Trump Is Screwing Over His Working-Class Supporters – and He’s Not Even Hiding It
At the same time, he's selling his name and presidential authority to fatten his bank account on a scale previously unimaginable. Will it spell trouble for Republicans in 2026?
As president, Donald Trump has so flagrantly enriched himself that Republican sycophants employ a novel defense: he’s doing it right out in the open.
Trump and his party make their supporters poorer the same way. They do it right out in the open.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” embodying Trump’s economic agenda, narrowly passed in the House last week, does that on a massive scale. The 10% of Americans with the highest incomes reap 70% of the benefits, while the lowest-income 10% lose money, analysts for the Penn-Wharton Budget Model found. Adding insult to injury, the bill would swell the national debt by more than $3 trillion, leaving taxpayers with higher interest costs and increased risk of financial crisis.
What makes this so striking is Trump owes his re-election last year to voters with modest incomes. Exit polls showed his winning margin over Kamala Harris came from voters with incomes under $50,000, below the national average. Once firmly identified with business and the affluent, Republicans now routinely bill themselves as the party of the working class.
In reality, only the billing has changed. Trump’s GOP pursues the same trickle-down economic policy as its Reagan-era precursor, with a shamelessness that will challenge the durability of their electoral coalition.
Pinching His Supporters
The budget bill, combining tax cuts with reduced spending on the social safety net, represents the pre-eminent example. The Yale Budget Lab found the top 20% of earners will see their after-tax incomes rise by an average of $9,660, while the top 1% will see an increase of $63,060.
The bottom 20%, the Budget Lab projects, will lose an average of $805. For them, the value of tax cuts would be swamped by reductions of $698 billion in spending for Medicaid, which provides health care for low-income families and senior citizens in nursing homes, and almost $300 billion for food stamps.
By 2034, the Congressional Budget Office projects that around 15 million people would lose health insurance from new Medicaid rules and reduced subsidies on Affordable Care Act exchanges. That loss of insurance, in turn, would threaten the financial viability of hospitals in the rural areas that Republicans dominate politically.
But Trump 2.0 harms the economic interests of his poor and working-class supporters in many other ways.