What did Donald Trump do today?

He slandered fired federal workers.

Asked today if he took responsibility for the massive job losses his indiscriminate firing of federal employees has caused, Trump retorted that the American workers he fired weren't really workers. "Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work." He added that he was "keeping the best people" in what remained of the federal workforce.

To be clear: the charge that federal workers weren't working is a lie. Some were working remotely because they had no offices to return to after Trump canceled leases and tried to sell off government buildings. 

In fact, Trump is not firing people based on performance at all, but simply who lacks civil service protection by virtue of being in a new job within the civil service. These "probationary" jobs are not just for employees who entered the federal workforce for the first time in the past few years, but also include people with decades of experience who had recently been promoted to senior leadership roles.

The firings have been so chaotic and, in many cases, so unlawful that either the courts or the Trump administration itself have been forced to scramble to try to undo firings to avoid catastrophe. A small portion of the federal workers who were summarily fired and then rushed back to work include those responsible for keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal safe, calibrating x-ray machines and other medical devices, containing the current bird flu epidemic, and handing benefits for first responders with chronic health conditions because of their service after September 11th.

Trump, whose lackluster management of the billion-dollar real estate fortune he inherited meant that his business underperformed the overall economy during the biggest real estate boom in the history of New York City, addressed reporters after taking his sixth golf vacation in seven weeks on the taxpayer dime.

 

Why does this matter?

• A billionaire trust-fund baby saying that Americans in civil service jobs don't do work is beyond the pale even for Trump.