Republicans Are Damaged by Their Own CrueltyThey’re pathologically unwilling to help Americans in need — and Democrats should hammer this home
People who lost SNAP benefits at a food bank Like almost all progressives, I was infuriated and disheartened by Senate Democrats’ cave on the shutdown Sunday. The party won stunning election victories Tuesday — and its leaders responded with yet another preemptive surrender? (Chuck Schumer may have voted no, but he didn’t manage, and may not even have tried, to prevent defections.) Yet while the immediate politics displayed Democratic tactical weakness, the larger story highlighted a different kind of weakness on the part of Donald Trump and MAGA as a whole — namely, their innate cruelty. They have a visceral dislike for policies that do anything to help the less fortunate, and can’t even bring themselves to be cynical, to help Americans temporarily while they consolidate power. Consider the grounds on which the shutdown fight took place. Democrats made it about the enhanced subsidies that have kept premiums for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act fairly reasonable for millions of Americans — Americans who are now facing huge premium hikes that will create intense financial distress and force many to go uninsured. Before the big cave, Democrats proposed a deal in which they would provide the votes to reopen the government in return for a one-year extension of those enhanced benefits. Republicans should have jumped at this deal. It’s true that Republicans are determined to destroy much of the social safety net. The One Big Beautiful Bill will impose savage cuts in Medicaid and food stamps. But these big cuts are set to happen after the midterm elections. Drastically increasing health care costs at the beginning of 2026, causing millions to lose insurance, certainly looks like a massive political blunder. My guess is that it doesn’t reflect a considered strategy. Instead, Republicans just stumbled into this because nobody in a position of power within the party understood how the ACA works. And polling suggests overwhelming public support for extending the enhanced subsidies: 74 percent overall, including half of Republicans:
Source: KFF So Republicans should have been eager for a chance to postpone the pain. Instead, by rejecting Democratic proposals, Republicans have placed the onus for soaring premiums squarely on themselves. But the thought of doing something decent, even cynically and temporarily, doesn’t seem to have crossed Republican minds. John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, immediately declared the proposed deal a “nonstarter,” insisting that his party would only negotiate about healthcare after the government is reopened — which everyone understands means that Republicans will agree to nothing. Why reject a deal that could have protected Republicans from their own mistakes? Part of the answer is sheer ignorance. Here was Trump’s response:
Substance aside, think about the idiocy of the timing here. The health insurance crisis is happening right now, as Americans open letters from their insurers and discover that they are facing huge increases — more than 100 percent on average, much more in many cases — in the cost of coverage beginning in just a few weeks. This is not exactly the time to propose immediately scrapping our existing health care system, replacing it with … something. And a vague promise to deal with an immediate crisis by totally revamping healthcare is especially lacking in credibility coming from a man who has been promising, and failing, to deliver a superior alternative to Obamacare for around 9 years. On the substance, Trump’s post makes it clear that after all this time he still has no idea how health care works. We’ve always known that he didn’t and doesn’t understand Obamacare, and why it’s hard to come up with a better system other than single-payer health insurance. But it’s now clear that he doesn’t even understand why healthcare relies on insurance, why we can’t pay medical expenses out of pocket. Hint: You never know if or when you’ll need extremely expensive treatment, but should the need arise, only the ultra-wealthy can come up with the necessary cash. Oh, and it’s especially rich to see Trump take a break from boasting about his new gold-and-marble bathrooms to pretend to hate “money sucking Insurance Companies.” Anyway, Trump’s vague ideas are, as Thune would say, a nonstarter. But why not punt, postponing the health affordability crisis by agreeing to a temporary extension of the ACA subsidies? The answer, I believe, is that doing so would involve giving help to people who need it — and that’s something that, at a deep psychological level, MAGA can’t bring itself to do. Health care isn’t the only area in which Trump and company’s cruelty and lack of compassion are becoming major political liabilities. The Trump administration rushed to cut off SNAP (food stamps) as soon as the government shut down, even though there was money available to pay those benefits — and the administration both defied court orders to pay and tried to stop states from helping the hungry. Going beyond government programs, most Americans are very unhappy about the state of the economy. They see high grocery prices and a very weak job market. Consumers’ assessment of the current state of the economy is worse now than it was at the peak of the 2021-22 inflation surge, or the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis:
The rational thing for Trump to do would be to say “I feel your pain,” while blaming the previous administration and promising that things will get better soon. But he can’t even fake empathy. Instead, he keeps insisting that things are great, in particular that “groceries are way down.” This is factually false. More important from a political point of view, it contradicts what people — even Republican partisans — are seeing in their own lives. Here’s what Americans think about grocery inflation, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll:
Has there ever been a case in which “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” was an effective political strategy? Last Tuesday’s elections clearly showed that it isn’t working now. But Trump and his minions seem unable to try anything different. Let me add that MAGA still seems to believe that scenes of masked ICE agents beating up women and senior citizens work to their political advantage. Either that, or they just can’t help themselves. The political moral is that the humiliating cave over the shutdown isn’t the end of the story. Democrats can and should keep hammering Trump and his party over their indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans. They need to make sure both that Americans know who’s responsible for surging premiums now and that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will lead to savage cuts in both Medicaid and food stamps after the midterms. MAGA can’t help being cruel. It can’t even pretend to care about other people’s suffering. And Democrats should take full advantage of this pathology. |
