It’s Official: The GOP Is Not A Working-Class Party

The passage of President Donald Trump’s massive budget bill that slashes taxes for the rich, raises them for the poor and cuts health care for millions should put to rest long-running commentary that Trump is remaking the Republican Party into a working-class party.

This is the same old agenda championed by Republicans for decades. Every GOP presidential administration has successfully enacted regressive tax cuts for the wealthiest. Trump has done that again, only this time, taxes will also go up for the poorest.

What’s different this time? Republicans finally took health care away from millions of Americans after trying and failing numerous times over the years. President Bill Clinton vetoed Newt Gingrich’s attempts to cut Medicaid in 1995. Trump just signed huge Medicaid cuts into law. Efforts to repeal or gut the Affordable Care Act failed repeatedly, until now.

This is not an agenda aimed at helping the poor, working-class people, or the middle class. It is geared toward enriching the already rich while punishing everyone else.

None of the supposed populist agenda items that were bandied about in public came to fruition. Cuts to Medicaid only increased after the Senate took up the bill, which Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he would oppose and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon openly criticized. Hawley voted for the bill. The bill did not increase tax rates for the highest earners, as numerousarticles suggested Trump supported. Instead, it cut those tax rates.

The outcome of this bill will be a net negative for everyone except the rich. It will shrink the economy, lower average wages and send four-fifths of its tax benefits to the top 10% of earners, according to an analysis by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

“On a dynamic lifetime basis, lower-income households and some in the middle class are worse off, as are all future generations,” the Wharton School analysis states.

It is true that the Republican Party has seen a dramatic change in the composition of people who vote for its candidates. Its base of voting support is now found in the lower and middle classes, unlike its previous tilt to the well-off. But that hasn’t translated into policy.

Instead, Trump’s major legislative achievement in his second term is as close as Republicans have come to enacting the punitive and regressive budgets pushed by former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in the 2010s.

This is certainly part of the reason why every Republican pushing the bill on TV or online lied about what was in it.

“No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill,” Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought told CNN in June.

“There are no Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill. We’re not cutting Medicaid,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on “Meet the Press.”

But some of those who have championed the transformation of the Republican Party into a working-class party are not too pleased with this development.

“No ruling party in US history has wasted a decent mandate and a tectonic populist realignment the way the Trump II GOP is doing now,” Sohrab Ahmari, a leading populist right-wing thinker, wrote on social media after the bill passed the Senate.

Oren Cass, who heads the right-wing populist economic think tank American Compass, told Politico that the bill’s passage was like “a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.”

“Nobody really has a case for it, and it’s not clear why it’s happening,” Cass said. “I guess that might be the best that can be said for it.”

This was the most obvious result of Trump’s reelection. He did not steer away from GOP economic orthodoxy in his first term, and he did not run on doing so in 2024, so why would anyone think he would break from it when in office? Yes, he entertains questions about raising tax rates for the rich, but Trump would say he’s considering drilling into the Earth’s crust to find King Kong in the Hollow Earth if asked.

What matters are Trump’s and the Republican Party’s actions, not their empty rhetoric about standing for working people. Those actions are the fulfillment of the wet dreams of Paul Ryan, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

As scripture says, a good tree can’t bear bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t bear good fruit. And this bill is bad fruit.