Welcome to The Poverty Trap, a newsletter and podcast for people who are fed up with the inequality baked into America’s system and want to individually and collectively make change.
Enjoy this clip of Senator Joni Ernst (R Iowa), trying to explain to her constituents how they would be “protected” under President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”…that slashes Medicaid by over $700 billion.
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The “Merry Month of May” has left me with too much to do and too few hours to dedicate to post writing. Please forgive my tardiness, and know that I will be back on a weekly schedule starting today.
In the last week or so, while our heads are still spinning over the tariffs, deportations and the administration’s other unsavory deeds, the press and freelance journalists are writing a lot about two issues: the simultaneous slashing of federal programs to help the poor and middle class, like Medicaid and food stamps, and the billions of dollars in graft “brazenly” raked in by the Trump family at work. These two efforts go together, hand in glove, and seem to be part of a purposeful strategy to enlarge the already massive wealth gap in our country. Or is it “simple avarice” on the part of a few with no greater plan, like an overthrow of our democracy?
First is the proposed budget bill supported by President Trump and all House Republicans: it literally takes food out of the mouths of poor children and gives that money to the super rich in tax cuts and subsidies to boost their businesses.
At the same time, the President and his family, among other government officials and mega-company CEO’s, are trading official business of the government for money. Large amounts of money, in the billions of dollars, that benefit only President Trump, his family and other super wealthy people. This is called corruption and graft.
Let’s start with those cuts to Medicaid, our country’s health insurance for the poor. Everyone’s been talking about the irrepressible Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst and her cruel, flippant response to her constituents and the entire country at a recent town hall.
While trying to defend the huge Medicaid cuts included in President Trump and the Republican party’s “big, beautiful bill”, she responded to a town hall constituent who stated the obvious: “People will die.” The good Senator quickly responded with her own profound statemement: “Well, we are all going to die.” Hey thanks, Senator. I think we all realize we’re going to die at some point, but we don’t believe our death should come purposely by the hand of our own government.
And here’s what Speaker Johnson had to say about slashing the Medicaid budget:
Republicans stress that their version of the bill aims to create savings in Medicaid by targeting "waste, fraud and abuse," in the system. Speaker Mike Johnson has said the proposal includes going after those who are "defrauding the system."
I understand there may be some waste involved in administering any federal program, but let me assure you from first-hand experience — very few, if any people receive Medicaid without meeting its embarrassingly low earning requirements. And each penny you earn must be proven with pay stubs, bank account statements and sometimes signed letters from your boss stating on company letterhead how many hours you work and your pay, particularly if you only work part time. If you are one of the perhaps handful of people in the country crafty enough to outsmart this system, you deserve the benefits.
While you’re riled up about Senator Ernst’s flippant remark and her snarly, sarcastic “apology” to her constituents, read this perfectly written take down of Senator Ernst by
“Well, we all are going to die.” That’s not just callous. That’s not just tone-deaf. That’s a moral collapse, broadcast live. That’s the mask slipping, the curtain pulled back on exactly what this Republican Party thinks of you, me, and anyone who isn’t padding their campaign coffers.
In this week’s New Yorker, Evan Osnos wrote a sprawling, intense article about the profiteering going on in our current administration, aptly titled “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder”.
It describes in great detail the pay-to-play dealings that have raked in hundreds of millions and more for the first family, and how a few progressive, elected officials (Senators Bernie Sanders Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy, Representative Alexandria Occasio-Cortez among others), the group Patriotic Millionaires, and millions of ordinary citizens are trying to call out the graft.
Trump has sold influence so briskly that the political machinery cannot keep up. After he was offered a four-hundred-million-dollar gift from the government of Qatar—an airplane so opulent that it was dubbed the “palace in the sky”—Dan Pfeiffer, a former White House communications director, called it “the most brazenly corrupt move by any President in U.S. history, and it’s not close.” Less than a day later, a crypto venture owned by the Trump family auctioned off a dinner with the President at one of his golf clubs. The family profited from the crypto auction twice over: from fees, which have so far netted them and their partners three hundred and twenty million dollars, and from their own stash of Trump-branded coins, which had grown in value to $4.1 billion even before the auction was complete. (emphasis added).
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos also called out President Trump and his family for “brazen corruption’ during the opening remarks of his June 1 show. You can read the Daily Beast article detailing specific incidences of corruption, along with the video clip here, but I’ll provide a few highlights:
“The scale is staggering,” the ABC host said. “President Trump and his family are making hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars as Trump and his administration take official actions that benefit contributors and investors.” (emphasis added).
Stephanopoulos also cited a report in the Atlantic by David Frum, which analyzed the overwhelming number of ways the Trump family is selling our country to the highest bidder. This is how Frum summed it up:
“‘Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency,’ he writes,” Stephanopoulos said.“ ‘Throw away the history books, discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past …The brazenness resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship.”
The depth and scope of the Trump family graft is hitting so fast that no one can fully keep up, although a few journalists and elected officials are trying to inform enough people to possibly make a difference in the outcome. So far, it’s not working. If the proposed Republican legislation passes and the corruption is allowed to continue, the resulting expanded inequality gap could break the system.
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What do you think about the proposed legislation slashing our country’s already meager social safety net, the remarks by Senator Ernst and the blowback she’s getting, the corruption in our Oval Office? Let me know in the Comments Section below:
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