Trump’s Week: Rob From the Poor, Give to the Rich, Steal Like Crazy
If the world still exists a hundred years from now or, even more improbably, a thousand, and people are still writing and reading something that vaguely resembles a “book,” some future Gibbon chronicling the descent into authoritarian corruption of the once-republican United States of America may very well sift through the archives of our era and decide that nothing sums up our decline and fall quite like the events of May 22, 2025.
Dawn broke with the House of Representatives passing the Trump budget bill, which takes from the poor to give to the rich more bluntly and blatantly than any bill in American history. The day ended with Donald Trump hosting the most corrupt dinner a president of the United States has ever held, solely for the purpose of enriching himself, and putting himself in hock to … well, his real employers—the citizens and voters of the United States—have no idea who they are, precisely.
That dinner is way beyond shocking. It’s the American equivalent of the art collection Hermann Goering stole from the homes of Jews during World War II in the way it symbolizes the sick corruption of this regime (and yeah, it’s a “regime,” not an “administration”). But from a small-d democratic perspective, it’s worse, precisely because the people who’ve enriched the president through his $Trump meme coin are mostly unknown to us.
We’ve learned a few names. They are not reassuring. The Wall Street Journal broke the story that one investor and dinner guest was the Chinese-born crypto tycoon Justin Sun, who, before this dinner, avoided even setting foot in the U.S. for fear of being arrested. His blockchain network company, says the Journal, is a “popular channel for crypto’s criminal fraternity to move funds.” (His people deny this.) The Biden Securities and Exchange Commission was suing Sun’s company; in February, the Trump administration dropped the lawsuit.
What sort of favor might Sun one day seek from the U.S. government? At least we know his identity. Otherwise, we have almost no idea who most of the 220 guests were. Were there Saudi potentates? Russian oligarchs? Employers of child laborers in some forlorn destination? Rich Qatari backers of Hamas?
Remember, a meme coin has no tangible value. It’s not an “investment” in any normal sense. Only two kinds of people would be drawn to the purchase of large shares of $Trump: people who simply adore the man—and people who want to have leverage over him.
It boggles the mind that this could be perpetrated by a sitting president of the United States. But it happened, and it will go unpunished, not only because Trump is so grubby and sleazy but because congressional Republicans are such cowards. If Kamala Harris were president and she did something that was fractionally as slimy as this—let’s say she just hosted a thank-you dinner for an undisclosed list of high-rolling donors—they’d be screaming impeachment. What Trump has done here is far worse, and with a few meek exceptions (“This gives me pause,” said the courageous Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis), they have nothing to say.
Lummis and her GOP Senate colleagues vow that they will have plenty to say about the small, ugly bill the House passed Thursday morning. And maybe they will. But what’s being said right now makes no sense.
Missouri’s Josh Hawley claims there will be no Medicaid cuts in the bill. He even said Thursday that Trump agrees with him on that. There are, nevertheless, $800-plus billion worth of Medicaid cuts in the House bill. You know, the one Trump pressured House Republicans to pass? Kentucky’s Rand Paul says adding $5 trillion to the debt isn’t very conservative. In theory, that’s true. But if Republicans want to cut taxes on rich people and take a cleaver to domestic spending—both things they yearn to do—then they’re going to add to the debt, and the deficit.
Republicans have been doing nothing but this for the last 45 years: cut taxes for the rich, punish people who rely on meager government programs like food stamps, and run the deficit and the debt to the sky. But they’ve never done it quite as nakedly as this bill does it. The House bill would add $3.8 trillion to the deficit by 2034. This will require the next Democratic president (assuming the existence of an election) to clean up an unprecedented Republican mess, which every Democratic president since Bill Clinton has had to do.
But even worse is the intentional skewing of benefits to the rich. It’s the usual GOP legerdemain: Yes, everybody gets a tax cut, but the tax cuts for the poor are peanuts, and they’re more than offset by the slashing of government programs on which poor people rely. And the rich are getting not just personal income tax relief. Republicans have thrown all kinds of things into the bill that help those at the top.
As TNR’s Grace Segers reported this week: “The [Congressional Budget Office]’s findings were echoed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business last Friday, whose budget model revealed that those in the lowest income quintile (annual income of $17,000 or less) would see their after-tax income cut by $1,035. Meanwhile, those in the top 0.1 percent of earners would take home an additional $389,280.”
This isn’t just dubious legislation. It’s antidemocratic decadence. These are the governing priorities of a ruling class that faces no democratic accountability.
There are other things in the bill too. The detention budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement jumps from $3.4 billion to $45 billion. Heather Cox Richardson draws out the key historic connection: “This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people. By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement.”
Lots of material for our future Gibbon, for whom May 22 may well symbolize our demise. The only qualifier to add? Something worse is bound to happen soon.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.