There is this whole mythology that Donald Trump came to power because 53% of white women voted for him, because 66% of white working men who didn't have a college degree voted for him.
That may be, but those are not his constituents. Those are his suckers. Those are his rubes.
Keep in mind this is a guy who has said that his hero - the guy whose favorite book he's modeled himself after - is PT Barnum. And he said it without a trace of irony. And Donald Trump's language, the rhetoric, it's breathtaking to me.
I'm on his mailing list. I'm getting an email from Donald Trump or from his one of his sons or from his wife or somebody on the campaign or whatever almost every single day. There'll be a sentence or two, "okay Thomas, we had this this brilliant victory yesterday, we just accomplished a quarter billion dollars in trade deals with China that are going to make America great again", with no context, no discussion.
There's nothing structural changing here. Trump has not changed anything other than rhetorically. You had businesses that were waiting to cut deals with China and basically they were asked to put it on hold until Trump goes to China so he can take credit for it. But really? Is there any there there?
No, it's a tax break for billionaires and big corporations at a time when billionaires have more money than they have ever had in the history of the world, when there are more billionaires in the United States than there have ever been in the history of the United States, there are more multi millionaires in the United States than there have ever been in the history of the United States. You have companies like Apple and General Electric and AT&T and Microsoft and whatnot that are stashing hundreds of billions of dollars offshore.
And it doesn't hurt them that they stash this money offshore because they can borrow at 1% or 2%. And so what they're doing is they're issuing bonds; they're borrowing against the money that's overseas. And so it's super cheap and the money is functionally available to them.
You say, "well, it's in an offshore bank." Well, not actually. It's probably in Citibank or Bank of America or something like that as an asset of an offshore bank.
But Donald Trump is not working for the white working class. He's throwing the white working-class rhetoric, but he is working for the billionaire class, for the more than hundreds of millions class.
Frankly, I don't think Trump is even working for the average just a millionaire person or for the average just a couple hundred thousand-aire person. We'll see how this tax bill ends up - whether it's the House version or the Senate version - but the Senate version is still taking it out of that group of people as well.
But most of the burden for this is going to be borne by the bottom half of Americans, in fact by the bottom 90% of Americans. This is where the money is going to come from to pay for this massive tax cut - on top of running up a 1.7 trillion dollar debt, they've got to come up with another trillion dollars or two to pay for this massive tax cut for the Koch brothers, for the Mercers for the Adelsons, for all these groups.
In fact these groups are now running ads, I don't know if you've seen them. The group that is running the ads that the most boil my blood is apparently Shelley Adelson, according to this very recent story.
Chuck Schumer says...
"Their pay masters, if you will ? the hard, hard right ... the Koch brothers ? all they want to do is cut taxes. They don't care about the deficit, they don't care about the country, they don't care about the middle class ? they just want their taxes reduced. And they run the Republican Party."
Elizabeth Warren said...
"The Republican leadership has outsourced its economic agenda to a handful of billionaires and corporate donors."
Donald Trump said...
"My accountant called me and said, 'you're going to get killed in this bill' if it doesn't include an estate tax cut."
According to Paul Blumenthal's Huffington Post article...
"Those big donors are already ... spending tens of millions of dollars on political advertising. Nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors, like 45Committee, American Action Network, America First, Americans for Prosperity, and Freedom Partners, plan to spend at least $43 million on a campaign to pressure specific members of Congress.
45Committee by Shelly Adelson and Joe Ricketts, this is the one that I've been seeing the ads here in Portland where they've got this nice woman and her husband and her two kids and she's saying the average American is going to get $1,200 or whatever.
It's a lie.
