3 ways Trump has already forgotten those he pledged to remember

The uproar over President Trump’s executive orders on immigration have obscured the new president’s efforts to overturn the progressive economic policies left over from the Obama administration. Progressives are right to be angry over the immigration order.

But remember, it’s still the economy, stupid.

Trump’s inaugural speech had a clear theme that focused on the principle that his administration would take government away from the elites and give it back to the people. But already, Trump has forgotten his commitment to the Americans that he promised to remember in his inaugural and during the campaign.

The new president’s executive orders include three actions that will hurt these forgotten Americans and help economic elites.

1. The president signed an order that blocked implementation of the Affordable Care Act. If Trump gets his way on ObamaCare, millions of hardworking Americans will lose their health insurance and medical care.

{mosads}2. Trump has frozen a regulation that would require financial advisers to put their clients’ best interests over their own. The executive order from the Obama Department of Labor would have simply required financial planners to advise their clients about the impact withdrawals will have on their retirement plans.

3. The president promised to “do a big number” on the Dodd-Frank Act. Congress passed the law in the aftermath of the Wall Street meltdown in 2008. The law cracks down on the abuses that caused the Great Recession and cost working families their jobs and then their homes.

Wall Street traders must be the “forgotten Americans” Trump always talks about.

But it’s hard for Trump to keep his populist promises when his senior White House adviser and five members of his economic advisory team were formerly executives of Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs.

Keep in mind that mismanagement at that company and other big financial firms created the Great Recession that started in 2008 and led to millions of Americans losing their jobs and then their homes.

One of the gang of Goldman Sachs alums on his team is Stephen Mnuchin, secretary of Treasury. He is a banker known as the “foreclosure king” after driving thousands of middle-class Californians from their homes during the Great Recession.

With Mnuchin and the rest of the Goldman gang calling the economic shots, the economically vulnerable white voters who voted Trump for president are on shaky ground. Their economic situation will be even worse if the president and the GOP congressional majority get their way.

Democratic members of Congress have already created a Blue Collar Caucus. The focus of the recent Democratic congressional retreat was a discussion of what Democrats can do to win over the voters in working families who supported the Republican presidential nominee last year.

For all the talk about change, the key to the Trump economic program is the tired old GOP philosophy of supply side economics. Trickle-down economics as practiced by Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush didn’t create much economic growth, but did lead to big federal budget deficits. Trump’s tax cuts will benefit Wall Street executives like the Goldman Sachs alumni in his administration more than the forgotten Americans.

On Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans encouraged by Trump’s election will begin the process of cutting holes in the safety net that have served and saved millions of working families during tough economic times.

Any program with the word “care” in it is under siege. Repeal of the Affordable Care Act will leave 18 million Americans in the lurch without health insurance. Attempts to “reform” or privatize Medicare will leave millions of senior citizens to the tender mercies of Wall Street investment bankers like Mnuchin.

President Trump and the Republican certainly won’t be thinking of the forgotten Americans when it all happens.

Brad Bannon is a Democratic pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. (He is not related in any way to the alt-right leader and Trump adviser Stephen Bannon.) Campaigns and Elections magazine called him a “mover and shaker” in the political consulting industry. He hosts and contributes regularly to the nationally syndicated progressive talk show, “The Leslie Marshall Show.” Bannon is also a political analyst for CLTV, the cable news station of the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV. He is also a senior adviser to, and editor of, the blog at MyTiller.com, the social media network for politics. Contact him at brad@bannoncr.com.

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