Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, last prominently seen confessing to Donald Trump's quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine on national television, with the now infamous "get over it," has done it again. This time he made his confession overseas in a U.K. visit, so maybe he thought nobody would notice. It didn't work.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of Mulvaney at the Oxford Union, sounding an awful lot like a Daily Kos blogger. "My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House," he said. "The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less interested as a party." Until it comes time to wield the deficit as a weapon to cut the safety net, of course.
He left that part out, but made another admission about why Republicans refuse to do anything about climate change, which he implicitly acknowledged as a real thing. "We take the position in my party that asking people to change their lifestyle dramatically, including by paying more taxes, is simply not something we are interested in doing." That answer got laughs in the student audience, The Post reports. One can only assume those laughs were derisive.
They never have a problem with asking poor people, senior citizens, communities of color or anyone who doesn't vote Republican to change their lifestyle dramatically by not having enough to eat, or a roof, or health care but they are absolutely not going to afflict the comfortable. Again, that's not news to anyone who has paid attention to the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, but the self-awareness from even a not-big-thinker like Mulvaney is a little surprising. Not that it will make any difference in the long run.
You know that in a second Trump term the deficit is going be used to cut Social Security, and Medicare, and deepen the cuts to Medicaid. It will be used to continue decimating food and housing assistance and every other program that helps everyone who doesn't count.