Trump’s Great American smash and grab
Just before 5:00 this morning, while most Americans were asleep, senators had been locked away inside the Capitol building for a heated debate during an all night vote-a-rama. And as the night turned into morning, it became clear that the outcome had already been decided long before the first vote was cast. Democrats had forced these votes to put Republicans on the record regarding immigration enforcement, Trump policies, and spending priorities. Yet Republicans remained solely focused on their loyalty to Trump and carrying out his demands regardless of the impact on their fellow Americans.
When the marathon session finally ended and the senators and their staff stumbled out into the early morning light, nearly $70 billion in new funding for ICE and Border Patrol had been approved, along with protections that shield Trump, his family, and affiliated businesses from IRS audits. Americans are expected to pay every tax dollar they owe and are always subject to audit. The president, the wealthy, and the politically connected play by a different set of rules entirely. One set of rules for them. Another for everyone else.
What happened this morning was bigger than one vote in one chamber. What the Senate did was not create that shield out of thin air. The Justice Department had already done that, weeks earlier, through a settlement addendum that forever barred the IRS from examining the tax returns already filed by the president, his relatives, and his companies, whether the problems in those returns are presently known or unknown. What the Senate did this morning was refuse to take it back. Democrats brought amendment after amendment to strip the carve-out out of the bill, and the Republican majority beat back nearly every one. They beat back amendment after amendment aimed at the settlement protecting Trump. The closest vote, an effort by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to block the related 1.8 billion dollar payout fund tied to that same settlement, failed by a single vote, 49 to 50. And through it all, they left the audit shield itself untouched, the one that lets Trump off the hook for what is reported to be roughly 100 million dollars in back taxes, and the entire family and the Trump Organization off the hook for any tax crimes they may have committed. And once you see that for what it is, the rest of what is happening makes complete sense.
Yesterday, a government watchdog group called Public Citizen released a report on the donors funding Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom. The report found that more than half of the publicly identified donors to that project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than fifty billion dollars in the past six months alone. Fourteen of the twenty-seven known corporate donors saw their government business grow in that window. The single biggest winner was Lockheed Martin, which received roughly 43.8 billion dollars in new or expanded contract funding since giving to the project. And 16 of those same 27 donors are facing federal enforcement actions that have been dropped, scaled back, or suspended by this administration. Those included antitrust reviews, labor rights cases, and securities matters. All quietly going away, for the companies writing the checks.
Jon Golinger, one of the authors of the report, directly said the truth of the matter. These giant corporations are not funding the ballroom out of the goodness of their hearts. They have massive interests before the federal government, and they are buying favor. And the administration has fought to keep the full donor list secret, disclosing only twenty-one corporate names while news outlets dug up six more, forcing Public Citizen to sue under the Freedom of Information Act just to see the contract that lets them hide who is paying. The donors who paid for the president’s pet-project ballroom were collecting 50 billion dollars in federal contracts and watching their legal troubles disappear. And just as troubling, the private donations were never going to be enough. The project that Trump promised would be paid for entirely by private money has doubled in cost, and so his allies in Congress quietly tried to move one billion dollars of taxpayer money into the immigration bill to help cover it, with roughly 220 million of that aimed at the ballroom itself, bulletproof glass, and drone detection and all.
With Trump, it’s all about the money, and it’s all part of a bigger plan. Yesterday evening, at 6:08, by a vote of 213 to 210, the House of Representatives passed a bill that cuts the fruit and vegetable benefits that nearly 5.4 million toddlers, preschoolers, and pregnant and postpartum mothers depend on through the WIC program. It is a $141 million dollar cut, about 10 percent, to the one part of the program that lets families buy fresh, frozen, or canned produce. And the House voted to take a piece of even that away, while grocery prices keep climbing.
And it did not even pass cleanly along party lines. It passed because four Democrats crossed over to help Republicans get it across the finish line, with five Republicans voting against it. So the margin was three votes, and the cruelty did not wear only one party’s jersey. Sometimes it just needs a few people willing to look away. None of this is just chaos and cruelty. And nor were any of them a coincidence. They were all predetermined and part of a larger plan. What has changed is the speed at which they are doing it all. The all-night votes and the rushed contracts and the cuts jammed through by three and four votes in a single day. The reason is sitting right in front of us. The man at the center of it all is failing.
