Trump Just Went Absolutely Nuclear in Screwing Over MAGA Voters

For at least the last half-century in American politics, Republicans have employed three distinct scams to hide the deeply regressive nature of their priorities and agenda from the voters. Trumpism, in its idealized form, was supposed to represent a break with this way of doing politics and policy at a fundamental level. Yet now that Congress has passed President Trump’s big budget bill, all three cons are alive and well—and have even been supercharged into something more venal and deceptive.

To appropriate a phrase long used to describe the GOP coalition, it’s the “Three-Legged Stool” of Trump-GOP subterfuge. The three legs of the swindle—let’s call this the “Three-Legged Scam”—are as follows:

• Deficits pose a civilizational threat to our country and the American experiment, but only when a Democrat is in the White House.
• Deficit concerns don’t constitute a case against tax cuts for the rich, because they will unleash massive growth and generate revenues that more than offset those lost to the tax cuts.
• But deficit concerns do require deep cuts to the social safety net, which won’t hurt the truly needy because they’re largely aimed at targeting the fraud that’s riddling the system and creating a massive class of welfare parasites.

All these are in evidence now that the House has narrowly passed the Senate version of Trump’s budget bill, which he’ll sign in coming days.

At its core, the bill is a massive engine of upward redistribution. It cuts over $1 trillion on health care, most of it from Medicaid. Between this and other changes to the Affordable Care Act, at least 17 million people could lose health insurance. It savagely cuts food stamp programs.

Meanwhile, the bill’s tax cuts—which nominally reach all income groups—in practice lavish stratospherically disproportionate benefits on top earners. The tax break enjoyed by millionaires is over 800 times larger than the minuscule one granted to the lowest earners, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds. For many at the bottom end, the tiny tax cuts are negated by cuts to social programs. The overall result of the bill, per one widely-cited analysis: The bottom quintile sees a net decline in resources while those in the top 1 percent enjoy a gain of $30,000.

Here’s where the Three-Legged Scam comes in.

The first leg—the deficit ruse—is the most obvious. Republicans used fake deficit concerns to attack the ACA for years and then to impose austerity and slow the recovery under President Barack Obama. They played this game when President Joe Biden pushed for desperately needed social spending amid an emergency pandemic.