Another note to my friends who are MAGA, this part may surprise you too. I understand why you were angry about the economy. Wages stagnant. Housing out of reach. Health care crushing families. High inflation eating away at every paycheck. A system that always seemed to reward the same people at the top while everyone else struggled. That frustration was real.
I can understand why the message worked in the beginning. Help working Americans. Bring back jobs. That message resonated far beyond party lines.
But that is not what you got.
What you got was the largest tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and corporations in modern history. In 2017, this administration slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The top one percent captured the overwhelming share of the benefits. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that single bill added nearly 2 trillion dollars to the national deficit over ten years.
Let that sink in.
Deficits suddenly stopped mattering the moment billionaires got their cut.
And now ask yourself how they plan to pay for it. Not by clawing money back from the ultra wealthy. Not by closing loopholes. Not by restoring fair corporate taxes. They are paying for it by gutting Medicaid, threatening food assistance, weakening disability benefits, and targeting programs that keep millions of Americans alive and afloat.
This is not theoretical. Republican budgets repeatedly propose hundreds of billions in Medicaid cuts. That is nursing homes. That is cancer treatment. That is care for disabled children and seniors. While corporate profits hit record highs.
Here is the part that makes no sense.
The people harmed most by these cuts are the same people being told to blame immigrants, the poor, or their neighbors for why life feels harder. Not the billionaires who pay less in taxes than a schoolteacher. Not the corporations buying back stock instead of raising wages.
You were told this administration was fighting for you. In reality, it is working against you and for the wealthiest.
If you are working harder than ever and still falling behind, that is not because someone poorer than you took too much. It is because someone far richer than you paid too little.
So here is the question you keep avoiding.
If an administration explodes the deficit to enrich the wealthiest Americans, then turns around and cuts health care and basic support for everyone else, how is that in your best interests? At what point do you stop blaming the victims of these policies and start questioning the people who designed them?
Because you cannot claim to stand with working Americans while defending a system that takes from the bottom and hands it to the top. And you cannot call that strength, patriotism, or common sense.
At some point, loyalty has to give way to reality.
