Democracy

“Republicans’ tax-and-spending cut bill will take from the poor and give to the rich”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 21, 2025

Just after 1:00 this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named The One Big, Beautiful Bill. If passed, this measure will put Trump’s wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”

Three judges are currently considering whether the administration is in contempt of court over its apparent disregard for court orders over its rendition of undocumented immigrants to third countries.

But the center of the bill is indeed related to money: it is the $3.8 trillion extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations. Yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Americans in the lowest tenth of earners will lose money under the measure while people in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.

Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal healthcare and food assistance programs to partially offset the costs of the tax cuts. Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without healthcare coverage. Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be “the biggest cut in the program’s history,” Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.

Yesterday the CBO reported that the measure will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and noted that when a budget adds too much to the federal deficit, it triggers cuts to Medicare (not a typo) under the Pay-As-You-Go law. The CBO explains that those cuts are limited by law to 4% but would still total about $490 billion from 2027 through 2034.

Tobias Burns of The Hill summed it up: “Republicans’ tax-and-spending cut bill will take from the poor and give to the rich, Congress’s official scoring body has found.”

Tonight, after 22 hours of debate and after a set of amendments made steeper cuts to Medicaid to woo far-right Republicans, the House Rules Committee agreed to move the bill forward to the House itself. There, Republican leadership intends to push it through as quickly as possible, originally hoping to have the vote over by 6:00 Thursday morning.

In 2025 the Republicans’ signature bill redistributes wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. Knowing the provisions in the bill will be enormously unpopular, the Republicans have been jamming it through, often in the middle of the night, as quickly as they could.

I have not been able to stop thinking today of the significance of the timing of the Republicans’ push for this bill, and what it says about how dramatically the U.S. has changed in the past 60 years.

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing the problems in the country “But I do promise this,” he said: “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.

Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity, which would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.

When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.

They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.

But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.

Opponents of this sweeping program picked up 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterm elections, and U.S. News and World Report wrote that “the big bash” was over. And now, exactly 61 years later, we are seeing Republican lawmakers dismantle the Great Society and replace its vision with the idea that the government must work for the wealthy few.

“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.

“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?…”

“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”

The “Big Bad Billionaire Bill” moves forward, with more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 18, 2025

Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.

The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.

And so the bill moves forward.

In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.

Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.

Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Part D. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Part D when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.

The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”

On the Sunday talk shows this morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the downgrade, saying it reflected conditions already in the market (although Moody’s explicitly said it was concerned about the potential passage of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill). House speaker Mike Johnson said that the credit downgrade just proved the need for the measure with its “historic spending cuts” to pass (although Moody’s named that bill as its reason for the downgrade).

The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.

But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.

But instead of considering taxes to address the deficit, in the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that foreign countries would pay for further tax cuts through tariffs, no matter how often economists said that tariffs are passed on to consumers.

In October 2024, when editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump replied: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know?… They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

Walmart’s suggestion that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs is forcing the administration to try to manage reality. “We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” Walmart’s chief financial officer John David Rainey during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Rainey predicted higher prices by June.

In response Trump appeared to agree that tariffs are paid by consumers, posting that Walmart should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Today, Bessent reassured Americans that he had spoken to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, who had agreed that Walmart would, in fact, eat some of the tariffs.

So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”

Lest there be any confusion about who will benefit from this Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the many pieces tucked into it is a prohibition on any state laws to regulate artificial intelligence for the next ten years.

Despite its gargantuan energy demands, harm to the environment, and threats to privacy, the administration is pushing AI hard, and the country’s leading AI entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Ruth Porat of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Andy Jassy of Amazon all traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia last week. The Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence.

Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.

In other news today, the office of former president Joe Biden announced he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As vice president and president, Biden was a fierce advocate for cancer research, with the goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, preventing more than 4 million deaths from cancer, and improving the experience of individuals and families living with and surviving cancer.

