Schumer Floor Remarks on President Trump’s Broken Promises
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer today spoke on the Senate floor about President Trump’s Broken Promises. Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery:
Mr. President, candidate Trump ran a populist campaign that promised so much to working America. Many of those themes were echoed in his Inaugural Address.
Ever since President Trump took the oath of office, he has gone about breaking promise after promise to the working people of this country.
A predictable pattern is beginning to emerge – this President uses populist rhetoric to cover up a hard-right agenda.
You still hear remnants of candidate Trump’s populism in his speeches, but his actions as President don’t match up.
Just an hour after he delivered populist words on the steps of the Capitol in his Inaugural Address, the President signed an executive order that jacked up the price on Americans trying to afford their mortgage.
Ever since, we here in the Senate have been working through the President’s cabinet, which is filled -- not with champions for the working class -- but with a slew of super-rich nominees, Washington insiders, and corporates types who have spent their whole careers sticking it to the working man.
A President’s cabinet provides insight into how they will govern and what their priorities will be. This President has shown his hand by selected the most anti-working-class Cabinet that I’ve ever seen.
The slate of nominees we will soon consider, including Steve Mnuchin for Treasury, Andrew Puzder for Labor, and Rep. Mulvaney for OMB, show the yawning gap between the president’s audacious promises to working Americas and the practical reality of his administration, which is steadily stacking the deck against them.
This evening we will debate the nomination of Steve Mnuchin for Treasury, a cabinet post that will have oversight over Wall Street.
Now, candidate Trump spent the campaign lambasting elites and criticizing Wall Street. He said: “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.” His words.
But what does President Trump do?
With one of his first executive orders, he started the process to try to roll back Wall Street reform -- undoing protections we put in place after the financial crisis to prevent another one from occurring.
He wants to eviscerate the one agency that sticks up for consumers when they’re being ripped off by payday lenders or debt collectors, the CFPB.
That’s a broken promise.
Candidate Trump said at his rallies, “When you cast that ballot, just picture a Wall Street board room, filled with the special interests, and imagine the look on their faces when you tell them ‘you’re fired!’”
But President Trump told Steve Mnuchin -- a Wall Street insider with decades of experience in that board room he described -- “you’re hired” as my Treasury Secretary no less.
That’s a broken promise.
A president who was a true champion for working America would never even consider unwinding protections that were designed make our financial system more secure and protect hard working Americans from the risky practices of Wall Street.
For the Secretary of Labor, the President picked Andrew Puzder, a man who once said he prefers robots to human employees, because they’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip and fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case. He actually said that.
I want to read it again. It galls me that this man is nominated for Labor Secretary. Why does he prefer robots to human employees? Because they’re always polite, they always upsell, they never show up late, they never slip and fall or bring an age, sex, or race discrimination case.
This is a man who has such disdain for workers that he said the minimum wage is a “big mistake” and, while at CKE restaurants, outsourced American jobs.
A president who was a true champion of the working American would never even consider selecting a nominee like Andrew Puzder to run the Labor Department.
Another broken promise to the working men and women of America. Amazing. What President Trump has done on the campaign and said on the campaign and in his Inaugural Address is almost the exact opposite of what he’s doing now. You could not find a more anti-labor nominee for Labor Secretary than Mr. Puzder.
For the Director of OMB, the President selected Rep. Mike Mulvaney, whose congressional career is a direct rebuke to key promises Candidate Trump made to working America.
Candidate Trump promised that he was “not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.”
But his pick for OMB has relentlessly argued to cut both of those programs, introducing bill after bill after bill that would end Medicare and Social Security as we know it.
Our new HHS Secretary, Tom Price, is in the exact same vein.
A true champion of senior citizens, of the working man and woman wouldn’t hire someone like Rep. Mulvaney or Rep. Price to take an axe to the programs they rely on.
Mr. President, just three weeks in, this Administration is stretching the boundaries of cognitive dissonance.
The President still speaks like a populist, but governs like a hard-right conservative. He promises to stick up for working families, but every decision he has made is rigging the system further against them.
Every American who works hard for their paycheck, who desperately deserves fairer overtime pay, who is counting on Social Security and Medicare to be there when they retire should look at this Cabinet and be very worried.
I know many of them voted for the President in the hopes that he would change the power structure of Washington, as his promised so many times.
His cabinet was the first and best way to prove that he meant what he said in the campaign.
Turns out he was using populist rhetoric to cover up a hard-right agenda, which will be carried out by this bevy of billionaires and bankers and hard-right ideologues.
Candidate Trump said that Washington was a place where “the hedge fund managers, the Wall Street investors…and the powerful [protect] the powerful.”
“But I’m fighting for you,” he said to working Americans.
If these first three weeks are any indication, that’s a broken promise.
Mr. President, the nominations of Steve Mnuchin, Rep. Mulvaney and Andrew Puzder represent broken promise after broken promise after broken promise. And we Democrats will make that clear to the American people as we debate their nominations.
Many working people who voted for President Trump are depending on him to do what he said in the campaign.
Reading the tea leaves of these first three weeks, working Americans are going to be very disappointed over the course of his Presidency.
Thank you and I yield the floor.
