The New York Times has a nasty, Soviet-style habit of putting political personalities they don’t approve of on the psychiatrist couch. Elisabeth Bumiller, writer at large for the New York Times and a former Washington Bureau Chief at the paper, issued a self-righteous, unprofessional screed in Monday’s “Washington Memo” slot, “In the Words of the Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy," in which she psychoanalyzed Trump-supporting billionaires and condemned them as soulless monsters bereft of empathy.
The opening sounds like something from a left-wing group’s press release, but this is a news story in the Times.
Sometimes the billionaires running the federal government sound like they’re talking to other billionaires.
“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” President Trump wrote on social media last week, offering a stock tip that appeared aimed at the investor class rather than ordinary Americans watching their plummeting 401(k)s.
Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has said his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check. Elon Musk, who is slashing the Social Security Administration’s staff, has called it a “Ponzi scheme.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asserted that Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.
....
Democrats say the comments show how clueless Mr. Trump and his friends are about the lives of most Americans, and that this is what happens when billionaires run the economy. Republicans counter that highlighting the quotes as unfair cherry picking, and that in the long run everyone will benefit from their policies, even if there’s pain now. Psychologists say that extreme wealth does change people and their views of those who have less.
Give Bumiller one cheer for using the word “pounced” when Democrats attack Republicans.
The opposition has swiftly pounced on their comments. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, said that Mr. Trump and his rich friends live in a “billionaires’ bubble,” while Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, called out Mr. Lutnick on social media.
“Maybe your mother-in-law wouldn’t complain if she didn’t get her Social Security check, but tens of millions of seniors struggling to survive would,” Mr. Sanders wrote. “How out of touch are you, not to realize that?”
A lot, at least according to pollsters.
Bumiller launched her pompous, personalized analysis off of comments by pollster Frank Luntz accusing Musk and Trump of not showing empathy,
Paul K. Piff, an associate professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the psychology of the rich for nearly two decades. He said that research shows that as a person’s wealth increases, more often than not empathy and compassion for others decreases. Professor Piff cautioned that there are exceptions, and that he was not speaking specifically about the billionaires in the Trump administration.
But he said excessive wealth has profound effects on a person’s character. “You certainly have more power and more influence over people in your life,” he said. Money, he added, “buys you space and distance from people, and alongside that comes this increased focus on your own self...."
Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist who was a writer for The Wall Street Journal’s Mind & Matter column about human behavior and earlier wrote The Business Brain column for The Globe and Mail, said the rich live in their own world.
Bumiller was clearly aiming her psychobabble at Trump-supporting rich people, not billionaires in Hollywood or on the left (George Soros did make a cameo as "the billionaire liberal philanthropist" in her tally of the uber-wealthy.)
Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who is Ms. Pinker’s brother, said he was not convinced that the billionaires’ comments were because of their wealth. “A more immediate cause may be cognitive dissonance,” he said, referring to the psychological state that can occur when people’s actions don’t align with their beliefs.
“In the case of the Trump administration,” Professor Pinker said, “they have little choice but to twist themselves into artisanal pretzels in order to defend the indefensible.”
