At a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last Wednesday, President Donald Trump defended the exuberant amount of wealth held by members of his Cabinet, the richest administration in history, by claiming they had to “give up a lot to takes these jobs,” according to CNN.
“I love all people—rich or poor—but in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person,” Trump said in his speech.
But poor people are the only people who should be making decisions that affect the welfare of their fellow Americans. Powerful, wealthy people won’t serve anyone other than powerful, wealthy people.
Several sources in science, religion and philosophy affirm this to be true.
According to the Scientific American, psychologists at the University of Berkeley conducted numerous studies on the relationship between wealth and compassion.
Unsurprisingly, they found that as a person’s wealth increases, their compassion for others decreases. Wealthy people are worse at recognizing the emotions of others, are less likely to pay attention to the people they interact with and are less likely to feel empathy toward others.
In one experiment, published in a paper by the Berkeley psychologists titled “Class and Compassion,” wealthy people showed more compassion for someone trying to build a patio than they did for children with cancer.
Meanwhile, Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, used a transcranial-magnetic-simulation machine to discover that powerful people have an impaired neural process called “mirroring,” which is “the cornerstone of empathy.”
According to The Atlantic, in studies spanning two decades, researchers found that the rich and powerful “acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.”
Of course, this is nothing new to philosophers and prominent religious figures.
Historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.”
And, of course, Lord Acton rather famously said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
The Bible, which Trump claimed to be his favorite book in a televised Bloomberg interview in August 2015, doubles down on this sentiment.
According to Matthew 19:24, when speaking to his disciples, Jesus said, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.”
And then there’s my personal favorite. In a rebuke of the Church of Laodicea, John writes, “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked,” which is found in Revelation 3:17.
Virtually every school of thinking agrees, as a generalization, that powerful, wealthy people tend to not be moral people.
It would be belligerently foolish to expect Donald Trump’s administration to act in the best interest of lower-income Americans.
And let’s not forget Trump’s most egregious claim. His cabinet sacrificed nothing to accept their position.
According to the Washington Post, Section 2634 of federal ethics laws will allow Trump’s cabinet to sell off their billions of dollars in assets tax-free, a tactic Henry Paulson, Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, used to save more than $200 million in taxes, according to the Economist.
None of this is to say that all wealthy people are evil—but I wouldn’t trust them to make decisions that best serve my interests.
