Class Warfare Takes Root & the Rich Seize Their Beachhead
The richest 10% of Americans are boosting their hold on our economy as protections from their excesses are ended. The GOP rails against "class warfare," but the wealthy have already taken up arms.
The wealthiest 10% of American households—those making more than $250,000 a year — are now responsible for half of all U.S. consumer spending, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.
In the 1990s, spending by top earners usually constituted a third or so of annual consumer spending overall, Amanda Mull of Bloomberg News wrote this week. Now, their spending constitutes the largest share of the consumer economy in data going back to 1989, a factor that’s skewing our economic reality in a way that has masked the struggles of the broader U.S. economy, Mull suggests.
Right. Now imagine what this will be like after four years with Trump and Musk in control of the government. The Project 2025 roadmap being closely followed by Trump urges cuts in corporate and capital gains taxes, ending U.S. agencies that protect consumers and maintain market competition, and diminishing employee rights to organize or fight unfair labor practices.
If that’s not “class warfare,” I don’t know what would be. In the past, Republicans frequently accused Democrats of engaging in “class warfare,” using the phrase as a political cudgel whenever Democrats proposed boosting taxes on the wealthy, expanding social welfare or regulating business. The implication: Democrats were dividing Americans based on their paychecks for purely political purposes.
Now the tables have turned. The services and protections that many hard-pressed Americans rely on to stay afloat are under attack.
“Class warfare” is no longer simply a rhetorical device tossed around for political advantage. It’s reality, and the wealthy class — led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — has seized a beachhead that will allow for further expansion and control as we move forward.
MAGA Republicans want to cut $2 trillion from the U.S. budget, with roughly $880 billion over ten years of that likely targeting health-care programs that provide medical coverage for millions of America. Why such a deep reduction? To pay for tax cuts that primarily help the wealthy and corporations at a cost to government of at least $4 trillion over a decade.
Medicaid, which likely needs to be a big part of those cuts given its $880 billion budget, provides health coverage to about 72 million Americans, including low-income individuals, seniors and people with disabilities.
Meanwhile, the more people you eliminate from Medicaid, the more costs individual hospitals will incur to care for the uninsured. And that, my friends, will lead to increased costs for any American that uses their services. If you have a million dollars in the bank, or many billions of dollars like Musk, you can shrug and move on. The rest of us can’t.
The average wealth per household among the top 10% reached $6.9 million in mid-2024, or 67% of wealth in the U.S., according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. In contrast, the bottom 50% — the folks Trump courted with his hollow populist rhetoric— had an average wealth of $51,000, or just 2.5% of total wealth.
Which group do you think will be better served by Trump and Musk?
Safety-Net Programs
At the same time, Musk — the very picture of corporate greed — is willy-nilly eliminating safety-net programs that protect Americans from corporate greed and, in the process, helping his own companies move along unhindered by common sense rules and investigations into their actions by the government.
But the class warfare beachhead established by the very wealthy goes even deeper. On the same day that Vice President JD Vance told the world the Trump administration would prioritize U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence, delivering a sharp critique of the European Union’s efforts to regulate the tech sector, Musk made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, an artificial intelligence powerhouse.
Coincidence? Come on, folks, let’s not be naïve.
Have you been discriminated against in your job or in receiving benefits because of race, sex, national origin, color, religion, or disability? Good luck dealing with it now. The U.S. Labor Department office that investigates those complaints has been decimated by Musk’s cuts, as has the Social Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, which prevents harassment and ensures accommodations for people with disabilities.
And now we come to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a prime target for Musk, who on Feb. 7 gleefully posted on X, the social media site he owns, the words "CFPB RIP" accompanied by a tombstone emoji.
Why such obvious glee? The bureau last year announced plans to regulate the finance and payment apps used by tech monopolies. Musk’s most recent attack on the bureau came just nine days after X (the former Twitter), announced it had struck a deal with Visa to process peer-to-peer payments.
The bureau halted much of its work to investigate and penalize corporate wrongdoing last week, after the new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent — worth $700 million plus, according to public reports — ordered a review to “promote consistency” with the new Trump administration.
How does the CFPB help the 90% of Americans not wealthy? Created in 2010 following the 2008 financial crisis, it enforces laws and regulations involving our banking, mortgages, credit cards, student loans, payday lending and debt collection. Since its creation, the agency returned billions of dollars to everyday consumers through enforcement actions against predatory financial practices.
Without the CFPB in place, the rich get richer.
Democrat Focus
Democrats are starting to focus in on these cuts in their drive toward the 2026 mi-terms, seeing early hints that Americans are starting to realize what’s happening. But there’s no guarantees out there once people enter voting booths.
