President-elect Donald Trump assured voters during his campaign that he would lower prices on groceries and other items — but a former New York congressman called him out for already abandoning that promise.
Tech tycoons Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have donated $1 million each to Trump's inauguration despite his past attacks on them, and former Democratic lawmaker Max Rose said the president-elect is already siding with the rich and walking away from the policies he promised to voters.
"This is not what Donald Trump ran on," Rose said. "Donald Trump ran and won this presidential election largely by co-opting traditional Democratic talking points in and around fighting an elitist class that was both culturally estranged from working people and working against the economic interests of working people. He did not run on this notion that he was going to parade billionaires down to Mar-a-Lago in what is ultimately an escalator of transactional deals.
"So this speaks to potentially what the Trump administration will actually look like, which is traditional Republican politics of being there for the top 1 percent. That's not only a bad set of policies and agendas for working people in the United States of America, but it's also going to be very poor politics."Republican strategist Brad Todd, however, didn't see anything wrong with Trump associating with the social media magnates and suggested that Democrats had unfairly benefited from their largesse in the past.
"People like Mark Zuckerberg have been in the pocket of Democrats and donating millions and millions to Democrats for generations, these same donors who you're decrying for going to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Trump," Todd said. "They're Democratic donors. I don't know how you can how you can take those things and not equate them."
Rose insisted he was not decrying their donations to Trump's inauguration, but he said it was still a betrayal of his campaign promises.
"This is not what Donald Trump ran on," Rose said. "Where were the commercials that said that he is going to surround himself by billionaires at Mar-a-Lago who give him a million bucks? Where were the commercials that said he's going to listen to donors and then talk about annexing the Panama Canal because someone's upset about their higher toll rates, that they're paying. This is not what he spoke about, but it is how he is governing."
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Reprinted with permission from Alternet