Trump's Cabinet could be the wealthiest in modern history

Washington

WHEN George W Bush assembled his first Cabinet in 2001, news reports dubbed its members a team of millionaires, and government watchdogs asked whether they were out of touch with most Americans' problems. Combined, that group had an inflation-adjusted net worth of about US$250 million - but that is only a 10th of the wealth of Donald Trump's nominee for Commerce secretary alone.

The president-elect is putting together what will be the wealthiest administration in modern American history. His announced nominees for top positions include multimillionaires, an heir to a family mega-fortune and two Forbes-certified billionaires. The rumoured candidates for other positions could add to the list.

Many of the Trump appointees were born wealthy, attended elite schools and became even richer as adults. As a group, they have much more experience funding political candidates than they do running government agencies. Their collective wealth in many ways defies Mr Trump's populist campaign promises; their business ties, particularly to Wall Street, have drawn rebukes from the Democrats.

They also amplify Mr Trump's campaign pitch: that Washington outsiders who know how to navigate and exploit a "rigged" system are best able to fix that system for the working class. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, said: "It fits into Trump's message that he's trying to do business in an unusual way, by bringing in these outsiders."

But she added that he and his team won't be able to draw on the sort of life struggles that President Barack Obama did, in crafting policy to lift poor and middle-class Americans. "I guess it will be a test - does empathy actually matter? If you're able to echo back what people are telling you, is that enough?"

Mr Trump's nominee for Commerce secretary is industrialist Wilbur Ross, whose US$2.5 billion fortune comes from helming Rothschild's bankruptcy practice and his own investment firm, said Forbes.

Mr Ross's would-be deputy in the Commerce Department, Todd Ricketts, is the son of a billionaire and the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs; Steven Mnuchin, named as head of the Treasury Department, is a former Goldman Sachs executive, hedge-fund executive and Hollywood financier.

Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire nominated as Education secretary, is the daughter of Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway. Her family has a net worth of $5.1 billion, said Forbes. Elaine Chao, the choice for Transportation secretary, is the daughter of a shipping magnate.

It is a group that has long spent big to influence politics. Mr Mnuchin, Mr Ross and Mr DeVos each made hundreds of thousands of dollars of political contributions in the last two years, reported OpenSecrets.org.

On Wednesday, the Democrats seized on Mr Ross's and Mr Mnuchin's Wall Street ties to accuse Mr Trump of undermining his populist pitch.

Sherrod Brown, a Democrat senator from Ohio, said: "I'm not shocked by this. It's a billionaire president surrounded by a billionaire and millionaire Cabinet, with a billionaire agenda ... to hurt the middle class. The appointments suggest that he's going to break his campaign promises."

In their first interviews on Wednesday after being unveiled as Cabinet nominees, Mr Mnuchin and Mr Ross pitched their business experience as being beneficial to the goals of boosting workers' welfare.

The former told CNBC: "I think one of the good things about both Wilbur and I is that we have actually been bankers. We've been in the business of regional banking and we understand what it means to make loans."

On the campaign trail, Mr Trump pledged to lift up Americans who have seen their economic prospects dim with the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs. And indeed, voters by and large ignored his own life of opulence, which never became the baggage that it did for 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Still, the question now is whether public officials who come from such privileged backgrounds will favour policies that benefit the rich.

Nicholas Carnes, a political scientist at Duke University, said: "This isn't a criticism or a conspiracy ... but it's important to recognise that everyone's perspective and policy and government is shaped by the kind of life they've lived. The research really says that when you put a bunch of millionaires in charge, you can expect public policy that helps millionaires at the expense of everybody else."

Future appointments could further increase the wealth of Mr Trump's Cabinet. Harold Hamm - a self-made oil-industry executive who ranks 30th on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, with a net worth of $16.7 billion - is on Mr Trump's shortlist for Energy secretary; Andrew Puzder, a restaurant-industry executive, has been floated for Labour secretary.

Mr Trump is hardly the first president to dole out Cabinet positions to wealthy Americans. The Commerce and Treasury departments, in particular, tend to be headed by politically connected donors or Wall Street executives, said Matt Grossman, a political scientist at Michigan State University."Of course, it's not uncommon for the wealthy to be over-represented in political positions of all kinds, and in appointment processes, you tend to get people who are already well-connected to the incoming president," he said.

Penny Pritzker, the current Commerce secretary, comes from one of America's wealthiest families, whose net worth Forbes estimates at US$29 billion. Former Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson Jr and Paul O'Neill both had personal wealth in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

The tradition goes back in history. Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest Americans in the early 20th century, was Treasury secretary under three administrations. First appointed by President Warren G. Harding, he steered the US economy through the 20s and into the Great Depression.

He is widely credited with pioneering an early version of the tax policies that form part of Mr Trump's economic agenda - policies which proved successful in the 1920s. They are underpinned by the notion that the government can speed up the economy - and increase federal revenue - by cutting taxes on the rich. WP

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