In mid-March, President Donald Trump added the fifth Goldman Sachs employee to his administration, solidifying his promise to “drain the swamp” as one of the most prominent cons of his campaign.

The blatancy of Trump’s Wall Street appointments seems almost like an intentional slap in the face to the American people, and intellectual lion of the left Noam Chomsky echoed that observation in an appearance on Democracy Now! this Tuesday.

During the interview, Chomsky was asked by host Juan Gonzalez if he could comment on “the capitalists directly taking over” the White House.

“Well, as you say, they’ve run it all the time. The simple measures, like campaign funding alone, simple measure like that, is a very close predictor, not only of electoral victory, but even of policies. That’s been true for a century,” Chomsky replied.

“And if you take a look at the analysis of public attitude—a major topic in academic political science is comparing popular attitudes with public policy. It’s pretty straightforward. Public policy, you can see. Popular attitudes, we know a lot about from extensive polling. And the results are pretty startling. Turns out that about 70 percent of voters, which is maybe half the electorate—about 70 percent of voters are literally disenfranchised, the lower 70 percent on the income scale, meaning that their own representatives pay no attention to their—to their attitudes and preferences. If you move up the income scale, you get a little more correlation, more—a little more influence.”

“The very top, which is probably a fraction of 1 percent, if you could get the data, it’s where policy is set,” he continued. “Now, the Trump administration is kind of a caricature of this. It’s always pretty much true. But here they’re—it’s as if they’re kind of purposely trying to flaunt the fact that this country is run by Goldman Sachs and billionaires, and nobody else counts.”

Watch the Chomsky segment in the video below:

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