Yesterday, during the hour-plus event in the Oval Office to promote what he called “beautiful, clean coal,” Donald Trump fell asleep for all to see on camera. He was slumped sideways in his chair, while the White House social media operation tried to deny it. After his visit to Walter Reed last week, he went missing for 8 days, reemerged just enough for us all to see how unwell and impaired he is. And today, the President of the United States needed help getting down a single stair, steadied so he would not fall at the end of the event in Wisconsin. He is getting worse by the day, and this creates an urgent issue for those using him to carry out their corruption plans. They have to act fast.
And that is what makes this moment so dangerous, because the decline and the grab are not two separate stories. They are the same story. The people around Trump are not slowing down. They are speeding up. They are encouraging him to say the loudest, most frightening things he can, to keep the country reacting to him while they work, and they are racing to seize as much money and as much power as they can while he is still able to sign what they put in front of him. Because they can see what is coming. They know that at some point, he will not be able to carry out their work on his own, and they know the midterms are closing in, and they know that if they lose their grip on Congress, all slows down to a near stop. So this is a fight to the bottom. A smash and grab in the window they have left. And the more he fades, the faster they move.
The urgency comes from what they are trying to turn this country into. One with only two kinds of people in it. At the top, a small and permanent class of the ultra wealthy, the Epstein class, the politically connected, the people whose names keep turning up in the same documents and the same donor lists and the same circles of protection. And at the bottom, everyone else, kept just insecure enough, stretched thin and desperate. Frightened about money, frightened about healthcare, frightened about losing their jobs, so that they will take any job, accept any wage, and ask no questions.
They do not want a middle. A middle class has the time and the security to pay attention, to organize, to participate, and to push back. Desperate people do not. Desperate people are too busy surviving. And desperate people do desperate things. They are counting on that. They are counting on exhaustion, fear, and on people being so overwhelmed by the daily struggle of getting by that they never stop long enough to ask why the richest people in the country keep getting richer while everyone else falls further behind.
They have already gone after the Department of Education because an educated population is harder to manipulate, deceive, and control. They know that the children of the wealthy will always have access to the best schools, private tutors, elite universities, and every opportunity money can buy. No billionaire is lying awake at night worried about whether their child will receive a quality education.
They go after healthcare for much the same reason. In their worldview, a person who needs help is not a human being deserving of dignity. They are an expense and a burden. Someone standing between them and another tax cut, government contract, or another transfer of wealth to the people who already have more than they could spend in ten lifetimes. Never mind that working people paid into these systems their entire lives or that they earned those benefits. The ultra wealthy will never have to choose between paying rent and seeing a doctor. They will never ration insulin. They will never delay treatment because they cannot afford the bill. That reality belongs to everyone else.
And they want to strip away every form of public support they can because every dollar invested in a struggling family is a dollar that cannot be redirected upward. Every program that helps someone survive a crisis makes that person a little less dependent on the people at the top. And dependency is the point.
The goal is not prosperity. The goal is control. A population that needs the people at the top. A population that performs the labor the wealthy do not want to do. A population too exhausted, too overworked, too indebted, and too frightened to walk away, speak up, organize, or demand something better. Because people who are constantly struggling to survive rarely have the time or energy to challenge the system that is keeping them there.
And the contempt does not stop at money. Because the people driving this, and we are talking largely about a certain kind of powerful man, want a world where women are subservient to them, where women exist to meet their needs and raise the next generation of workers. That is why they treat LGBTQ Americans as people who do not count, who cannot contribute in the way they have decided contribution is supposed to look, because they are not the ones serving those needs. That is why there is an obsession with population growth. More workers. More bodies. It is not about families. It is about supply. None of this is random. They are not careless. They are doing this on purpose, and they do not care about this country as it is, because they intend to rewrite it entirely.
And that is the part I keep coming back to, because it is the part that outlasts him. They want to change what America means. They want to take everything we were taught to revere, the founding, the flag, the idea of the country itself, and reattach it to one man. They are building Donald Trump into a kind of pseudo god of America, the way we were raised to look back on the Founding Fathers, so that long after he is gone, they can keep telling his story their way, keep rewriting what he was and what he stood for, keep using his name to justify whatever comes next.
This is not new. It is one of the oldest moves in the authoritarian playbook. When Stalin consolidated power, he not only seized the economy and the courts, but he also seized the past. He had photographs altered to erase the people he purged, had the textbooks rewritten so children grew up learning a version of history with him at the center of it, and built a cult around himself that came to feel almost religious. The same impulse runs through Putin’s Russia, taking the state’s assets and handing them to a handful of loyal oligarchs who get to keep their fortunes only so long as they serve the man at the top. That is the machine being assembled here. A tiny circle of the protected and the enriched. A vast public kept dependent. And a story, carefully maintained, that tells everyone this was always the way it was meant to be.
