Do you remember during the presidential campaign when then candidate Donald Trump promised to “make America affordable again” and end inflation on Day 1?
Or when he claimed he would lower the cost of “everything,” like energy prices by 50 percent, or gas below $2 a gallon, or reducing mortgage rates to 3 percent and “maybe even lower than that” to make housing more affordable?
Apparently, President Trump now has different priorities.
“Donald Trump promised Pennsylvanians he’d bring down costs, but his first week in office shows he’s only interested in himself and his billionaire backers,” said DNC Deputy Communications Director Abhi Rahman.
Now, I know, some readers might think this is just partisan political posturing by a Democrat.
So let’s fact check Rahman’s claims together.
While Trump left thousands of his supporters out in the cold (it was too cold for him) for the inauguration, he gave billionaires front-row seats inside the warm and cozy Capitol One Arena.
In fact, “populist” Trump has stacked his gilded administration with “a record 13 billionaires” so far, moving the country closer to plutocracy, or oligarchy as former President Biden warned.
And as NPR pointed out, Trump, in “a flurry of executive orders and other actions” on his first day in office, reversed former President Joe Biden’s actual populist initiatives to lower drug costs and expand coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicaid. Well, at least Big Pharma and the health insurance industry are happy.
Remember inflation? Even the Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal reported this week that “economists predict higher inflation and interest rates for the next two years due to Trump’s plans for tariffs, tax cuts, and immigration restrictions.”
And that’s not all.
Trump is planning cuts to social safety net programs that will hurt both “the poorest Americans” and “struggling working class voters.” Instead, he plans on funding a “supersized tax giveaway” to billionaires and corporations.
So when the DNC’s Rahman told me on the phone today that “it’s clear his priorities are billionaires over working people,” he’s absolutely right.
How can any one dispute this?
It’s not even a full week into his presidency and for people paying attention to Trump’s many betrayals, they might be having buyers’ remorse.
This offers Democrats an opportunity.
Besides opposing all of Trump’s handouts to the country’s wealthiest through various legislation and executive orders, they need to embrace and propose progressive populist economic policies and communicate them to as many audiences as possible – in both mainstream and nontraditional media outlets – to recapture the hearts and minds of voters they lost in this last election.
Then, most importantly on the grassroots level start, organizing. Otherwise poor, working class and middle class families in Pennsylvania are going to suffer quite a bit over these next four years and that’s unacceptable.
