It’s All About Trump’s Contempt

There is, however, a unifying theme — Donald Trump’s contempt for the voters who put him in office.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Well, he hasn’t done that, at least so far. He is, however, betting that he can break every promise he made to the working-class voters who put him over the top, and still keep their support. Can he win that bet?

.. remember his claims that he would pay off the national debt?

.. 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps.

.. West Virginians .. more than 4 percent of the population, the highest share in the nation, receives Social Security disability payments, partly because of the legacy of unhealthy working conditions, partly because a high fraction of the population consists of people who suffer from chronic diseases, like diabetics

.. they supported Trump because he promised — falsely, of course — that he could bring back the well-paying coal-mining jobs of yore.

.. Maybe he would take benefits away from Those People, but he would protect the programs white working-class voters

.. it would be apocalyptic: Hundreds of thousands would lose health insurance; medical debt and untreated conditions would surge; and there would be an explosion in extreme poverty, including a lot of outright hunger.

.. Coal isn’t coming back; these days, West Virginia’s biggest source of employment is health care and social assistance. How many of those jobs would survive savage cuts in Medicaid and disability benefits?

.. people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming.

 

A Time for Immodest Proposals

But often the newest attempt at a new right offers a rhetoric of nationalism that cashes out in policies not obviously bolder than what reform conservatism offered.

.. So as an experiment, I thought I’d write a few columns (an intermittent series, as events permit) floating genuinely radical visions of how policy makers might respond to our order’s slippage toward something worse than stagnation. These will not be ideas that I find entirely convincing, they will not be fully fleshed-out, and I will disavow responsibility if they’re ever put into disastrous practice.

.. So an emergency response would set a more ambitious goal: a swift boost in work force participation and family formation, using a few sticks and a lot of very expensive carrots.

.. The sticks would include cuts to disability and unemployment benefits and tighter Medicaid eligibility rules for the able-bodied — not as “pay fors,” but simply to make sustained worklessness less pleasant.

.. The scale of spending means this proposal gores more conservative oxen than liberal ones. But that’s only because I’m saving a related proposal to ban pornography and video games for a later installment in this series — which I promise will only grow more outlandish as it grows.

The telling letter Betsy DeVos wrote to clarify her position on U.S. disabilities law

In addition, Mrs. DeVos failed to address the original question I posed to her in her confirmation hearing, which was about why she is comfortable with voucher programs that force parents and students to sign away their rights under IDEA.

“Between her lack of experience with public education, her support for diverting taxpayer dollars to private schools without accountability requirements, and her lack of understanding of the challenges facing students with disabilities, Mrs. DeVos has shown herself to be completely unqualified for this position — and her recent letter has only reinforced that she is unfit to serve as Secretary of Education.