Mick Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and top aide to former President Trump, has been hired by CBS News to serve as a contributor, the network announced this week.
Mulvaney appeared on CBS’s streaming service for the first time on Tuesday and was asked about President Biden’s recent budget proposal, the framework for which was revealed on Monday.
“It really is a very different way of measuring wealth in this country,” Mulvaney said of Biden’s plan to raise taxes on households worth more than $100 million.
“We’ve never taxed wealth before, we’ve taxed income. In fact, the Constitution might not even allow a property tax … but that’s the basic framework. We’ll find out how much money you’ve got on things like unrealized stock gains, businesses that you might own, and even though you didn’t make money off of that last year we’re still going to tax you on it. That’s the basis of this proposal.”
A fiscal hawk during his years in government, Mulvaney was the director of the Office of Budget Management during the Trump administration before being tapped to serve as Trump’s acting chief of staff.
Since leaving the Trump administration, the Republican has blasted his former boss for his assertions about the 2020 presidential election, his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and predicted Republicans are likely to move on from Trump in coming elections.
Last week, a local newspaper in South Carolina reported a Trump-backed Republican House candidate in the state sent a series of text messages to Mulvaney in which she blasted him for being disloyal to Trump and called him “a true piece of shit” after he had weighed in on the candidate’s campaign.
CBS said Mulvaney will appear as a political analyst across its various platforms and shows. Like many other leading national news outlets, CBS has been beefing up its political coverage in the run-up to the fall’s midterm elections by hiring top talent like reporter Robert Costa from The Washington Post to cover national affairs and former local Washington, D.C., investigative correspondent Scott McFarlane to cover Capitol Hill.