Trump can’t fulfil his promise to fix the economy, so he’s blaming workers instead
Forget about inflation. Now it’s all about cutting ‘waste’ in the form of jobs and our already paltry social safety net
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to harp on inflation, promising that “on day one” he would “end inflation” and lower the costs of groceries, cars and other common goods.
Well, it’s day 40, and inflation saw its largest increase
in over a year. Blink and you might have missed that Trump and his
fellow Republicans have largely abandoned their concerns about inflation
to focus on government “waste”.
While
Trump hasn’t fulfilled his campaign promise, he is living up to his
usual brand of politics: the blame game. And this blame, as usual, is
rooted in generating anger against “undeserving” Americans.
This
time, the undeserving are federal workers and poor people who get
nominal benefits from the federal government – like Snap, which
administers food stamps, and Medicaid. To fix so-called waste, the
president apparently has no choice but to crack down on spending (and
enlist help from Elon Musk), an issue that barely registered in the public consciousness in the past 10 years but is somehow now a rampant problem, according to Trump.
There
are policy frameworks backing Trump and the GOP’s divisiveness,
including the well-known Project 2025 and a lesser-known House proposal
published in 2024, Fiscal Sanity to Save America,
that centers government “waste” instead of corporate greed. And now,
with Republicans controlling the House, Senate and presidency,
Republicans have the power to act on cuts that will harm millions of
Americans.
Musk and Trump, of course, have
already worked to cut thousands of federal workers’ jobs. And with the
Trump-backed budget bill the House passed on Wednesday, including $800bn
in likely cuts from Medicaid, Republicans are one step closer to bulldozing America’s already paltry social safety net.
This isn’t just at the federal level. Republicans
have been floating proposals in state governments that would restrict
healthcare, housing and food benefits instead of making it easier to
afford things.
The party of “freedom” is
endorsing government home visits to surveil “fraud” in all US states
(according to page 43 of the GOP’s “Fiscal Sanity” plan). The party of
“family values” is also turning its attention to school lunch and
breakfast programs, which it claims are subject to “widespread” fraud
and abuse (page 46). The party that wants to “make America healthy
again” is floating restrictions to Medicaid that would make recipients
work at least 80 hours a month, a proposal that wastes government time
and money to verify work requirements and which would probably just deter people from getting healthcare, as a flailing GOP work requirement experiment in Georgia has shown.
And as Trump touts himself
as an anti-war president, his proposals belie the fact that much of
these spending cuts will now be diverted to defense contracts and other military and border spending, not on improving the economic lives of everyday workers to whom he made sweeping campaign promises.
Meanwhile, straightforward proposals to simply give people more money (which does have evidence
of working), such as universal basic income, would be outright banned
at the federal level under the GOP plan. So as the cost of living is
primed to increase, Republicans have ready-made excuses to justify
cutting billions of dollars from these programs, an exceptional sort of
cruelty.
Focusing
on extreme examples animates America’s propensity for divisiveness,
giving Republicans wide latitude to wreck the lives of millions
Of
course, no one wants to see public money being spent wastefully or
fraudulently. But incessant focus on “waste” stems from faulty,
selective evidence. According to reports from Musk’s own so-called
“department of government efficiency”, nearly 40% of cancelled contracts
to cut costs are expected to yield no savings. It also stems from something else that does have proven results: the utility of public outrage.
Focusing
on extreme examples and “undeserving” government beneficiaries animates
America’s existing propensity for divisiveness, giving Trump and his
party wide latitude to wreck the lives of millions of people who don’t
engage in fraud, waste or abuse. When Reagan wanted tax cuts for the
rich, we saw the “welfare queen” trope. When neoliberal Democrats and
Republicans wanted to cut public housing at the federal and local level,
we saw extreme stories about the criminality
of people who lived there. We cannot waste the money of hard-working
Americans on these “others”. It’s a narrative – often hinging on racism
and sexism – that has great outcomes for America’s capitalist class and
the politicians who support them.
So instead of
protesting against the rising cost of living or making demands for
universal healthcare, federal job guarantees, increased labor rights, or
Snap benefits for all, or cutting the bloated defense budget and
increasing taxes on the super-rich to pay for the nominal social welfare
benefits that other industrial countries have normalized, working-class
Americans are engaging in petty debates about what kinds of groceries other working-class Americans should buy and deputizing themselves to root out “abuse” among other workers.
Republicans
redirecting blame towards people who are suffering in this economy
under the guise of “waste” is a distraction. As inflation is poised
to worsen under Trump, Americans would be wise to focus their anger
more on the elected officials and billionaires who profit from their
pain than on each other.