You can see the same shape in our own history if you look. In the Gilded Age, the men who owned the railroads and the steel mills built company towns where workers were paid in company money, lived in company housing, and bought from the company store, so that they were always, by design, in debt to the very people they worked for. No safety net or leverage. And no way out. That is what dependency engineered from above actually looks like, and it is what is being built behind the scenes while Trump falls asleep or creates some other public spectacle.
And I think about all of this as someone who still believes in what this country was supposed to be. Because every one of us who was not brought here in chains through slavery, and who is not descended from the Native peoples who were already here, came from somewhere else. Our families arrived carrying their own histories, cultures, strengths, flaws, talents, and burdens. Some came with nothing. Some came with more. Some arrived fleeing famine, war, persecution, or poverty. Others came seeking opportunity. But all of those different experiences became part of the same story.
Those strengths and weaknesses shaped us. They shaped our communities. They shaped our institutions. And together they shaped this country into what it is today. That was always the idea. Not that any one group would rule over everyone else, but that people from different places and different backgrounds could build something together that none of us could build alone. That is what government is supposed to be. It is not a king and his court helping themselves to the treasury. It is not an authoritarian, a dictator, or a fascist, and his oligarchs using public power to enrich themselves. It is not a system designed to funnel wealth upward while everyone else struggles to get by.
Government is the connection between us. It is our pooled resources. Our shared investment in one another. It is the roads we build together, the schools we educate our children in, the research that cures disease, the protections that keep workers safe, the help we extend when our neighbors fall on hard times, and the opportunities we create for the next generation. It is the recognition that all of us do better when all of us have a chance to succeed. That is what they are really trying to take. Not just money, programs, or services.
The entire premise of a government is that we belong to one another, that government exists to serve the public good, and that the wealth of a nation should benefit the people who built it rather than a small and permanent class at the top.
And the hardest part right now, the part that sits heaviest, is watching them lie to the American people about it, and watching people believe it. Watching neighbors who feel real patriotism line up behind the destruction of the very thing they love. He is trying to wipe our memory of what being an American even means. I talk to people I know outside the United States, and they tell me they have gone from shock to horror to a kind of complete disgust at what they are watching happen here. And real people are being hurt. They voted to pull fruits and vegetables from the mouths of pregnant women and babies. They are going after trans kids. They keep choosing the people who are already marginalized, already struggling, already carrying the most, and the thing they refuse to see is the potential in those very people. A single mother who needs a little help feeding her kids is raising children who could become the next great teacher, the next doctor who cures cancer, the next president, or simply the next decent human being this country needs. When you look at a person and see only their limitation instead of their potential, you are not just hurting them. You are robbing all of us. And they have convinced a whole subset of Americans that it is better to hate than to love, better to suspect your neighbor than to stand with them, better to accuse the struggling of leeching the system while the people doing the actual leeching sit at the very top with all the money and all the contracts and all the protection. That is the country they are actually selling.
And as ugly as all of this is, we need to remember that they are building it in a hurry because they know it is not built to last. Americans are finally waking up to what is happening. They are racing against time because time is no longer on their side. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: Trump targeted Bruce Springsteen again. He cannot stand that Bruce will not be quiet. And here is the thing I keep coming back to. At seventy-six, Bruce is still one of the most tireless voices in the resistance who pours hours into a crowd that loves him. Meanwhile, the man attacking him cannot make it thirty minutes through his own event without falling asleep. This picture is from two months ago at the LA concert my daughter and I attended.
Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-vote-a-rama-ice-funding-reconciliation/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-reconciliation-bill-immigration-dhs/
The destruction of an educated American public began long ago. Otherwise we would not be in this disaster. We will not be able to fight back effectively until we shake off the illusion that electing more Democrats will save us. Only a mass movement that forces this fascist machine to a halt will give us a fighting chance.
Thank you Heather.
I am so appalled at the disgusting money , land grab and the constant finger pointing at others when Trumps revolting band of viscous underlings are busy taking handfuls of gold to line their pockets.
All I can think of to help is that each person is kind and helpful to their neighbours and the neighbours pass on the same kindness. Hopefully that can cause a tidal wave of looking out for each other and making sure these money grabbing toads finally fall.