As President Donald Trump, surrounded by Republican members of Congress, marked the Fourth of July by signing a bill to cut health care and food benefits for millions of Americans to finance corporate tax cuts, Democrats fired back — with moral outrage, polished messaging, and blatant political opportunism.
After House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) spoke for more than eight hours against the bill, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responded not with a substantive moral countervision but instead shared a flattering photo of Jeffries captioned, “Hakeem Jeffries is the leader America deserves.” And shortly after the legislation passed, liberal leaders and pundits began channeling public outrage into campaign strategy. House Democratic whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) declared, “Project 2026 starts today.”
Jen Psaki, Biden’s former press secretary-turned-MSNBC anchor, remarked that the bill “reminds me a lot of what the midterm elections looked like last time Trump was president,” recalling how Democrats gained ground in red districts by riding a wave of backlash to Trump’s policies.
This is how Democratic politics often functions now: not as a counterforce to cruelty but as a machine for managing it. The party treats mass suffering not as a call for transformation but as fuel for the next election. While Republicans signed this particular bill, the inconvenient truth for the Democrats is that they, too, played a role in setting the stage for this cruelty through decades of bipartisan market-based logic that gutted the social safety net.
Make no mistake: It is undeniable that the Republicans are at greater fault. As a party, they have long approached poverty not as a problem to be solved but as a moral failing…
Auteur: Evelyn Quartz
