With his pretty ugly bill, Trump's fake populism goes *pop*
The One Big Beautiful Bill is the culmination of the GOP's decades-long war on American democracy and mass prosperity; Trump just helped Republicans take it to the next level
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) passed by congressional Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump may be the single most harmful piece of legislation for the widest range of Americans ever passed in our country’s history. It guts health care via cuts to Medicare and Medicaid so that 17 million citizens are expected to lose coverage over the next 10 years; shivs the fight against climate change by axing incentives for renewable energy and incentivizing oil and gas production; adds trillions to the public debt that will drive up long-term interest rates, leading to more expensive mortgages, loans, and credit card debts; and massively cuts taxes for the upper classes while scattering relative table scraps to lower-income earners, further skewing the economy and political power against the interests of ordinary citizens.
Although President Trump fused his political identity with the bill by anointing it with its grotesquely inappropriate name and exerting his influence to ensure its passage in a narrowly-divided Congress, a basic fact in assessing the legislation’s import for American politics is how closely it adheres to long-term Republican priorities. This is not just Trump’s bill; it is the Republican Party’s bill. Despite the protestations of a handful of senators and representatives, relatively few arms were truly twisted in its passage. The insistence on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; the antipathy to social insurance programs like public health care and food assistance; the general starving of government functions; and, critically, the multiplication of debt in order to justify even more draconian cutbacks in the future: these are all-long term Republican strategies and goals, only here pumped up to the max in an undisguised way. As observers like The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait have pointed out, this is the first time that the national GOP has so clearly linked paying for tax cuts for the rich to the evisceration of spending that benefits the middle- and lower-classes. And so the bill is a pure distillation of modern Republicanism, fully out of the conservative closet and into the street, loud and proud about its contempt for the public, its worship of the rich, and its rejection of common projects like health care that are seen as siphoning money from the wealthy to the unworthy.
At his Cross Section blog, Paul Waldman captures the spirit driving the legislation, writing:
This is the fulfillment of their fondest policy wishes. If it costs them their House majority and maybe even their Senate majority as well (a long shot, but not impossible), they’re willing to do it. Because they believe in it.
While we think of politicians as cynical operators who care only about reelection, that isn’t always true. In this case, Republicans have decided that they have an opportunity they may not have again for a long time, and if they’re going to suffer politically anyway, they might as well get as much policy change out of it as they can.
In many ways, this bill is truly revolutionary. There has never been this kind of assault on the safety net, and the damage will be so great that it will take Democrats years or even decades to undo the damage — if they can manage it at all.
The willingness of Republicans to risk at least short-term electoral backlash helps us understand both the scope of their vision and the terms of the political struggle in which they see themselves engaged. For the GOP, this was not just a fight over a single spending bill, but over the very nature of government in the United States. The GOP saw an opportunity to permanently alter the capacities of the U.S. government to serve the interests of the majority, and jumped on it without hesitation. Even the “downside” of $3+ trillion in additional debt isn’t quite the bummer that many commentators make it out to be: that debt is a down payment on further cuts to remaining social spending in the years ahead, and any coming debt crisis will contain the opportunity of sticking a mortal blow to remaining programs like Social Security and Medicare. They have burdened our government with debt not out of profligacy, but out of a larger goal of forcing catastrophic but self-serving choices upon the nation.
The GOP’s decades-long effort to cripple the American government’s ability to serve its people has become indistinguishable from a rebellion against democracy itself. This is not just a fight over the scope of democratic government; this is a fight over whether we can even have a democratic government at all. Democracy is not just the right to vote; democracy is also the right to shape our country as we see fit, and central to this shaping is how we choose to spend money from the public treasury for the common good. The Republican Party has struck a major blow in favor of the proposition that Americans in fact should not have a democracy: that the many shall simply not be permitted to spend our collective wealth to benefit the many. It is the latest step in an effort to define democracy out of existence, to render it more theoretical notion than shared reality.
The Republicans’ decades-long effort to re-define the limits of democracy so that it is no democracy at all has reached its latest culmination in the OBBB. And here, we can more fully understand the crucial role that Donald Trump has played in furthering and accelerating this long-term Republican goal. For while the bill echoes the agendas and budgets of previous Republican presidents, there are crucial differences made possible specifically by Trump himself.
First, the bill’s simultaneous cutting of benefits for millions of Americans (including many millions of Trump voters) while cutting taxes for the rich makes the direct link between these two efforts plain for all to see; this is a new brazenness for the national GOP, and helps lay bare the party’s opposition to serving the interests of ordinary Americans. Such audacity was enabled by Trump’s claims to be a populist who advocates for the interests of working people, and by claims that this populism is shared by the broader, Trump-dominated GOP. This is a lie, but Trump and his allies have repeated it so often that it has become accepted as common wisdom by much of the media and, incredibly, even among some Democrats. To put it in terms of the GOP’s war on democracy: Trump’s false claims to be a tribune of working people gave the GOP the cover it needed to press the accelerator on demolishing a government that serves its citizens.
