Image Credits: Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images.
It’s not news that Donald Trump is a fraud, nor that he has poor record of practicing what he preaches. Still, I feel compelled to highlight his employment practices every time a new story emerges detailing his propensity to hire undocumented or foreign workers over American applicants.
For years, President Donald Trump has insisted it’s impossible to find Americans to fill seasonal jobs at his hotels, resorts, and wineries, leaving him no choice but to hire foreign guest workers instead.
“You can’t get help,” he has said.
But government records obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal for the first time that at least 58 US workers applied for the temporary jobs as cooks, servers, and housekeepers at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump resorts from early 2014 through mid-2018.
Only one of them appears to have been hired.
The last time I harped on this issue was back in January when I lamented that Trump’s use of undocumented workers should be a bigger scandal, but even then I admitted that I’d probably be moving on to focus on the next outrage, just like everyone else.
Perhaps it’s just a personal quirk, but I am especially galled by this particular brand of hypocrisy. I think it’s because it gets to something that goes beyond my political disagreements with the president or even people with a conservative viewpoint. If they aren’t worried about environmental degradation or access to health care, I can somewhat respect their opinions even if I think they’re cruel, short-sighted, or based on faulty information. If they actually like the president’s style and are mostly pleased with his results, I can almost write that off as a difference of priorities and taste.
But I have real trouble getting past examples of the president doing things he professes to despise and that he’s premised his entire political career on stamping out. I don’t much care if the president hires undocumented people to manicure his fairways and greens, and I don’t mind if he wants visiting Irish students to wash the dishes at Mar-a-Lago. It’s the people who make up his most fervent base of supporters who are supposed to care about these things, because it’s taking the jobs of hard-working patriotic Americans. He’s not putting them first. They should realize that he’s conning them, and they should be angry about it.
It makes me a little crazy that he gets away with this, and I just wish that one day the scales would fall from more people’s eyes.
Instead of giving jobs to local workers, the Trump properties applied for permission to bring in more than 375 low-wage workers from abroad on short-term visas. All of the requests were approved by the Department of Labor, the records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show.
The BuzzFeed article focuses on Trump turning down American applicants in favor of foreign workers on short-term visas, but this is legal and only half of the “problem.” He has consistently relied on undocumented workers who do not have visas, and that isn’t legal. Both of these practices fly in the face of Trump’s whole political raison d’être.
And, yet, Gallup says that 89 percent of Republicans approve of the job he is doing. It’s like some prion disease or brain virus has infected almost half the country.