The One Big Fugly Turd Bill

Uh oh, here comes a political rant

Today I was scheduled to post my final article in the series on why modern parents are sick so often, but all I can think about—all I want to write about—is the One Big Fugly Turd Bill.

I mostly avoid talking politics, unless directly related to my themes around motherhood and parenting, because our political climate is so insanely polarized right now, and people like me who don’t fall neatly into line with the political agenda of the either party tend to get skewered by BOTH sides. Last week I mentioned in one of my Instagram stories that I think the situation in the Middle East is complicated and subsequently had the privilege of being called both an antisemite AND a genocide-promoting white supremacist. These are fun times for influencers and opinion writers.

But I also feel that I have some responsibility, given the success of my platform, to take a stand on things that matter, and the One Big Fugly Turd Bill is one of those things. As Sharon McMahon has said, “neutrality in a moral crisis is like standing still in a burning house. You’re not safe. You’re just next.”

Now, what constitutes a moral crisis is often a matter of opinion. Democrats and Republicans, it seems, are living in parallel, non-overlapping moral universes, fueled by their own preferred separate media channels who report one-sided stories about current events. Liberals tend to think that we are the educated ones, the ones who look at the issues from all sides, the ones who really understand what’s going on, but the truth is that we are just as prone to insulating ourselves inside our own echo chambers as the other side.

When Donald Trump was elected to office this time around, I was genuinely willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If you’re a liberal reading this piece you’re probably hovering over the “unsubscribe” link. After all, it’s not like DT was a wild card. This was his second time around. He’d had plenty of time to show his true colors during his first term in office, and there were definitely some red flags.

But even though I voted for Kamala Harris, I couldn’t bring myself to write off DT’s massive, popular success as being simply the result of America’s ingrained racism and misogyny (which is what most of my liberal friends, and the hundreds liberal newsletters that I used to subscribe to-- and then unsubscribed from, when I realized they were all more interested in name-calling than untangling the complexities of the current political landscapes—wanted me to believe).

There are three main reasons why I was willing to “wait and see” on a DT second term before adding my voice to the cacophony of enraged liberals.

First, I was genuinely shocked at the class divide in this most recent election. As I wrote about in this piece, published shortly after the election, there was a staggering class realignment in favor of DT compared with the election of Biden. When Biden won, he carried more voters under $100k, whereas Trump carried the majority of working and middle-class voters in this election (while the majority of affluent voters picked Harris). Exit polls showed that Harris voters were mostly concerned about the state of democracy and (to a lesser extent) abortion, while Trump supporters were mostly concerned about the economy. The divide here is FLOORING, as shown in the graphic below.

And working class Americans were RIGHT to be angry about rising prices. If you’ve been following along here for a while, then you know that I recently moved my entire family across the Atlantic to live in the Southwest of France (not because of the election results, but because my husband is French and we want the kids to speak French) and was immediately struck by the affordability of high-quality food relative to the US. We literally pay HALF of what we paid for groceries in California, and those groceries taste much better.

As Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey explained in this brilliant piece, food prices in America went up a staggering 11.8% in 2022 alone (a year when overall inflation was 6.5%), home prices jumped 47% since 2020, and rent went up 20% in some placed (and has doubled in others) since Covid. Because the Fed’s response was to hike rates, credit-card APRs spiked through the roof and because many families in America live paycheck to paycheck and rely on credit cards to bridge the gap, this further hurt the working class. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ response to working class Americans’ complaints about the rising cost of living was to throw up a bunch of macroeconomic charts and gaslight them by insisting that, no, they were actually thriving (if only they were smart enough to understand the numbers).

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s plan for fixing the American economy was never a good one, but at least he took the issue seriously. I find it hard to fault working class Americans struggling to put food on the table who voted for him.

Second, Donald Trump repeatedly positioned himself as the Peace President. One of his most consistent campaign promises was that he intended to end American involvement in risky and expensive overseas conflicts. As this Atlantic article highlights, “In 2016, Donald Trump ran to Hillary Clinton’s left on foreign policy, arguing that she was ‘trigger happy’ and that foreign adventurism ‘has produced only turmoil and suffering and death”: an argument that is hard to disagree with. DT leaned into this same narrative in the last election, arguing that Joe Biden had “brought the world to the brink of World War III” and promised to scale back America’s international conflicts. It’s also worth noting that the working class pays disproportionately for these wars with the lives of their loved ones. How many yuppies do you know who fought in Iraq?

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was busy campaigning with the Cheneys. Make of that what you will, but Dick Cheney activates my gag reflex more than just about any American political figure in recent history and his endorsement of Harris did NOT kindle my enthusiasm.

Trump’s anti-war rhetoric struck a chord with voters on both the left and right who are exhausted by America’s decades of expensive policing of overseas conflicts, many of which we should never have gotten involved in in the first place, all while neglecting the most fundamental needs of its citizens at home. As one French TV journalist quipped last week during a commentary session on events in the Middle East, “this B-2 bomber is the reason Americans don’t have social services.”

Third, I was increasingly exhausted by the moral self-righteousness of the political left and the McCarthyan language policing that had become so run-of-the-mill that it was all but impossible to talk about gender, culture, race or politics on the internet without having a very nasty, very dangerous label slapped on you. I’ve been called just about everything under the sun at this point in my internet-writing career: a TERF, a bigot, a white supremacist, an antisemite, an ableist, an ageist, a misogynist (this one I always marvel at, as a woman who spends most of her time advocating for women), and so on. We bandy these terms about like they mean nothing--as if people have not been fired from their jobs, lost control of their own NGOs, been ostracized, pilloried and severely economically and socially penalized – and attach them to people who do not in any way deserve them, in a sort of collective boy-who-cried-wolf phenomenon. These are not things you call people just because they hold a different political opinion from yours or express skepticism on how we are handling things like the conflict in the Middle East or youth gender medicine (apparently, people were right to ask certain questions about that one, as this recent piece by Helen Lewis points out).

In the meantime, the political right, like a well-trained dodge-ball team, has been carefully collecting our poorly aimed lobs, waiting for the right moment to hurl them back at us.

There were other reasons why I was willing to “wait and see” that were not directly linked to DT’s policies. I was interested in his alliance with RFK. I “get” the people who threw their weight behind RFK in this election (there are some in my family), as I wrote about in this piece on why so many crunchy moms are voting right. I am not one for vaccine conspiracy theories and I respect scientific consensus on such matters, but I agree that we desperately need to clean up our food system, and RFK is the closest we’ve ever had to a candidate who really took this issue seriously. RFK was absolutely slammed by the liberal media as the ultimate force of evil, but many of the policies he is advocating for are simply common-sense forms of regulation that have long been the norm in Europe. And RFK has had some small but real wins: for example, in encouraging the FDA to ban synthetic food dyes, based on legit evidence that these dyes are harmful, especially to children.

I am also personally quite fascinated by JD Vance, his life story, and what he represents, as I wrote about here. The socioeconomic condescension that characterized liberal attacks on Vance during his VP campaign were, in my opinion, just as revolting as the racial slurs that DT was busy lobbing at immigrants. