ATLANTA — President Donald Trump’s brash populism has always involved incongruence: the billionaire businessman-politician stirring the passions of millions who, regardless of the U.S. economy’s trajectory, could never afford to live in his Manhattan skyscraper or visit his club in south Florida.
His second White House is looking a lot like the inside of Mar-a-Lago, with extremely wealthy Americans taking key roles in his Republican administration.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is overseeing a new Department of Government Efficiency. Billionaires or mega-millionaires are lined up to run the treasury, commerce, interior and education departments, NASA and the Small Business Administration, and fill key foreign posts.
“He’s bringing in folks who have had great success in the private sector,” said Debbie Dooley, an early 2015 Trump supporter and onetime national organizer in the anti-establishment Tea Party movement. “If you need to have brain surgery, you want the proven brain surgeons.”
Others raise concerns about conflicts of interest at odds with Trump’s pledge to fight for “forgotten men and women” in a country where the median household net worth is about $193,000 and median annual household income is about $81,000.
“It’s hard to conceive how the wealthiest set of Cabinet nominees and White House appointments in history will understand what average working people are going through,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who served under President Bill Clinton and has warned for decades about the nation’s widening wealth and wage gaps.
Countered Dooley: “Trump sets the agenda. If they won’t enact his policies, then they will hear him say what we hear on ‘The Apprentice’ all the time: ‘You’re fired!’”
Here is a closer look at some of Trump’s picks, their net worth according to Forbes, and what the choices could mean:
Musk (net worth estimated above $400 billion) is chairing the new Department of Government Efficiency, which is a special commission charged with slashing federal spending. The extensive ties his businesses have to the government have raised questions about Musk’s potential conflicts in the role.
McMahon was picked to be Trump’s secretary of education. She is the wife of Vince McMahon, who is worth at least $3 billion.
The former WWE wrestling executive will lead an agency that many conservatives have called for abolishing altogether. While that’s a heavy lift politically, McMahon and Trump have endorsed an expansion of “school choice,” programs that steer taxpayer money to private school tuition. She also could be in charge of implementing Trump’s proposals to withhold federal money from public sch