OMB Director Mick Mulvaney appeared on CBS' Face the Nation this Sunday, and this is his response when he was asked by host John Dickerson whether average Americans ought to be paying for Trump to run down to Mar-a-Lago every weekend when they're proposing Draconian cuts to the budget which will slash anti-poverty programs, Meals on Wheels, public broadcasting and countless other programs.
DICKERSON: Let me switch to the budget. You said kind of -- one of your guiding principles was when you start looking at places where we reduce spending, one of the questions we asked was, can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia, or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? And the answer was no. That seems like a good sorting technique, but doesn’t it open you to the political question then, well, what about the president’s vacation, you know, when he goes down to Mar-a-Lago? President -- as a candidate, Trump made a lot of Obama --
MULVANEY: Sure.
DICKERSON: President Obama’s vacations. Now people are -- are bringing that back to the president. What does a coal miner or a single mom say about these trips down to Florida?
MULVANEY: Sure. You could always attack a budget for being political, right? In fact, we -- we are going to do so. But keep in mind who the president wrote the budget for. He -- he wrote the budget for everybody. We’ve heard a lot of criticism, for example, about different line items in the -- in the budget blueprint from members of Congress. That’s to be expected. I used to be a member of Congress. I used to represent 700,000 people. And my first job was to represent their best interests. We had special interests at play on The Hill. We had lobbyists at play on The Hill. The president wrote this budget without consideration for those things, without being beholden to anybody except the people, and that’s who this budget is written for.
DICKERSON: But if you think about the coal miner and the single mom, doesn’t savings begin at home? I mean there are things the president can do to cut back on his own using that test.
MULVANEY: Yes.
DICKERSON: The coal miner doesn’t get to fly down to Mar-a-Lago either.
MULVANEY: Yes. I don’t have a business card to give to you today, John, because at the Office of Management and Budget, we have to pay for our own business cards. So it does start at home but it’s already started.
I'm not sure what planet these people are inhabiting, but it's obviously not the same one the rest of us are if he believes those things are comparable. And Dickerson just moved onto the next topic without blinking an eye. The fourth estate is truly dead in America.