And in international news, Romanian voters today rejected a far-right nationalist who deliberately styled his behavior after Trump and whose victory, until recently, was being treated as a foregone conclusion. Instead, voters elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan. Even before the election, Dan’s opponent insisted the election was illegitimate, claimed that he was the new leader, and called for his supporters to protest in favor of his election. But in the end, Dan’s 8-point victory was too much to overcome and he conceded.

“This is your victory,” Dan told his supporters. “It’s the victory of thousands and thousands of people who campaigned [and] believed that Romania can change in the correct direction.”

The Reckoning That Wasn’t

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Six months ago, Trump won. Much rethinking was promised. Did it happen?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Anand Giridharadas 
Anand Giridharadas 

Six months ago, Donald Trump won the presidency for the second time — and a legion of people and institutions that stand opposite him vowed a reckoning. The country was promised real soul-searching and sincere, if grueling, introspection — by the Democratic Party, by activist organizations, by the press that aspires to hold Trump to account. Lessons from the first term would be learned this time around. Blind spots would be filled. Sacred cows would be slain for the sake of reinvention.

Somehow or other, over this past half year, I ended up in many situations in which planned or spontaneous reckoning found its way onto the agenda. Sometimes it was former aides to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris debriefing the campaign. Sometimes it was summits of progressive organizers and movement leaders. Sometimes it was gatherings of labor leaders. Sometimes it was a meeting of funders. Sometimes it was desperate calls from a Democratic Party leader asking what the hell could be done. Sometimes it simply emerged at a dinner party. Sometimes it was more organized. But, again and again, people were asking a version of: How did this happen, again? What do we not see? What must change?

For a moment, it seemed there might be a window of openness to a real reckoning worthy of the word and age. With a loss so devastating to so many, there was space for rethinking.

But as I look back on this half year, I can’t escape the conclusion: there was no reckoning. In fact, as far as I could tell, quite the opposite.

What I observed in these settings was those who found themselves facing Trump for the second time — whether in active opposition to him or in the adversarial role of the press — wriggling out of the hard self-examination so many promised and craved in November.

After what was once heralded as a wake-up call, I saw instead in so many quarters human qualities that make reckoning all but impossible: defensiveness, incuriosity, touchiness, the inability to see oneself as others see you, certitude in the name of so-called “moral clarity,” smugness, condescension, blame casting, deflection, and a total rejection of introspection.

So many of the people and organizations that should be grappling hard in this moment instead seem consumed by the feeling that they have been getting it absolutely right in a world that fails to appreciate their good sense. We were promised a reckoning; instead, we got complexes of feeling misunderstood. Here we are — amazing political party or news organization or activist group — and people don’t get it. Everyone is crazy. But we’re sane!

This pandemic of incuriosity has spared few.

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Former Bidenworld insiders refuse to crack the doors of their minds three percent ajar to the possibility that his decline was a bigger deal than they treated it as being, with consequences the entire country is living through. And the former president himself is now being sent out to do interviews denying it all, everything is fine, I would have won, nothing to see here. It is remarkable, in a sense, this ability to be impervious to and oblivious to what so many others see, to be so uninterested in the possibility of learning from the past.

People who served on the Harris campaign engage in their own doubling down, insisting that the problems with the campaign were all external to it — the short time horizon, the pressure to stay close to Biden on policy. That the campaign itself was more lackluster and less inspiring and transformational than it could have been — that there are, therefore, lessons that could be drawn for next time — nope. This is no time for genuine reflection.

