'They’ll believe it': Analyst details 'decades-long Republican trick' of robbing constituents
The New Republic’s ‘Daily Blast’ with Greg Sargent touched on the uncomfortable truths some Republican Senators are admitting about President Donald Trump’s massive budget measure.
Lawmakers like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Josh Hawley (Ohio) are nervous that 10 million mostly red state residents could lose access to Medicaid under the Trump’s bill, which would also cut food stamps while delivering a huge tax cut for the rich and redistribute resources upward, with the top 10 percent of households gaining and the bottom 10 percent losing
Paul Waldman, co-author of ‘White Rural Rage’ pointed out that the Republican Party appears to be the party of the white working class, but only in terms of which constituents support them. More educated voters with college degrees are likely to vote for Democrats, while mostly white voters without college degrees are much more likely to vote Republicans.
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“But one of the implications of that is that people more likely to vote for Trump are much more reliant on government services, both as individuals and in the areas they live,” Waldman told Sargent. “And you layer on top of that a lot of the specific things [Republicans] are going after, like green energy subsidies. About 80 percent of the manufacturing subsidies that the Biden administration put in goes to Republican districts. … They’re actually going to hurt their own constituents and the people who voted for Trump most.”
But Waldman said Trump believes his own voters are “bigoted and simple-minded and they believe anything he tells them.”
“I think he does believe … that he can tell them something’s good for them when it’s actually bad for them and they’ll believe it,” Waldman said. “There are times in his first term when … he hurt them and they still voted for them. In a lot of coal country in West Virginia and Kentucky, he promised to bring back coal jobs and he didn’t. … Yet they voted for him in as high rates or higher as they did in 2020. They felt like it didn’t matter that he didn’t keep his promise.”
This illogical faith allows Trump and the GOP to invoke “fiscal savings” as a way to slash their voters’ safety net while delivering a huge tax cut to the rich and imposing deficits on the children and the grandchildren of GOP voters.
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“It’s a decades-long Republican trick,” said Waldman. “If they feel they can get away with that it’s because they’ve gotten away with it before. … Every time Republicans take power they cut taxes for the wealthy. And every time they make the same argument, which is ‘this is going to cause such an explosion of economic growth that we won’t be able to count all the money we take in from new tax revenue and nobody will feel a thing. They say that every single time, and every single time they’re wrong, but they keep coming back to it.”
Waldman explained “the core of the Republican political project” is that if you’re going to advance ethe interest of a small, wealthy sliver of the population “you have to convince the rest of the population that it’s good for them, too.”
“The fact that it never works out, well, people have short memories and the next time there’s a Republican president and a Republican Congress they’re gonna come up with another tax bill with tax cuts for the wealthy and they’re gonna say the same thing. … They don’t have to win the argument. They just have to fight to a draw.”
Waldman predicted the Republican Party and Trump would likely get the massive tax cut to the finish line this year, but “once the cuts hit you can’t convince somebody that they didn’t lose they’re health insurance, that they were ‘the waste’ Republicans were out to cut.”
He added that the party will likely try to finagle the worst of it to hit after midterm elections to protect themselves from the political fallout.
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