A second, far more powerful reason why this platonic ideal of a GOP spending bill has passed under Trump is that Republicans see the president as a bulwark against the democratic backlash it may well provoke. Just as the GOP has worked for years to subvert American democracy in favor of its wealthy donors and the white conservatives who form the party’s electoral backbone, via all manner of voter suppression efforts, Donald Trump has brought that same spirit to the presidency — where it has metastasized into an open authoritarianism. It is not so specific as GOP legislators believing that Trump will save congressional leaders from electoral retribution in 2026 through outright election subversion (though some elected officials in the GOP may believe or hope for this). Rather, it is a more generalized sense that Trump has helped open the door to previously undreamt-of methods of making the GOP immune to public accountability.
This encompasses possibilities for political repression that a lawless executive can implement: witness the multiple incidents that have already transpired under Trump II, including bogus charges against a Democratic legislator for doing her job, threats to arrest California governor Gavin Newsom, and the deployment of troops against non-existent “rebellion” in Los Angeles. But it also includes the ability of Trump (assisted by allies and sympathetic media) to flood Americans with lies and propaganda, an effort that itself forms its own particularly vicious attack on American democracy by depriving the citizenry of basic facts by which they can form their political opinions.
A closely related reason why the GOP’s anti-democratic bill can’t be separated from Trump’s anti-democratic initiatives on other fronts can actually be found in the OBBB itself, in its allocation of $170 billion to immigration enforcement and efforts to deport millions of immigrants from the U.S. For years now, Donald Trump has propagated the lie that the United States has been “invaded” by tens of millions of foreigners, whose expulsion is required if the nation is to survive. In doing so, he has tacitly made the argument that the essence of democracy involves dealing with this supposed crisis, lest the United States simply be overwhelmed by hostile others. In fact, he has at times made the link explicit, for instance claiming that Democrats only win elections because they’ve recruited million of undocumented immigrants to go to the polls and vote for them. So while the OBBB guts the scope of actual democratic action and capacity (no health care for millions, no healthy environment for any), it also advances ersatz pro-democratic spending that is in fact intended to advance the interests of an American minority of white nationalists, Christian fundamentalists, and others on board with Trump’s Great Replacement theory of the world.
But it’s even worse than that, for as we’ve seen in the last few months, the anti-immigrant jihad has proven an entry point for an attack on the rights of citizens as well. Due process rights for all are endangered when not applied to all who reside in the U.S., and we have already seen many instances of American citizens arrested, abused, and even deported by the masked agents of ICE. As political scientist Theda Skocpol wrote in the wake of the bill’s passage, “The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”
Yet neither the fact that Republicans have advanced their war on democracy with this bill, or that they still hope to avoid accountability for its resulting material destruction and broader subversion of the public good, means that they have somehow “won.” To the contrary, the risks that both the congressional GOP and President Trump have incurred should not be underestimated. For those willing and able to face the plain facts, the GOP has unfurled it flag of depraved values and anti-democratic rebellion against the common good for all to see. Among other things, Donald Trump betrayed millions of his own voters by signing a bill that shears them of health care, helps poison and flood their communities, and tears apart local economies through mass deportation of non-criminals.
Yet these are risks whose potential damage to the GOP depends to a great extent not on luck, or fate, but on the Democrats and other opponents of Trump doing all in their power to make the Republicans pay for their malice. Democrats can’t just wait for the harms of the bills to become apparent to people on their own (particularly as some especially noxious cuts to health care and other spending aren’t slated to kick in until after the 2026 midterms) — they need to take the fight to the GOP now, and for the next year and a half.
And they shouldn’t just limit their critiques to the vicious reductions to health care, nutritional assistance, and myriad other cuts. Rather, they need to remind citizens of the continuity between the OBBB and decades of GOP sabotage of our safety net and of public investments in our common future. They must confidently assert that the OBBB is the grotesque continuation of a longtime quest to destroy our democratic right to control our economic destiny, and in this way to destroy the meaning of democracy itself. And they must draw the connection between the lawlessness of the Trump administration’s war on electoral democracy and the anti-democratic animus of budget and program cuts so savage that they cripple even our future choices to strive for a fairer society.
There is no piecemeal approach to steering the country back from the brink to which the radical GOP has brought us all; there is no saving our democracy without saving all of our democracy, and there is no doing this without finding a way to fully discredit the means and ends of this authoritarian party that apparently exists to serve only the rich and the racist. The OBBB is an object lesson in the GOP’s full-spectrum war on democracy; it is up to the rest of us to hold this lesson up to maximal public view.
Exactly! Republicans have been dreaming about this since Reagan. I hope voters will finally see that the GOP is nothing but liars who want to hurt people, not help them.