Working-class MAGA supporters interviewed on TV in areas of the country where Trump is strongest say they like the government cuts, seemingly unaware how they’ll be personally affected. This, of course, is no surprise given that many of them depend entirely on far-right news sources and Trump’s online shock troops to make up their minds.
All of this comes at a time when there’s a significant gap between two halves of the American public that’s based largely based on ideology and rooted in base emotions rather than the basic dollars-and-cents issues Trump and his MAGA minions are gleefully taking advantage of.
As Mull writes in her Bloomberg News column: “Americans, of course, aren’t a monolith. While our fates may be tied, they’re not tied quite so closely that the richest decile’s windfall portends prosperity and stability for everyone else, even if it’s enough to statistically mask the deepening chasm for a while. It may very well be a warning sign of the opposite.”
Fraud & Waste; Say it Again & Again
How does Trump keep his faithful in line in the meantime?
His standard strategy is constantly repeating his lies to make his point, in this case using the words “fraud” and “waste” in saying why he’s cutting government services and regulations. So far, Trump and his shadow president, Musk, have shown little proof of widespread fraud, and waste is in the eye of the beholder, based more on MAGA ideology than anything else.
Trump convinced millions of his followers that the 2020 election was stolen by doing the same thing, shamelessly repeating the lie with little proof to back it up. And now that he’s president, he has a squadron of folks working directly for him who will keep repeating his lies on the cutbacks time and time again.
Waste and fraud. Fraud and waste. Waste and fraud. Fraud and Waste. Is there a MAGA Republican in the country who isn’t spitting out these words right now?
This is a phenomenon called "illusory truth effect" that’s been widely studied by psychologists, neuroscientists, and behavioral scientists. It refers to the tendency for people to believe false or misleading information as true simply because they have been exposed to it repeatedly.
Consider the advertising phrases "Just Do It" by Nike, or "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" by cereal companies. Consider the political propaganda used in the Bush administration centered on its “weapons of mass destruction” phrasing. How may times did we hear that?
But none of these folks hold a candle to Trump, the master of the illusory truth effect and a true student of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, who famously said: "Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth."
Trump presents himself as a populist fighter for the "forgotten American," but his actions — and the blueprint provided by Project 2025 — tell a different story. As Musk works to gut consumer protections and Trump imposes tariffs under the guise of economic nationalism, the real winners are the ultra-wealthy. Their power is being steadily consolidated while everyday workers pay more, earn less, and lose essential safeguards.
This isn’t politics as usual. We’re in the middle of a class war and the battlefield is being shaped by those at the very top of the economic ladder. What do you think?
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The Sunday wrap-up:
Trump & Vance Gang Up on Zelensky: Whatever you think about the the U.S. support of Ukraine in its defense against Vladimir Putin, the bottom line is Russia invaded Ukraine. The lie that Ukraine caused the war is just that, no matter how often it’s repeated.
The recent scene in the Oval Office between Trump, the clownish Vance, and a clearly aggrieved Volodymyr Zelensky aligns the U.S. with Vladimir Putin’s war aims, undermining the very principles of democratic solidarity. Trump could have stepped in to end the soap opera tenor but decided instead to contribute to it. No surprise there.
An “Official” Language: Trump has signed an executive order designating English as our “official language,” the first time we’ve ever actually had one. This revokes a common-sense mandate from Bill Clinton's presidency that required agencies and organizations receiving federal funding to provide services and documents in languages other than English.
The White House says the move is aimed at promoting unity, establish efficiency in government operations, and creating a pathway for civic engagement. But really? Critics say non-English speakers — even those working hard to learn the language — will face challenges in accessing healthcare, legal assistance, and even voting information as a result.
My guess: “Exclusion” is more the issue here than “unity.”
Trump Takes on the Weathermen: In the 1960s, the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground, were a radical militant organization committed to the overthrow of the government, which they viewed as imperialist and oppressive, particularly in relation to the Vietnam War and racial injustice.
These days, the weathermen are folks in the federal government who warn us when storms are bearing down on us. On Thursday, Trump fired hundreds of weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). On Friday, hundreds more resigned from the agency.
Project 2025, the policy roadmap followed by Trump, calls NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and urges that it be dismantled. But here’s the issue: Many of those now lost worked in the National Weather Service, which helped prepare folks who live in the Republican-dominant states of Florida and Texas as major destructive hurricanes bore down on them from the Gulf of Whatever-you-want-to call-it over the past two years.
Maybe some of the departed staffers will form a new Weather Underground, aimed at identifying instances where forecasts fall short in the future. It wouldn’t overthrow the government, but it may give some very wet people pause as we move forward.