We the people have broken our country. Division in Washington reflects that fact.

Donald Trump asked me one time how I would describe my role as White House chief of staff. I paused for a second, then told him: "I'm the person who gets paid to tell you what you don't want to hear." 

I am sure opinions on how I performed that function would vary. But I know one thing for sure: I was never uncomfortable doing it. Maybe that is the budget director in me.

Budget directors, even some Democrat ones, spend most of their day telling people "no," which in Washington, I can assure you, is not what people want to hear. That may also be why Office of Management and Budget directors have gone on to serve as chiefs of staff in the Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton White Houses.

So when I turn to one of the largest issues of today – the divided state of our nation – it doesn’t bother me to offer an uncomfortable insight on who is to blame:

All of us. 

Not MAGA Republicans. Not Antifa or Black Lives Matter. All of us. 

We have broken the country, not Washington. After all, our system is a representative democracy: the government represents the people. If the government is broken, it is because the people are. 

More from Mick Mulvaney: 'Things could get very dark for the former president'

Look at it this way: there is no sinister invisible force in the nation’s capital that decrees "send me your great dividers … the peddlers of outrage … the wannabe social media influencers." No dark force in Washington anoints the AOCs and the MTGs. We vote for those folks. We send them to Washington. And we do it because we feel those people represent who and where we are right now.

I speak to lots of student groups these days. High-achieving kids from famous universities. It has been enlightening – not in a good way.

I once had a young woman ask me if I was friends with someone I had just debated. I assured her that I was: we go to dinner together, watch baseball games, etc. She was flabbergasted: "I could never be friends with someone who disagrees with me on so many things."

Are Republicans 'semi-fascists'? Biden’s ‘deplorables’ moment won’t play well.

He finally said it: Biden right to call MAGA Republicans a threat to democracy.

Another young man once proclaimed that he was convinced the police department in his city was racist. He then reeled off a list of "facts" that supported that claim. When someone provided uncontroverted evidence that all of his facts were wrong, his response was that he didn’t care. "They’re just racist and we all know it." (For context:  he was white, well-educated and upper middle-class.) 

We are kidding ourselves if we think those attitudes are limited to the younger generations. How many Thanksgiving meals have been ruined over politics in the last decade? How many people still think that either Trump stole the election in 2016 or won it in 2020?

I suppose President Joe Biden was trying to address some of that in his Philadelphia speech Thursday night. But demonizing millions of Americans who support Trump probably doesn’t help much. That’s especially true when his apparent remedy for the situation was even more demonizing of Trump-supporting Americans.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Biden’s speech was a political one aimed at influencing the upcoming midterms. And hard-left (and hard-right) speeches tend to push more people to the polls than messages of reconciliation. 

But it also shouldn’t surprise us because all Biden was doing was reflecting where we are as a nation.

Until we change, our government will not. Until we learn to talk to those with whom we disagree, the people we elect will not. And until we pick leaders who are truly interested in uniting the country, the division will just get worse. 

At the end of the day, the government we elect is the government we deserve. We need to show that we deserve better.

Mick Mulvaney served as White House acting chief of staff from December 2018 until March 2020, when President Donald Trump named him special envoy to Northern Ireland and installed Mark Meadows as chief of staff. Mulvaney served previously as director of the Office of Management and Budget and as a Republican in the House of Representatives. He is now a co-chair for Actum LLC.