This is Fascism
Trump’s Big Ugly Bill is fascist — not only in what it does and authorizes, but in how it got enacted
Friends,
Trump’s 940-page Big Ugly Bill was passed today by the House and is now on the way to the White House for Trump’s signature.
It is a disgrace. It takes more than $1 trillion out of Medicaid — leaving about 12 million Americans without insurance by 2034 — and slashes food stamps, all to give a giant tax cut to wealthy Americans.
It establishes an anti-immigrant police state in America, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities that will transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government.
It will increase the already-bloated deficit by $3.4 trillion.
It’s also disgraceful because of how it came to be.
Trump was elected with only a plurality of American voters, not a majority. He eked out his win by a margin of only 1.5 percent.
His Big Ugly Bill squeaked by in the Senate by one vote, supplied by JD Vance, and by just two votes in the House. No Democrat in either chamber voted for it.
Polls show most Americans oppose it.
It was passed nevertheless — within an artificial deadline set by Trump — because of Trump’s total grip on the Republican Party.
Republican lawmakers feared that Trump would go after defectors with public attacks or endorsements of primary challengers.
They also feared withering blowback from conservative media, “Maga” diehards, and Trump himself on social media.
After North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis announced his opposition to the bill, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER! He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”
Then Trump pledged to back a primary challenger to Tillis, and Tillis announced he would not seek reelection. Trump called that “good news” and threatened primary challenges against other Republican fiscal conservatives standing in the way of the bill’s passage.
Other presidents in my lifetime have been able to summon majorities of lawmakers for unpopular causes — I think of Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — but none with the retributive threats, social media fury, and potentially violent base of supporters that Trump is now wielding.
Needless to say, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts made America more inclusive. Trump’s Big Ugly Bill makes America crueler.
The best analogy isn’t to Lyndon Johnson. It’s to the “strongmen” of the 1930s — Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco.
That such a regressive, dangerous, gargantuan, and unpopular piece of legislation could get through Congress shows how far Trump has dragged America into modern fascism.
The GOP is working hard to fulfill Khrushchev's promise to destroy American from inside.
It looks like they’re going to enact this awful bill cutting at least 11 million people off healthcare. What a travesty. I cannot remember any other time in American history when so many people have been cut off a vital life and death program that has existed for so long ( since 1965). It also has to be unique in American history for its cruelty because it is almost a gratuitous act. There was no need for it. Let alone who benefited from it.
A day that will live in infamy.
Even if the Republicans pay a price - and who knows if they will - that will not make up for this.
Norman Ornstein has argued that the American people are fair and decent but I’m not sure if they are after this. Where is the outcry. The calm out there is deafening.