Four days after it was signed into law, Donald Trump’s absurdly named Big Beautiful Bill (also referred to as the BBB) seems to represent everything that has gone wrong in American politics.
There is the blatant, cartoonish plutocracy: the law makes no bones about the fact that it’s robbing the poorest Americans blind — kicking millions off their health insurance, cutting food aid for millions more, and endangering rural hospitals and nursing homes — to hand thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest.
There is the US political system’s ever-growing distance from the actual public opinion it’s meant to channel: the BBB was desperately unpopular when it passed, even more so when people learned what was actually in it, and the Republican lawmakers who all ended up voting for it had to endure months of irate constituents yelling at them about it.
There is the US government’s accelerating transformation from a vehicle for protecting Americans’ basic rights and economic security to the mothership of a sprawling, armed force of faceless storm troopers who violate those rights: the BBB triples the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an agency that has spent this year arresting judges and elected officials, gleefully aiding Trump’s lawless end run around the courts, and trying to deport US citizens — turning it into the largest, most well-funded armed agency in the country’s history, while also giving it more money to imprison people than the entire federal prison system.
But there’s also something else about the legislation that’s gone mostly unremarked upon: how it starkly illustrates the Democratic Party’s failure to enact its own, altogether different BBB, the…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
