General
Democrats, we are told over and over, can’t win hearts and minds just by trashing Donald Trump. They have to unify around a new agenda, to show how they would deliver for working class voters.
I don’t buy that. Parties don’t unify until they hash out their differences in a presidential primary and pick a new leader. But even a diverse gaggle can win mid-term elections, and often do, just by opposing the guy in power. And Trump, especially in the last few weeks, has handed Democrats plenty of ammo with a budget that does violence to working people, and a surge of brazen profiteering by the Trump clan.
“Trump and the GOP’s agenda of corruption, chaos and cruelty should be burnished in the public’s mind,” Rahm Emmanuel, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, wrote in The Washington Post. “We need to focus foremost on what’s winnable: next year’s midterm elections.”
Start with the Big Beautiful Bill approved by the House last week. The beauty of it eludes me.
One day after Trump promised that “we’re not changing Medicaid” the House voted to cut $675 billion from the program over the next decade, along with whopping cuts in the subsidies for families enrolled in Obamacare. Together, 14 million Americans will lose health coverage, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
That’s going to tear through the working families Trump pretends to champion. Some will die for lack of medical care, as every study shows. More will go broke under the weight of impossible hospital bills. And many millions more will worry — cutting back on needed medications, hoping no one gets sick, and wondering how bad a child’s earache has to get before heading to the emergency room.
Food stamps will take a hard hack as well, reducing benefits to 40 million people, and eliminating them altogether for 3 million, including 1 million children. How beautiful.
And why are they doing this? To provide a tax break that leans heavily in favor of people like Elon Musk. The richest 1 percent will capture 43 percent of the tax cuts, while the bottom fifth, the folks who worry about paying the rent, will share 1 percent of the total.
Ezra Klein at the New York Times points to the brutal math of this Big Ugly Bill. “The bill has $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people who make more than $500,000 a year. And it has $1.1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps,” he wrote. “It is a straight transfer from people who cannot afford food and medical care to people who can afford to fly first class.”
It is gobsmacking to think that Republican Party can look across America’s landscape today, when the rich have never been more dominant, or more rich, and conclude that their top priority is to shift money from the bottom to the top. But that’s exactly what this bill does.
Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, offered an amendment last week that would deny the tax cut to those earning more than $1 billion a year. It was a revealing bit of political theater — Republicans rejected it on party lines. They want Elon and his buddies to get a big piece of this pie.
How are Republicans from purple districts going to defend that next year, just as prices will likely be rising to cover the cost of tariffs?
Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the ranking member on the Commerce and Energy Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Obamacare, predicts that Democrats will take back the House next year when the damage sinks in, as several moderate Republicans have warned.
“Most people who are going to lose their insurance don’t realize it yet,” Pallone says. “And if they are getting insurance through the ACA (Affordable Care Act) their costs are going to go up.”
Look also at the profiteering by Trump and his family. They are getting richer by the day. Bloomberg News calculates that Trump has doubled his wealth, to $5.4 billion since the start of his campaign. And he’s just getting started.
His sons recently buddied up with Saudi Arabia and Dubai to launch development deals worth billions of dollars. They also just broke ground on a golf course in Vietnam, which the government put on a fast track, over the objection of locals, hoping to win Trump’s favors. Melania Trump will clear $28 million after Jeff Bezos agreed to license a film about her transition back to being first lady, the most Amazon has ever paid for a documentary, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The family company and its partners have taken in $320 million in fees from selling crypto meme coins to willing buyers who explicitly say they are hoping the payments give them influence over policy. The Trump boys are soliciting investors for other crypto ventures as well.
Donald Trump Jr. just opened a club in Washington D.C. with a membership fee of $500,000, an aggressive peddling of daddy’s influence that makes Hunter Biden look like a piker. (Hunter earned a mere $50,000 a month pretending to work for Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, while his dad was vice-president and Hunter was battling an active crack addiction.)
Trump has other vulnerabilities that could bite him before the midterms. The tariffs could spark inflation, and his trade wars could backfire. This budget will explode the deficit, again according to the CBO, and spark a financial crisis. And sharp increases in the cost of housing and child care, which he’s not even trying to address, could hurt him, too.
Yes, Democrats are capable of blowing the opportunity. As GOP consultant Kristin Davison told the Washington Post, “Democrats still don’t have their act together — it’s a gift for the GOP.”
But I prefer to believe GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who sees trouble on MAGA’s horizon. “Higher prices as a result of tariffs, and millions of Trump voters losing their Medicaid-funded health care. I think even the Democrats might be able to do something with that.”
One hopes.
Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at [email protected].
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