Trump's Darker, Meaner Future

From Medicaid cuts to climate denial, Trump and the far-right are mortgaging our tomorrows. They're tossing aside the vulnerable & ushering in a sicker, poorer, and dirtier future for the rest of us.

The weight of Trump's budget doesn't fall on him

Americans once welcomed the future. Heck, we built the future. But now, we’re apparently scared to death of it.

In the 1960s, when I came of age, young people marched against a foreign war. Black Americans marched for civil rights, and women demanded autonomy, tired of the “Father Knows Best” fantasies of the time. Authority was challenged, tradition was questioned, and science wasn’t the enemy; it was a gateway to progress, a promise of what we could achieve together.

The future wasn’t feared back then. It was embraced as a new generation of Americans took to the streets to demand change. That was my generation, baby, I’m talkin' 'bout my generation, as the Who’s Pete Townshend put it in a song that helped define the spirit of that golden moment in time.

But now, increasingly, sadly, we’re spiraling backwards in time.

Books are banned in schools as too salacious or too “divisive” for fragile minds. Fossil fuels are back in favor, putting our environment and our climate at risk. Protections fought for by workers and consumers are dismantled. Civil rights are undermined. Women are no longer in control of their own bodies. Universities are attacked for allowing independent thought. Public health is politicized, allowing diseases we once defeated to come roaring back. Science is ignored or mocked, and our history is being … well, whitewashed.

And white nationalism? It’s not just online anymore. It’s creeping into classrooms, boardrooms, and legislatures, as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs are ruled “illegal,” and truth is scrubbed from our textbooks.

Worst of all, at least in my view, is that the vulnerable are being shoved aside to find more funding to reward the rich. Trump’s new budget bill, passed in the U.S. Senate by a single-vote margin, is just the latest example of how our world has gone haywire.

Sold as fiscal discipline, it mandates a brutal reordering of our national priorities, slashing healthcare and food assistance for the most vulnerable, and gutting clean energy investments that promised new jobs and a brighter, safer future. This isn’t a budget, it’s a bonfire.

As a country, we are no longer surging forward. We are in full retreat into a fetid past we once struggled to escape. The Gilded Age -- when robber barons owned the government and the poor died in tenements, factories, and filth — was brutal. The sequel is being written now.

On Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that passage of Trump’s proposed budget would cause 11.8 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2034. And it isn’t just the jobless, the lazy, or the fraudsters who are affected, as the MAGA Republicans would like you to think. They include working families at the lower end of the middle-class income scale, gig workers, and caregivers who rely on Medicaid or subsidized insurance plans, Obamacare, to stay afloat.

The result: More parents skipping cancer screenings, more chronic illnesses untreated, and more infectious diseases spreading without early intervention. It means fewer children seeing doctors, and emergency rooms overwhelmed by patients who have gotten increasingly sicker because they couldn’t afford basic care upfront.

Federal spending on Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act — and yes, even Medicare, the sacred cow of American health programs — would be cut by a combined $1.1 trillion by 2034, as the bill is presently written. And even if you’re insured, you’ll pay a price. When an uninsured person ends up in the ER, public hospitals are required by law to treat them. And the cost incurred doesn’t simply disappear. It’s passed on to the rest of us through higher insurance premiums and hospital fees.

The Trump budget also targets food assistance, with significant cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More than 5 million people — about 1 in 8 SNAP participants — live in a household at risk of losing at least some of their food assistance. Within that group are 800,000 children and roughly half a million adults aged 65 or older, along with those with disabilities.

It’s a full-frontal attack on the safety net in a country where one in eight households already struggles with food insecurity, and where poor nutrition directly leads to higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other costly, preventable illnesses. In the end, cutting food aid isn’t just cruel, it’s bad public health and bad economics. And it will affect every middle-class American in one way or another.

Taxing the Future

And speaking of bad economics. Trump’s budget also escalates his politically tainted assault on wind and solar power, phasing out existing federal tax subsidies by 2027 and imposing an entirely new tax on future projects.

It’s a worse-than-expected jolt that could cripple a growing industry, eliminate jobs, and lock the country into fossil fuels — oil, gas, and even coal — that have been accelerating climate change since the late 1800s, fouling our air and too often causing environmental destruction from oil spills, methane leaks, groundwater contamination, and the more-than-occasional earthquake.

Wind and solar are the fastest-growing sources of electricity in the U.S., accounting for nearly two-thirds of the new capacity coming online this year. For utilities and tech companies, adding solar, wind, and batteries has been one of the easiest ways to meet soaring electricity demand. It’s not just clean energy, it’s smart energy designed to feed a changing future.

Meanwhile, the rich get richer under legislation that’s only beautiful to them, though it seems even some of them aren’t so happy with it. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, and he was once Trump’s good buddy. But now, he’s ripping the Trump legislation, calling it “utterly insane and destructive,” and warning it could drive up prices, hurt growth, and “destroy millions of jobs.”

And then there’s the deficit. This one’s a doozy: The bill promises to add $3.3 trillion to the national deficit, driving up America’s debt and sticking taxpayers—you, me, and our kids-as they grow older—with increasingly higher interest payments that need to be covered by our taxes.

The party of “fiscal responsibility” has become the party of “what the hell, it’s only money.” Right? But it’s our money, our taxes, our children and grandchildren.

So, let’s review: Less access to healthcare for the nation’s most vulnerable, including millions of children. Less access to food assistance. More expensive energy and higher interest payments on the national debt to be paid out to the countries loaning us money, including our international nemesis, China.

What’s the line Joe Biden used to use? “Show me your budget,” he said more than once, “and I’ll tell you what your values are?”

This is Donald Trump. Human values, the core principles that guide our actions and shape our understanding of what’s important in life, have never been a strong suit for this guy.

We Built the Future

We were the first nation to enshrine freedom of speech in our founding documents, and the first to land a man on the moon. We led the world in mass production and civil rights legislation. We invented the personal computer and transformed the internet into the central nervous system of modern life.

We mapped the human genome and developed the vaccines that ended polio in the 1950s, and helped stem a global pandemic in the 2020s.

We turned ideas into billion-dollar industries, from steel to semiconductors, from the flickering frames of the first movie projector to the dawn of artificial intelligence. America never fought the future. We built the future, piece by piece, with contributions from across the nation, from government and university labs to garage startups, from immigrant scientists to unionized assembly lines.

For a long time, the world followed where we led. Not anymore.

An entire political party is working to entrench its power by dragging us into the fever-swamp authoritarianism of the far right. And we’re being led into this fetid swamp by a man who doesn’t just want to take us back to the early 1900s. He wants to drag us all the way back to the early 1700s — to an America ruled by King George III, the so-called “mad king” — when dissent was considered treason and power passed through bloodlines.

And you don’t have to squint too hard to see who he’d crown next. Don Jr. is already campaigning like a prince-in-waiting.

Trump’s budget is just the latest symptom of a nation turning its back on its own proud history, and a ruthless attempt by the far right to serve the wealthy, locking in power for a privileged ruling class they believe they’re entitled to lead.

What they’re building isn’t a country, and it isn’t a future for the vast majority of Americans. It’s a fortress for the rich. What do you think?