The same incuriosity can be found in the progressive wing of the party, among activist and organizing groups. Many meetings have been held, and then at those meetings the same behaviors that made progressive ideas less popular than they would naturally be were repeated. The out-of-touch, jargony, apologetic throat-clearing, the social justice terminology that feels inaccessible to those outside activism or academia, the breathtaking insistence on talking about politics in ways most normal people would not understand, the focus on issues affecting very small numbers of people instead of issues affecting everyone — these habits and reflexes reared their head in progressive “reckonings,” signaling that almost nothing meaningful would be rethought. Progressives have a giant normie problem in America; they don’t seem interested in fixing it, unless repeating the word “intersectional” until everyone comes around counts. Land acknowledgements are fine, but progressives might consider adding “game acknowledgements” to their repertoire. That’s when, like 98 percent of people in this country, you start by joking about last night’s game.

At the other end of the spectrum of the broadly defined left, you have corporate-adjacent groups like Third Way, which advocate for business-friendly policies. There is a broad consensus today that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. Do you see a reckoning at places like Third Way, therefore? Nope. You see it putting out statements about how important centrist and business-friendly policies are going forward.

Then you have the national Democratic Party. Here is another place we were told reckoning might occur. But, spoiler alert, reader, it did not occur. The fact that the national party is not even really a party so much as a fundraising vehicle, the fact that it has embarrassingly little physical presence in much of the country, the fact that it is so cozy with the very donors whose business practices have fueled so much of the populist rage of this moment — none of this was truly reckoned with. Senior party leaders reached out widely for advice but seemed reluctant or unable to act on it.

Or consider the Democratic Party’s top elected leaders. Can anyone report some dazzling reckoning there? Some really sharp reimagining? The double down is in full force. It is a panglossian politics: everything that should be done is everything we already happen to be doing. There is nothing the angry street is telling us that gives us the shadow of a new idea. We are perfectly perfect, standing where we should be standing, saying what we should be saying. When, on rare occasion, someone like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaks of the failure to reckon, it catches fire. People feel heard. This appears to scare party leadership instead of galvanizing them. Don’t threaten them with the good time of their constituents feeling understood, at last.

Among the resistance, too, there is incuriosity. It is admirable, taking up of the cause of defending democracy, the work it involves, even the bravery. But the resistance has been hurt by an attitude that can sometimes imply moral superiority or dismissiveness toward the very citizens it hopes to persuade. There is often an affect of being the only ones to get it. The movement has struggled to attract people of color, and Black people in particular; it has struggled to attract young people and working class people who don’t have the luxury of time and gas money. And these conspicuous (and democracy-threatening) absences often seem to inspire contempt for those who don’t see rather than curiosity about the resistance’s own limitations. In politics, if your ranks are fewer than you want them to be, the safe assumption is that it’s your own fault.

The press is, of course, not the opposition to Trump — even though some would like it play more of that role. But it was widely agreed in many quarters of my profession that some rethinking was in order after Trump’s second victory. How do you combat his lies rather than unwittingly amplify them? How do you cover a man who uses the vernacular of traditional media forms to spew propaganda? How do you hold to account a man who is waging frontal war on the press itself? Why is the mainstream press so distrusted, and why is so much of the bled-out trust finding its way to independent podcasts and newsletters? But I have been struck by how many of my peers in the media have chosen to double down rather than truly rethink and reimagine. Here, too, is a defensiveness almost heroic in its devotion to keeping the old thing going. We just have to keep doing what we were doing. Our critics don’t get it. People want us to be this and that; they want us to betray ourselves. We will stick to what we know. And the trust bleeds further out, and many of the traditional media forms reach fewer and fewer Americans.

Of course, there are exceptions to these phenomena. But, from where I sit, I have noticed infinitely more wagon circling and doubling down. Ask yourself: In what sectors of American life have you seen leaders (and regular people) engaging in the actual kind of reckoning I’m talking about, letting the criticisms fall on them, trying to figure out what they mean, secure in knowing they are still decent even if they have limitations they can’t see?

