Maeve Higgins: Why are people like Mick Mulvaney rewarded for failing in politics?

Playing up your Irishness while taking food from the mouths of hungry people isn't a good look for any multimillionaire's son

Mick Mulvaney in Dublin during his stint as Trump's special envoy to Northern Ireland. Despite that career ending in ignominy, he has fallen upwards into a new role as a TV pundit. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

Mick Mulvaney; to any Irish person, the name sounds familiar. Mick Mulvaney sounds like someone who works with your father, maybe a county hurler from the 1980s, or a guy two years ahead of you in home economics.

Unfortunately, Mick Mulvaney is Irish. Well, he is Irish-American. The absolute worst kind of Irish-American at that. Mulvaney is a former Republican congressman from South Carolina and was a big fish in the stinking pond of the Donald Trump administration. 

Mulvaney’s run with the worst president this country has ever had the insanity to elect began with his appointment as head of the White House Office of Management and Budget and interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That is where my image of Mulvaney remains frozen in time, unfortunately.

It’s a photograph taken on St Patrick’s Day 2017 of Mulvaney, with his breast pocket stuffed full of shamrocks, proposing to cut the budget for Meals on Wheels and overseas famine relief. 

Taking food from hungry people’s mouths as he celebrated his Irishness, a nationality historically decimated by famine? Brazen. You couldn’t make up the levels of cartoonish villainy Mulvaney and his cronies got up to during their time in power; more on that later.

Mick Mulvaney heralding Donald Trump's 2017 federal budget which proposed cutting programmes that benefited America's poorest, while offering  tax cuts for the wealthy. Picture: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Trump then made Mulvaney his acting chief of staff, and he remained in this job for just over one year. He finished out his ignominious stretch with Trump by serving as special envoy for Northern Ireland. 

Mulvaney resigned the day after the January 6 insurrection, and I’d hoped that was the last we’d have to hear from him. Sadly not, now he’s crawled out of whatever hole he belongs in to take a plum new role as a TV talking head.

Late last month, CBS News hired Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor. Bad news for those of us who don’t appreciate politicians getting rewarded for the destruction they’ve wreaked. Worse again for anyone who cares about the news — in the traditional sense of information delivered to us through the medium of television. CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani said that the choice was part of a conscious effort to hire more Republican commentators: “Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.”

This reasoning doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. There are, of course, countless other Republican commentators who could be candidates for the role. Few would provoke such anger as Mulvaney, anger felt by other CBS employees and people outside the organisation.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, asked: 

When he appears, will CBS News anchors question Mulvaney about his actions? Will they grill him about the anti-democratic and legally questionable directives he acted on? 

"Will they ask him about the actions of his niece, Maggie Mulvaney, who was a “VIP Lead” for the “rally”-turned-insurrection, and who was subpoenaed by the Jan 6 House Select Committee last fall?

“Or will they present him as a respectable “former acting White House chief of staff” and allow him to just deliver anti-Biden talking points?”

Mulvaney will not be challenged at all; he will slot into his role as a supposedly insightful commentator with something of value and intelligence, something worthy to contribute to the conversation.

How insightful is he, though? How intelligent and how worthy of this space on primetime television? He is an abject failure of a politician; having been elected on the crest of the Tea Party wave that promised to cut government spending, he was in office as the US national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion. 

Despite the superficial veneer of respectability, Republicans such as Mick Mulvaney have long been encouraging and embracing extremism. Picture: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

This included the expenditure necessitated by the pandemic, but The Washington Post reported that “federal finances under Trump had become dire before the pandemic”.

“That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.” Mulvaney was bad at his job, and he also used his job to do bad things. The dirtiest dealings he took part in have come back around today. Look at global affairs and Russia’s grotesque war on Ukraine.

Now, cast your mind back to the Trump administration’s part in the relationship between those nations. Mulvaney was in the thick of it.

In 2019, The Washington Post reported: “President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400m in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.”

Mulvaney blatantly admitted this but later walked his comments back in what became one of his worst blunders. In February 2020 he called Covid-19 the “hoax of the day” and blamed the media.

Again, this was in February 2020, after Congress had been warned of the coming danger. 

An ugly day in US history 

Mulvaney later wrote a now notorious Wall Street Journal opinion piece stating that should Trump lose the 2020 election, he would concede without an issue.

We all know what happened next — one of the ugliest days in US history, when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol building to try and overthrow the results of the election.

Supporters of Donald Trump are confronted by US Capitol Police outside the Senate Chamber during the notorious invasion of the US Capitol on January. 6, 2021. Picture: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

What a wonderful legacy Mulvaney has! Who wouldn’t want such a man on their team? It’s no wonder CBS staff are upset. 

“I, for one, can’t wait to hear Mulvaney’s trenchant and objective political analysis,” said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, which is also on the network. 

Colbert made fun of Mulvaney’s predictions: "Is Mick Mulvaney psychic? Get this man to Vegas! He’s Nostradumbass!" Colbert continued: 

So, obviously, I’m just joking, but why would the Tiffany Network’s venerable news division put this craven toady to a tyrant on their payroll? 

Why, indeed. Rats, perhaps especially Irish-American rats with wealthy families (Mulvaney’s father was a multimillionaire), will eventually desert a sinking ship. Mulvaney finally did resign at the last possible moment, after the attack on the Capitol. Mulvaney told Andrew Ross Sorkin in a CNBC interview: “I called Mike Pompeo last night to let him know I was resigning from that. I can’t do it. I can’t stay.”

Mike Pompeo was the secretary of state then, and Mulvaney claimed he did not sign up for the violence and terror of the Capitol attack. He cynically tried to dodge responsibility for the attack and even salvage something from his years with Trump, saying, “We didn’t sign up for what you saw last night. We signed up for making America great again. We signed up for lower taxes and less regulation. 

"The president has a long list of successes that we can be proud of. But all of that went away yesterday, and I think you’re right to ask the question as to ‘how did it happen?”

It happened because cowards and grifters like Mulvaney made it happen. 

Men like Mulvaney have long been rewarded for the very qualities that make them despicable; they have been rewarded in American public life by consistently failing upwards in politics. And as we’ll soon see on our screens if we bother to watch CBS news, in media too.