Of the many millionaires and billionaires in Donald Trump’s inner circle, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stands out for his consistently convincing impression of a 19th-century robber baron. There are the superficial similarities, of course—his ominously bald pate, for instance, and his penchant for $500 custom-made velvet slippers embroidered with the Commerce Department logo. Others are almost too on the nose. Ross, who is worth an estimated $2.5 billion, previously served as the head of a secret Wall Street fraternity, whose off-color jokes, hazing rituals, and annual drag show he tried to protect by offering himself as a future source to help kill a story. In 2014, he appeared on Bloomberg TV to complain that the “1 percent is being picked on for political reasons” and that the unwashed masses could easily join his tax bracket if they wanted to (“Education is the way that people get out of the ghetto and into, if not the 1 percent, something close to it”). Earlier this month, he described a U.S. airstrike in Syria as “after-dinner entertainment” for the Mar-a-Lago crowd (the best part, he added, was that it “didn’t cost the president anything to have that entertainment”).

Ross, who made his billions outsourcing U.S. jobs, has since given up the life of a plutocrat to serve his country as a member of Trump’s Cabinet. Since entering politics, however, he has found new and creative ways to remain painfully out of touch, as he did Monday morning on CNBC, when he suggested that U.S. protesters could learn a thing or two from the Saudis. Saudi Arabia, he noted with satisfaction, had managed to prevent any protesters from disrupting Trump’s trip to Riyadh, where Ross, among others, participated in a traditional sword-dancing ceremony and helped negotiate a $110 billion arms deal. CNBC anchor Becky Quick tried to save Ross from himself, by hinting at the fact that protesting is a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, but Ross still doubled down:

Ross: The other thing that was fascinating to me, was there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard instead—

Quick: Secretary Ross that may not necessarily be because they don't have those feelings there but because they control people and don't allow them to comment and express their feelings quite the same as we do here.

Ross: In theory that could be true but boy there was not a single effort at any encouragement. There wasn't anything. The mood was a genuinely good mood and at the end of the trip as I was getting back on the plane the security guards from the Saudi side who'd been helping us over the weekend all wanted to pose for a big photo-op and then they gave me two gigantic bushels of dates as a present as a thank you for the trip we had had. That was a pretty from the heart very genuine gesture.

As a person who surrounds himself with yes-men and is made to feel important by getting one more scoop of ice cream than everyone else, Trump has been particularly rankled by the protests that have erupted across the country (and all over the world) since he was elected, going so far as to call their activities “unfair,” and arguing that protesters have “no right” to express themselves at his rallies. While it wouldn’t be surprising to hear the president’s inner circle tell him that the lack of protests over the weekend had nothing to do with the Saudi government sentencing protesters to death for dissent, it’s still remarkable to see the Commerce Secretary making that argument on TV.