The defensiveness and incuriosity are understandable. People naturally feel defenseless in this moment; the cavalry is very clearly not coming. No one is in the mood to make themselves vulnerable right now, because vulnerability is danger. The stakes are high, and every hint of weakness will be exploited. If the Democratic Party takes a genuine public look at itself, or if a big media company does, won’t Trump exploit the crack in the armor? It takes a level of security to look at yourself and criticize part of what you’ve become without feeling that you are at risk of invalidating the whole. It may not feel like the time.

The problem is that, in refusing reckoning, refusing introspection, turning against curiosity itself, those facing Trump become more like him.

The mirror neurons of our collective brain are firing on full blast right now. Introspection is, of course, the central gaping absence in Trump himself. But now his deepest tendencies are becoming our tendencies standing across from him.

An unthinking man is making us unthinking. An unreflective man who always thinks his first thought is his best thought is inspiring that instinct in his foils. A president blindly sure of himself is making others blindly sure that everyone who supports him is deluded or ill. A man who sees all critics as haters is stirring a similar defensiveness in those who face him.

Trump is causing those playing opposite him in this drama to remake themselves in his image. His is a Trumpomorphic opposition.

What perhaps protects Trump’s power and position as much as any formal power is how he changes those opposite him. There is a small chance he will throw someone like me in jail one day. But he has already remade my heart, made me at times harsher, less prone to assume good faith, more dismissive, than I would have been. This is a way of defanging your opposition that is considerably easier to scale.

Trump makes those he faces less equipped to face him. Less and less prone to living the lives of curiosity, openness, self-doubt and self-questioning, visioning and revisioning, wondering, renewal, and constructive jettisoning that is so vital to actual strategy and action. He drains his foils of their lifeblood, and, remarkably, has them celebrating the wasting of their minds as imagined strength.

Trump will never be defeated, or held to account, or kept in proper check — pick your lane and vocation — by people as unthinking and defensive and incurious as he is. Making you as facile as he is serves only him. Nuance and complexity are part of the way out — and, above all, curiosity about what you don’t see.

A culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of Trump’s enduring appeal — even in the face of the present chaos and pain. Everyone with some one- or two-word catchall explanation for what is going on — Fox! racism! — is pretending they know things. This incuriosity prevents his opposition from seizing on the clearly potent issues he has latched on to — say, how trade works — and offering their own, non-rampaging version. The incuriosity prevents the construction of a broad pro-democracy coalition. It prevents the reform and transformation of political parties and movements. It prevents the kind of changes to the news business that could allow good information to reach way more people.

The cost of all this incuriosity can be measured in distrust. Majorities of Americans do not trust the major political parties, do not trust journalists, do not trust people in sclerotic institutions who are so wedded to their certainties that no new information can derail them. Trump has lost a considerable amount of support since taking office. Yet it is a remarkable fact about our present situation that this slide has not really seemed to benefit Democrats.

Incuriosity is perhaps the knowledge culture of a tribal age. In more tribal societies, people don’t ask what’s the best way to prepare bread or throw a wedding or allow women to spend their time. They do those things the way they do those things. Questions are trouble. When you’re scared and hunkering down with your people, you may not feel in the mood for a big rethinking. This fear has to be gotten over.

Where is the boldness? Where is the wildness? Where are the people willing to shred their own deepest assumptions and roll the dice? Where are the institutions renovating their entire strategy, in the cold light of new realities?

After all, the opposite of Trumpism is not just a different immigration or tax policy. It is, at bottom, fundamentally different habits of mind: curiosity, humility, openness to criticism, a hunger for growth, and the courage to change.

Source: The Ink

“One, Big, Beautiful Bill.” Is America getting 86’d?”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

May 16, 2025

MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.

Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.

MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: “that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear…. [H]e’s calling for the assassination of the president…that’s gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people…. He’s a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.

In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.

In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”

Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.

The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”

The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.

“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”

Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”

The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business Insider Monday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.

Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.

As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump’s agenda to get our economy back on track.”

In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.

The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.

Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.

His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.

Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.

Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.

The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.

Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.

The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.

Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.

Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.

Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”

Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.

Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.