Trump Seeks To Slash The Social Safety Net To Offset Billionaire Tax Cuts
MAGA Working Class People Would Be Harmed
MAGA Will Not Oppose Trump’s Cuts
The New York Times has a long story today abut Trump’s proposed cuts to social safety net programs. The story goes into detail about the impacts of such cuts on working class people, especially Trump’s MAGA base, see:
The new administration wants to slash aid for health, food and housing, but many of those programs now reach the struggling working class he is courting.
Gee, it’s a little late now. Perhaps they should have reported this story BEFORE the election?
The NY Times and the Democratic Party have ignored the working class and poor and homeless for decades now, as they abandoned the New Deal Coalition in favor of taking corporate money and championing Neoliberal economic policies that destroyed labor and deindustrialized and devastated working class communities.
The Democrats and media lost touch with the idea that government and government programs benefit the day to day lives of real people and that there are direct links between politics and all those “kitchen table” issues they tend to trot out during campaign rhetoric.
As a result, they both have zero credibility and many working people feel so betrayed that they voted for Trump, some even knowing that they were voting against their own economic interests.
The NYT story seems like an obvious attempt to drive a wedge in Trump’s MAGA base.
It won’t work.
First of all, MAGA does not read The NY Times (it’s “fake news” to them).
But there are many other reasons, which I listed in this reader comment to the NYT:
MAGA will not oppose even elimination of the social safety net for the following reasons:
1) they are in a cult and the leader is never wrong and even if he is, he is not to be resisted or criticized;
2) MAGA believes welfare is evil because it creates dependence on government and saps the individual’s will and dignity. They prefer “Christian charity” and tough love to build character;
3) MAGA thinks welfare recipients are lazy, stupid, drug or alcohol dependent, or mentally ill and don’t deserve to live the easy life with their tax money;
4) MAGA thinks most of the money goes to black people, a blatantly racist false assumption;
5) MAGA is cruel – they enjoy making people suffer, particularly liberal democratic people;
6) MAGA hates government and wants it dismantled. They have been told by right wing media, the Christian White Nationalist Church, and Republicans for decades that all their problems were created by government, not the corporations who shipped jobs overseas to exploit slave labor and no environmental regulations and the billionaire’s who rigged the system;
7) MAGA thinks they earned what they have and the poor, homeless, unemployed, sick, et al deserve what exactly they got and should suffer.
There is no reasoning with MAGA and virtually no ground for traditional politics as usual compromise.
The media and the Democrats need realize this and focus on the dangers of Trump’s fascist regime and get people of good will off the couch and out in the streets.