Republican Leaders To Working Americans: You’re on Your Own

President Donald Trump’s budget bill has passed and is headed to his desk. It’s not just an economic travesty; it’s a moral one. It represents the culmination of decades of a market-first political order and failed trickle-down economics that have calcified into a greed-first economy, one that will take great moral courage to overturn.

This law is a direct attack on the basic support programs that generations of working people have fought to fortify. Its consequences will fall hardest on those very people: low-wage workers, rural communities, middle-class families, and the uninsured. While marketed as a fiscally responsible populist victory for working Americans, it is, in fact, the opposite: a cruel and calculated transfer of wealth from working families to the rich.

The megabill extends and deepens the logic of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, widely regarded as one of the most regressive fiscal measures in US history. That law overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, with households in the top 1 and 5 percent receiving tax cuts more than three times the size of those received by people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent. Trump’s new bill makes those tax cuts permanent, benefiting the ultra-wealthy while devastating the working class. Like much of Trump’s political playbook, the law uses the language of broad-based prosperity to justify austerity and the language of working-class relief to mask elite capture.

Trump’s bill effects sweeping cuts to programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), introducing work requirements and other eligibility restrictions that will push millions into free fall. Cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage will leave nearly 17 million Americans uninsured and force local hospitals—particularly those serving rural communities—to shutter. Millions of Americans who rely on SNAP for food assistance will be thrust off the program entirely, while millions more will see their benefits reduced. And if states are unable or unwilling to make up the difference, the cuts could be even deeper.

Trump’s bill doesn’t stop there. It also guts key provisions for student debt relief and rolls back investments in clean energy infrastructure and workforce development—further exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis and undermining two pillars of long-term economic opportunity for younger and middle-class Americans.

The bill reflects a worldview shaped by the myth of trickle-down economics and decades of deregulation, but it fails even on its own avowed terms. By one analysis, the bill’s debt load will stall GDP growth such that by 2054, the economy will be nearly 3 percent smaller than it would have been if the bill had not passed. This market-first approach has failed to bring prosperity to all Americans, and it will continue to fail them.

Knowing all we know about how economic growth and shared prosperity truly happen, these claims are but a fig leaf for what’s really going on. Decades of living in a political order built on the notion that individual profit-seeking will produce prosperity for all have justified a level of greed that can only be described as cruel and indecent. It is an indecency we see across the economy.

Even as most Americans struggle to make ends meet, corporate practices that deepen the problem are seen as acceptable—even rational—in a world that justifies unchecked profits as “natural” market behavior: Self-dealing and patent shenanigans in health care that push the cost of essential medicine out of reach; extractive finance in housing that drives up rent and drives down quality; and rampant union busting in workplaces, to name a few. The influence of money in politics perpetuates and solidifies these power structures, ensuring that laws and regulations prioritize the interests of the wealthy and corporations over the needs of everyday Americans.

The one bright spot in this episode has been the unified resistance by Democrats, and their relentless focus on the GOP’s catering to the rich amid a deepening crisis of affordability for the vast majority of Americans. The challenge ahead is not only to resist Trump’s cruel excesses but to build a vision for the future based on principles of inclusion and a commitment to the deep, structural reforms necessary to achieve it. We need new leaders who can confront the injustices set forth by this horrific legislation and have the courage to challenge the status quo in service of a future world where power and agency in the economy are shared, and everyone has access to a good life.

These leaders must be able to speak to economic justice and fairness with authenticity and urgency. Today’s challenges require that those with power build it with the people closest to policy impact by listening to them, rather than relying on pundits and elites. This environment requires leaders with policy ideas that address people’s hopes and fears, and who believe that economic fairness, competitive markets, and democratic accountability are not in tension, but interdependent.

It has been striking to see this modeled so powerfully by NY State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani in his bid to become New York City’s next mayor. He won the Democratic primary with a straightforward policy agenda that addresses the cost of living. His campaign has given voice to tenants, workers, immigrants, and younger New Yorkers who have long been lectured at rather than heard by our leaders. It also reflects a deep understanding of how corporate landlords and exploitative employers have found innovative ways to keep working people in precarity.

Moreover, Mamdani’s unifying rhetoric illuminates a pathway back from the brink of social dissolution. His economics-forward, anti-corporate agenda allows us to redirect ire away from marginalized communities—the kinds of attitudes that rationalize deliberate exclusions, such as work requirements—and toward solutions that more evenly redistribute power. A new generation of voters is ready to organize around this vision: An overwhelming number of 18–24 year olds voted in this Democratic primary compared to 2021.

Elections aren’t just about the future of two political parties—they’re a referendum on what kind of country we want to be. Will we continue down a path where market forces justify and perpetuate inhumanity and cruelty, all while enriching corporations and the ultra-wealthy? Or will we choose a different direction—one rooted in fairness and decency? True democracy, as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood, requires more than political freedom; it requires economic security and a real sense of dignity. When people cannot afford life’s essentials—and when government codifies exclusion with regressive laws—freedom and democracy become hollow promises.

If you ask Eleanor

“A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Struggle for Human Rights” (September 28, 1948)