Mailbag: Will The Press EVER Treat Trump's Authoritarian Corruption As A Scandal?

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I wanted to quickly draw your attention to Sarah McBride’s Wednesday night appearance on MSNBC. The whole segment is worth watching, but she becomes (I believe) the first elected official to take “Trumpcare” for a spin.

Look, there are, as you mentioned, a lot of terrible things in this bill.

But in addition to putting at risk the health coverage for 15 to 17 million Americans… this is overall the single greatest remake of the American health care system in a generation or more. This is Trumpcare.

And Trumpcare means 15 to 17 million Americans more not having coverage. It means rural hospitals closing across this country. And when you decimate a critical leg of the health care stool, you are impacting all patients who will see higher premiums, who will see longer wait times.

And Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, they own that. Every single time a patient loses coverage because of this bill, they will own it. Every single time a rural hospital closes or a federally qualified health center closes, they will own it.”

It was gratifying to hear (even if it’s pure coincidence). I hope more Democrats follow her lead. We can help make that happen by amplifying the consequences of Trumpcare (insurance losses, hospital closures, defunded medical research) wherever we communicate, whenever we see them.

Fortify Democracy: would [it] make sense to now push Democrats to stop with the argument that we can't afford anything to improve the material conditions of working people (healthcare, child care, education, other safety net programs). Like, that counterargument should be dead now, never to be used again. The Big Beautiful American Disaster Bill proves that we can afford anything when it comes to Democratic policy priorities. Obviously, Democrats won't enact such policies by putting the balance due on the Deficit Credit Card like how Trump did for Trump Tax Cut 1 and 2. But Democrats should be willing to raise the necessary tax revenues (reversing all of the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy) to fund and implement all of the Democratic policy priorities.

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I would love to see Democrats embrace the approach you laid out here, think hard about what American citizens deserve, unite behind what we’d normally call an ambitious agenda, and then go out and sell it fearlessly. In his best rhetoric, Bernie Sanders frames his ideas as sensible: “there’s nothing radical about [X, Y, Z]” and then links them to the incredible wealth and power of America: “in the richest society in the history of the world.” Nobody should go hungry. Nobody should die because they can’t afford health insurance. Abstracted from all the things that have made Sanders a polarizing figure, this is the kind of appeal you can imagine frontline Democrats making in rural America.

In practice, the big problem is party disunity. Republicans, for all their policy incoherence, agree to the person about the desirability of huge, regressive tax cuts. The only limit on what they can accomplish is set by their 50th senator, and how much federal debt that person is willing to incur. If that number is $4 trillion, that’s how much they cut taxes for the rich. Democrats disagree much more fundamentally: about how much they’re willing to spend and tax, yes, but also about how the benefits should be allocated: to everyone, or just the needy?

Generally speaking, I think publics respond better to universal, solidaristic appeals than to poll tested (and, thus, mean tested) ones. We all get sick, we all die, we’ll all hit a rough patch. Means-tested benefits will tend to be cheaper, at least under legislative accounting rules, than universal benefits, and they tend to poll better in issue surveys and message tests. But that’s just to say they do less at a glance to put off voters near the median. Sometimes a defensive play is the right move it (e.g., if the alternative is toxically unpopular) but polls can’t measure the rallying power candidates lose by adopting “safe” issues. As an example: contrast Kamala Harris’s 2019 “student loan forgiveness for Pell grant recipients who open and operate businesses in underserved communities for three years” plan with just “student loan forgiveness.”

I also think appeals to our wealth and power can help unlock a public spirit of generosity. If you convince people that America is broke, or that we’re poor, or that we can’t afford the kinds of social compacts that power growth and upward mobility in much of the advanced world, they will be reluctant to tax and spend what is necessary. People who conceive of America as a prosperous society (particularly at a moment of unusual prosperity) will be more receptive to the idea that we can afford to take care of each other.

But step one is persuading moderates, front-line members, and the consultants and leaders who serve them, that this is correct. That public opinion will shift a few ticks left if Democrats unite behind a more robust social safety net.

On that front we’re basically nowhere.

Consider the Democratic party line against Trumpcare, and how it has already internalized GOP horseshit about work requirements. Why? Because work requirements poll well. So Republicans say “Medicaid isn’t for people who sit on their parents’ couches,” and Democrats and liberals respond, not with appeals to common humanity, but with logical rebuttals: Work requirements disenroll way more than just the idle poor. You can’t save money depriving young, unemployed men of health insurance, because young men aren’t big consumers of health care.

I think that’s a shame. If they don’t make solidaristic appeals against Trumpcare—and particularly, if they don’t make it because they’re scared of polls—they’ll inherit Medicaid work requirements and lack the mettle to abolish them.

Two further caveats:

1. Raising enough tax revenue to cover a cradle-to-crave safety net for all Americans will create real political challenges, even at the campaigning stage. That’s not just a thing centrists imagine or make up to shrink the limits of the possible—there is another party, and it won’t concede to popular framing. As I suggested above, the challenge might be surmountable if Democrats were genuinely united and determined to enact a modern New Deal. But in practice, ambitious candidates with plans like these will face fierce attacks both from the GOP and from within the Democratic tent, which will tend to drive public support for the underlying ideas way down.

2. Implementation, and implementation speed, would be critical. Reversing the Trump tax cuts alone won’t generate enough revenue to fully finance the kinds of health care, child care, and education reforms that 50 Senate Democrats might agree upon in principle. Taxes would have to be increased beyond that, and probably not just for households making more than $400,000 a year or whatever. The way this might pencil out as “populist” is that, accounting for health care and child care transfers, this would tend to reduce inequality and make most people better off than they were. But if Dems vote for big tax increases, and the program takes years to implement, or the implementation is mismanaged, you’ll have a political debacle on your hands.