Not a 'maverick': Critic dismantles chief assumption about Trump

02 July

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he visits a temporary migrant detention center informally known as "Alligator Alcatraz" in Ochopee, Florida, U.S., July 1, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says he’s not sure how President Donald Trump earned his "maverick" label while acting as a quintessential Republican.

“As nearly every commentator under the sun has observed for the past decade, Trump is unique — and to his critics, transgressive — in ways that defy traditional categorization,” Bouie writes, but “as an actual office holder, the most salient detail about Trump" is that he is “willing to sign whatever” the most conservative Republicans “bring to his desk.” And that means tax cuts at the expense of the American economy and destroying the national safety net.

Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was not a transformation of the American economy nor a “populist blow for Americans left behind” by failed leadership.

“No, it was a massive upper-income tax cut designed to pay huge benefits to the wealthiest Americans, including the president, his family and their friends,” Bouie says.

“His Environmental Protection Agency worked in the interest of industry; his Department of Labor worked in the interest of bosses; his Health and Human Services worked hard to undermine Medicaid and other federal health programs, and his Department of the Interior was more interested in using land for resource extraction than protecting it for current and future generations of Americans,” said Bouie.

In short, Trump governed like a Republican, and “a mostly orthodox Republican” at that, Bouie says.

Now Trump’s budget bill threatens to slash $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and $186 billion from anti-poverty food assistance to fund trillions in tax breaks, including more than $564 billion in business tax cuts. It could also boot at least 17 million people from their health insurance and millions from SNAP, with some states possibly even ending their programs entirely.

“All this so that the top 1 percent of households can receive an estimated average of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year,” Bouie argues, while adding there is a certain “dog-bites-man element” to the bill in that it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.

“It is … the longest-standing priority of the modern Republican Party to starve the welfare state, lower taxes as much as possible and spend what little federal revenues remain on internal and external security.” Says Bouie. “… Trump is doing … what any Republican president would do,” except he “cloaks” his damage “in the rhetoric of populism.”

Read the full New York Times report at this link.

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