The ruling oligarchy is clueless about ordinary Americans

Elisabeth Bumiller, The Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy and the Things They Say, NYTimes, April 19, 2025.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” President Trump wrote on social media last week, offering a stock tip that appeared aimed at the investor class rather than ordinary Americans watching their plummeting 401(k)s.

Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has said his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check. Elon Musk, who is slashing the Social Security Administration’s staff, has called it a “Ponzi scheme.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asserted that Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.

And if automakers raise their prices because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs? “I couldn’t care less,” the president told Kristen Welker of NBC.

Democrats say the comments show how clueless Mr. Trump and his friends are about the lives of most Americans, and that this is what happens when billionaires run the economy. Republicans counter that highlighting the quotes is unfair cherry picking, and that in the long run everyone will benefit from their policies, even if there’s pain now. Psychologists say that extreme wealth does change people and their views of those who have less.

Whoever is right, it is safe to say that almost no one thinks the comments have been politically helpful for Mr. Trump, or calming for Americans.

“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “What did they say about the old New York Mets? ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’” (Mr. Ayres was referring to what the manager Casey Stengel once said about his hapless 1962 Mets, and the subsequent title of a book by Jimmy Breslin.)

The Pinkers weigh in:

Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist who was a writer for The Wall Street Journal’s Mind & Matter column about human behavior and earlier wrote The Business Brain column for The Globe and Mail, said the rich live in their own world.

“The reason why the super wealthy at the helm of government can’t imagine how people might be distressed by some of their policies is that they don’t really see them that clearly,” she said. “We’re not really built from an evolutionary perspective to feel like we’re at home with everybody. The stronger our in-group, the more likely we are to exclude others.”

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who is Ms. Pinker’s brother, said he was not convinced that the billionaires’ comments were because of their wealth. “A more immediate cause may be cognitive dissonance,” he said, referring to the psychological state that can occur when people’s actions don’t align with their beliefs.

“In the case of the Trump administration,” Professor Pinker said, “they have little choice but to twist themselves into artisanal pretzels in order to defend the indefensible.”

There's more at the link.