The headline on today’s Washington Post Opinions email sounded like a real liberal barn-burner: “The stench of Trump’s self-dealing.” Which liberal was throwing fire? That would be….Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough has the chutzpah to insist that Trump is not following through on the populist rhetoric he used on the campaign trail in 2016. Just as Scarborough used to be gleefully FOR Donald Trump before he decided to be against him. Nothing Scarborough wrote would look out of place in a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren floor speech:
For a president already dogged with accusations that he is personally profiting off the presidency, such a massive giveaway to the very hedge-fund managers and real estate executives he promised as a candidate to confront only adds to the stench of self-dealing that engulfs all things Trump. Like autocrats across the world, the 45th American president has perfected the art of the self-deal.
Trump’s Republican Party looks no better, nor will it when an economic reckoning finally comes to pass in a bankrupt America. There will be no justification for having thrown on an additional $1.5 trillion to our existing $20 trillion debt — at a time when unemployment was low, consumer confidence was high and Wall Street was setting records by the day.
It should be painfully obvious to a first-year economics student that there is no rational reason to pass massive tax breaks for billionaires when the economy is humming along.
Scarborough sounded like the male Jennifer Rubin, a liberal disguised as someone on the center-right. Rubin also attacked Trump’s “populist scam.”
In case you missed how much the Post hated the tax cut, here are the other links presented to readers at the end of the Scarborough jeremiad:
Robert J. Samuelson: Trump’s $1.5 trillion bribe
The Post’s View: A win for the wealthy, the entitled and the irresponsible
Fareed Zakaria: The GOP tax bill may be the worst piece of legislation in modern history
Robert E. Rubin: No serious lawmaker should support this tax bill
