‘…turn the Oval Office into eBay’: Trump lashed out at by former Chicago mayor

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has a pessimistic vision of the nation’s future under Trump. Girl, same.

In an interview on The Ezra Klein Show, Emanuel offered chilling predictions concerning Trump’s second term. The former mayor fears that Trump is going to use his power in order to essentially pimp out the executive branch of government. According to Rahm, Trump is go to sell political privileges to the highest bidder and “turn the Oval Office into eBay.” Who’s buying? Rahm has an answer for that too.

“He is going to sell it to every special interest,” continued Rahm. “The Democratic Party is the thin blue line between the pharmaceutical industry getting everything they want or you paying everything you have.” Rahm fears that without Democratic influence to temper Trump, the president-elect and his ilk will allow lobbyists and corporations to run amok, essentially turning the American government into crony capitalism. Well, more so than it is already.

“Whoever pays the highest price will get what they want, and you’ll be left paying through the nose,” said Emmanuel.

Considering the particulars of Trump’s incoming tax plan, that’s a depressingly fair assessment. According to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Trump’s plan gives a significant tax break for the nation’s top 5% of earners. The remaining 95% of earners will be taking a hit come tax time. Who will be hit the worst? The bottom 20% of earners, who will be see their income taxes increase by 4.8%, over double the percent increase that the upper middle class will be paying. Trump has also slashed corporate taxes down from 20% to 15%, so long as those companies
make their product in America.” Considering Trump’s trade war-mongering tariff plan, they’re gonna have to.

So if Trump is going to be so bad for the economy, particularly the working class that he spent his campaign promising to protect, why did people vote for him? Emanuel believes that Trump won because he was able to successfully erode public opinion of the American economy, and paint himself as its savior. “70% of the country thinks the economy is bad” said Emanuel, and Trump was able to convince them that under Democratic rule, the nation was headed in the “wrong direction.” As it turns out, Emanuel was right, the nation’s economy was ranked as a top issue among voters, with 4 in 10 voters choosing it is as their number one reason for casting a ballot.

Emanuel believes that while Trump is indeed a “threat to democracy,” the Democratic Party is also to blame for the nation’s sordid state of political affairs. Emanuel points to the Great Recession of 2008 (when he himself was serving as Obama’s chief of staff) as one of the most corrosive events to public opinion of the nation’s government. The average American citizen was plunged into economic turmoil, while the Democratic powers-that-were ordered a bailout for the Wall Street suits that caused the problem in the first place. A rising antipathy towards this unaffected “top of society” gave birth to Trump’s trademark brand of anti-elite populism. Trump was simply able to fool his supporters that he himself isn’t cut from that same elite cloth. But once the pharmaceutical companies and corporations get their way in Trump’s e-Bay Office, it’s safe to say his supporters will find out the ugly truth for themselves.