is that an assumption Democrats can afford to make? One more presidential election like this one will constitute a pattern that will be hard to break. Democrats must show voters between now and 2026 and 2028 that they are on the side of working- and middle-class people. Being in the minority, they’ll have few opportunities to show that. Confirmation hearings of nearly a dozen billionaires are a golden opportunity, Democrats. Go seize it.