Letter to the editor: Trump's bleak dream

Brunswick Beacon, 05.29.25

“Dirty Old Town” is a melancholy song set in a crumbling post-WWII British factory town: 

‘I met my love by the gas works wall

Dreamed a dream by the old canal

I kissed my girl by the factory wall

Dirty old town

Dirty old town’

If you thought the songwriter was celebrating the drudgery of his factory job rather than the dream of young love, you might be Donald Trump’s hand-picked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Lutnick is worth $3.2 billion. In 1983, he became the protégé of Bernie Cantor, who, as a boy, sold hot dogs at Yankee Stadium and later founded securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald. In 1996, as Cantor lay dying, Lutnick staged what Bernie’s wife Iris called “a palace coup.” Lutnick seized control of Cantor Fitzgerald by arguing that Cantor did not possess "sufficient mental capacity" to understand what he was doing. Cantor’s family was “shaken and enraged.” 

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, and crashed it into 1 World Trade Center, Cantor Fitzgerald's corporate headquarters. All 658 employees in the building that day perished. On September 15, Lutnick dropped them from the payroll, killing the livelihood their families depended on.

Lutnick, a Trump mega-donor and head of Trump’s transition team, enthusiastically supports Trump’s regressive tariff tax. Lutnick said, “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little-little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America,” adding, “This is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”

Very few Americans want that future for their kids. But the American Dream envisioned by Trump’s Billionaire Boys Club is an endless supply of wage slaves for their factories: generations of Americans working tedious jobs while American kids settle for five pencils, two dolls and no hope of a better future.

Michael Rush

Leland