Andrew Puzder is a real piece of work. He’s the former CEO of CKE Restaurants, the corporation that foisted the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast food chains on the world, but you may know him better as Donald Trump’s first choice to head up the Department of Labor.

Like many of Trump’s cabinet nominees, Puzder was entirely unqualified for the position of Secretary of Labor. He actively cheered on automation as a solution to minimum-wage increases, cooing at one point that robots are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case." He’s argued against regulations like mandatory work breaks, and his company has frequently been sued for wage theft and sexual harassment, which is not exactly the résumé of a staunch defender of the working class.

Puzder eventually was forced to withdraw his own nomination—but not necessarily because he is the exact opposite of what a good Secretary of Labor should be. Instead, thanks to Oprah, old spousal abuse allegations resurfaced and Puzder quit before the confirmation hearings even began.

But Puzder has not gone away quietly. In fact, he’s making the rounds as a talking head right now as he promotes his new book, The Capitalist Comeback: The Trump Boom and the Left’s Plot to Stop It.

In a recent appearance on a call-in show on CSPAN, though, the premise of Puzder’s book got some pushback. After Puzder talked about President Trump’s low unemployment numbers, a caller from Oklahoma took issue, citing his personal experience.

“I have a lot of friends that are low and middle class and they don’t see the jobs that you are talking about,” the caller said. “I have friends that work at Walmart that lost hours when they got a pay raise.”

Puzder — who reportedly earned somewhere between two and ten million dollars a year while he was CEO at CKE Restaurants — started in with his aw-shucks, I’m just a cornpone boy from a poor family routine:

Look, I’m sensitive to the needs of working class and lower working class individuals. My family was working class. I didn’t have a silver spoon or paid education to college, neither [through] the government nor my family. I worked through college and law school with a family. I remember months I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pay rent at the end of the month or buy enough food to feed everybody. It was tough and I’m sensitive to those needs.

After establishing how working-class he is, Puzder promoted the Earned Income Tax Credit, calling it “very meaningful and helpful.” (One in five eligible taxpayers don’t claim the EITC.) And then Puzder told the caller that he and his friends’ lived experience is wrong:

As far as the jobs for individuals, I will tell you right now, there are 400,000 jobs open in the manufacturing sector and 250,000 open in the construction sector. There were in January 6.3 million job openings, or 6.2 million. Those are historically high numbers.

Hmmm, but why can’t the caller and his friends find work? First Puzder said the caller is wrong and jobs are available everywhere: “To the individuals who are unable to find jobs, or feel they need a better job than they are getting at Walmart…there are jobs out there.”

And then he offered his own blend of condescending advice: “As long as you don’t have a criminal history or serious drug problem, you should be able to find employment in this economy,” Puzder said, ignoring systemic disparity in racial incarceration rates.

And finally he just outright denies the caller’s lived experience. “I hate to disagree with this individual’s personal experience and I can’t rectify the problems for the people he knows, but the jobs are there if you want them.”

Wow.

By the most generous reading of his comments, Puzder is making the classic mistake of thinking of the economy as a video game in which the “best” numbers win. Those unemployment numbers he’s bandying about don’t reflect the reality of the economy for most Americans. More and more people are working in part-time jobs with no benefits for low-wage employers like Puzder’s own CKE Restaurants. They’re finding jobs in the gig economy where they can enjoy the “flexibility” of a 50-or-60-hour workweek. Or they’re stuck in a state that stubbornly refuses to raise the minimum wage to something above the poverty line.

Puzder may idolize Trump—seriously, about 90 percent of his public-speaking time is spent polishing the president’s wingtips with his tongue—but he lacks Trump’s estimable ability to speak to working-class voters. Like the wealthy elitist he is, Puzder claims that the lack of good jobs is not a failure of the economy or government leadership but is instead the fault of the lazy, no-good American worker.

Puzder also botched what should’ve been a softball question: “How concerned should we as Americans be about the growing gap between the the richest and the poorest in this country?”

“Any time there is inequality, there is reason for concern,” Puzder began, but then he immediately shook off the concern. In his book, he said, “I have a chapter that covers income inequality at length. It is not as bad as you are being told it is.” (Again, Puzder by some accounts earned 10 million dollars in a single year as the CEO of a fast-food chain that has been repeatedly sued for wage theft.)

The solution to income inequality, Puzder said, is making sure money trickles up to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. “If we get economic growth, wages will start to go up, income inequality will decline and everybody should benefit,” Puzder claimed, blithely ignoring forty years of economic evidence to the contrary.

He concluded, “I’m excited about where we are and the potential going forward and I hope people will take a look at the book and share it with their kids and grandkids who may be buying into the socialist progressive ideology.”

Conservatives love to knock liberals for being out-of-touch elitists, but I’ve never heard a Democratic politician outright tell a worker that their problem is that they don’t work hard enough. Puzder’s condescending line of trickle-down garbage is a real let-them-eat-cake moment for Donald Trump’s Republican Party.