Trump and his White House are extremely out of touch with the workers whose paychecks they are holding hostage.
Trump’s top economic advisor said that in some sense workers are “better off” from the Trump Shutdown because they’re basically taking vacation.
HASSETT: “Workers are furloughed, and right now, it’s about 25 percent of government workers are furloughed, which means that they are not allowed to go to work. But then, when the shutdown ends, they go back to work and they get their back pay. A huge share of government workers were going to take vacation days, say, between Christmas and New Year’s. And then we have a shutdown, and so they can’t go to work, and so then they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days. And then they come back, and then they get their back pay. Then they’re — in some sense, they’re better off.”
Trump previously wrote off the workers hurt by his shutdown, suggesting that they weren’t really in pain.
VICE: “President Donald Trump has a message for federal workers who once again won’t receive their paychecks Friday: Some people have more pain than you.’”
Talking Points Memo: “But Trump was dismissive of government workers’ struggles. ‘You know who has more human pain? The parents of people who had children killed by illegal immigrants that should have never been in the country,’ he shot back when asked about the human pain being caused by the shutdown.”
Vox: “At one point, a reporter asked Trump about the ‘human pain’ being felt by federal government workers who are now missing paychecks because of the government shutdown. Trump used the question as an opportunity to suggest that undocumented immigrants are murderous criminals.”