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.
But Trump’s bill will now explode the debt by $3 trillion. To justify all this, Trump and Republicans have rolled out the old con that high-end tax cuts pay for themselves. Trump just tweeted that “GROWTH” will make his bill “successful,” which has “already begun.” Never mind that the economy contracted in the first quarter; it’s all a variation on the scam that tax cuts for wealthy investors and corporations will unleash massive, revenue-generated growth that will magically pay for them.
Yet this ruse betrays Trumpism’s supposed promise in another sense, too. Ideal Trumpism was supposed to repudiate Reaganomics. The idea was supposed to be that elites have rigged our economy in their favor by gaming the tax code, justifying it all with false promises to the working class that never materialized. Trump hinted strongly in his first campaign that he’d hike taxes on economic elites. In 2017, he massively cut them instead.
But the scam has only gotten more brazen. As Paul Krugman shows, GOP accounting tricks to disguise the bill’s deficit-busting are comically absurd. What’s more, despite that 2017 betrayal, as recently as two months ago Trump was still pretending that maybe, just maybe he’d raise taxes on millionaires, and headlines blared forth the claim. Larry Glickman shows that even amid debate on this very bill, media accounts kept credulously suggesting Trump fiscally represents a new kind of Republican.
Yet not only does the new bill continue the 2017 tax cuts—if anything it’s more upwardly redistributive. Once again, it’s all being packaged with the same old “rising tide lifts all boats” ruse. Trump has made the first two legs of the Three-Legged Scam sturdier.
And the third leg? Well, much of the Medicaid downsizing is accomplished with work requirements, which are designed to bump people off the program. Republicans justify this by insisting they merely remove people who are defrauding the system by refusing to work despite being able-bodied. Trump keeps lying that the only Medicaid changes he’s pursuing target “fraud.”
That’s nonsense—the health care group KFF estimates that more than half of people who will face work requirements already work. Large numbers of those people are surely GOP voters. And as Jonathan Cohn explains, decimating Medicaid will have terrible ripple effects in working-class and rural communities.
But an even deeper betrayal of all those Trump voters—and the working poor writ large—is at work here. Like Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” and Paul Ryan’s depiction of the safety net as a “hammock,” Medicaid work requirements are premised on the core idea that those who need social programs are in some sense at fault for their own plight.
Idealized Trumpism nominally represented a repudiation of that way of thinking—a rejection of the claim that working poor people’s circumstances are their own doing, that life outcomes fairly reflect merit and effort. Instead, Trumpism purported to offer a different diagnosis: That elite self-dealing and larger economic forces had inflicted this on the working poor—and thus that things like Medicaid are a necessary corrective. As MAGA Senator Josh Hawley recently put it, Trump voters “depend” on Medicaid precisely because the economy failed working people for “the better part of 50 years.”
Hawley voted for the bill. It’s a remarkable betrayal for Trump and Republicans to inflict Medicaid work requirements after making that particular big-picture argument—and then justify it by saying those who lose Medicaid are scammers who had it coming.
Shockingly, all three legs of the Three-Legged Scam are looking pretty solid. The real genius of Trumpism, as Jamelle Bouie notes, is that Trump has persuaded voters he’s “heterodox” on economics but has “accelerated” the GOP’s plutocratic agenda, importantly including comprehensive efforts to weaken worker power as well.
Republicans know how unpopular all this will be. So they’ve structured the bill so the tax cuts land immediately, while many of the Medicaid cuts get going in 2027 and 2028. That’s meant to spare them in the midterms.
But there’s a wrinkle here worth appreciating. Those policies will start hitting right when JD Vance’s bid to succeed Trump is getting underway. For Vance—perhaps the most prominent evangelist for Trumpism’s supposed promise for the working class—to have to defend all of that carnage while running for president could yet prove a form of poetic justice.
To sum up: If you thought Trumpism promised redress for what elites and their hand-rigged economy have done to working people over the last half-century, well, you’ve been swindled. Very, very badly.
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