DEAR EDITOR:

I have never understood how someone who used the phrase “you’re fired” as a cheap punchline on TV came to be accepted as a champion of working folk.

Getting fired is a life-changing experience — and not in a good way for most people.

Nonetheless, “Celebrity Apprentice” star Donald Trump rode “you’re fired” to new visibility, and eventually, the presidency.

And now, after virtually buying victory for Trump with a late-campaign infusion of $288 million, celebrity billionaire Elon Musk has become his real-life apprentice.

And Musk has shown himself to be even more cavalier than Trump when it comes to firing people — in this case actually throwing people out of their jobs, not just playing a hatchet man on TV.

Let’s put aside the question of how the eccentric richest man alive — having not received a single vote himself — was given the power of life or death over various agencies created by Congress and have functioned for decades.

My concern here is with the arbitrary and coarse way in which Trump and Musk are excising what they characterize as “waste and corruption” in Washington — not with a scalpel, but with an axe. Musk and his wunderkind march into these agencies and within hours determine that fraud, waste and abuse (none yet specified) is such that virtually everyone must go. Thousands of dedicated workers (and, yes, doubtless some malingerers) are unceremoniously given the boot.

It’s not that the firings are haphazard, unfair and unbusinesslike, it’s that Musk, and by extension, Trump, revel in the cruelty of it all. After shutting down USAID, Musk shared a post, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

After doing the same to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he posted “CFPB RIP” with a tombstone emoji.

Again, save the debate over the value these agencies had to the world’s poorest people, to the nation’s standing in the world as a beacon of hope and to the need to protect American citizens from financial predators. Focus for a moment on the utter lack of compassion Musk and Trump show toward thousands of men and women working to provide for their families at jobs that would never make them rich. Think about the gut punch of not knowing what the future holds for them because they’ve joined Trump’s ever-growing list of “enemies of the people.” And think about Musk lamenting that he had to miss “some great parties.”

Where is the empathy? Where is the humanity? Trump boasts that he is governing with common sense. Alas, what is missing is common decency.

DENNIS B. MANGAN

Howland