Trumpublican

 Well, so Trump ultimately signed his big abominable bill into law—and all in time for his self-imposed July 4 deadline. And after it happened, Jamelle Bouie made a good point over on the New York Times op-ed page: what is most striking about it is just what a blandly predictable sort of Republican bill it is. It's horrible to be sure—a disaster on multiple fronts. But it's disastrous in all the ways that Republican governance usually is. 

Bouie's point is that Trump's weirdness tends to distract from all the ways he is also just a typically awful Republican president. We focus so much on all the eccentric and bombastic ways he is terrible—that we tend to miss the ways in which he is also just ordinarily terrible. On top of all the unique ways in which he is awful, he is also just a Republican. And fundamentally, what that always means—when push comes to shove—is that he will cut taxes for the rich. 

In a 2002 essay about the early years of the George W. Bush administration, Gore Vidal described the new White House team as "eerily inept in all but its principal task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes." And indeed, what's eery about Trump is how perfectly this statement also summarizes the first six months of his second presidency. What has he accomplished so far—other than to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor, and to strip heath benefits and food aid from the poor? 

This "big, beautiful bill" was his signature policy achievement of the first part of the second term—on which Trump has staked his whole reputation. And what did it actually do? It cut taxes for the rich, while slashing benefits for the poor. It swelled federal deficits by eliminating tax revenues while expanding funding for ICE detention. In short, it did what Republicans always do. For all Trump's vaunted distinctions from Bush—they share this much, alas, in common. 

And that's not even to mention the effects of Trump's tariffs—which essentially amount to a consumption tax. As such, they will mostly be paid by the poor and working class. And so, Trump—for all his supposed economic populism—is really just shifting the expense of government from the shoulders of the rich—who are best positioned to sustain it—to the poor—that is, the people who can least afford it. As J.A. Hobson once pointed out, a tariff is really just an "indirect tax" on the poor. 

In his misanthropic Swiftian satire, Penguin Island, Anatole France (who clearly shows himself in the book to have been influenced by Hobson) at one point depicts the Penguin-people's early efforts to establish a state. Right up front, they have to decide who should bear the burden of paying the costs of government. Some propose that perhaps the rich—having the most to spare, and being the least likely to starve should they be forced to give a small portion of it for the common good—ought to take up this task. 

But no, skillful advocates declare: "The poor live on the wealth of the rich and that is the reason why that wealth is sacred. Do not touch it [....] You will get no great profit by taking from the rich, for they are very few in number; on the contrary you will strip yourself of all your resources and plunge the country into misery. [...] What is certain is that everyone eats and drinks. Tax people according to what they consume. That would be wisdom and it would be justice."

As France ironically declared: the argument must be sound, since "in fifteen hundred years the best of the Penguins will not speak otherwise." And so—the tax burden continued to fall on the poor instead of the rich. And thus: "Although children died in marvellous abundance and plagues and famines came with perfect regularity to devastate entire villages, new Penguins, in continually greater numbers, contributed by their private misery to the public prosperity."

And so today, the Republicans are not speaking otherwise. And the eleven million or so Americans who are to be imminently dispossessed of their health care, and the innumerable others who may lose their nutrition support—will, one supposes, contribute by their private misery to the public prosperity. 

This is just the standard Republican platform. It's the "Contract with America" all over again. As William Gaddis once observed, the Gingrich program was just a scheme to treat poverty as a punishable offense. It's the same moral system they apply in Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Gaddis noted: sickness and misfortune are treated as shameful crimes; whereas corruption and injustice are treated as forgivable peccadilloes. Certainly, this is Trump's ethic, but it's really the ethic of his whole party. 

What else are we to make of the Medicaid and food aid cuts in the bill other than a nod to the traditional Republican belief that poverty is a sign of God's displeasure—an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual disgrace—meriting not only the punishment of poverty itself—which many people might have thought already contained enough suffering on its own, without any help—but of whatever additional ignominy and misfortune the government can heap on top of it. 

And so the Republican Party—whether led by Trump or otherwise—will continue to be the champion of those "two great public virtues"—as Anatole France put it: "respect for the rich and contempt for the poor."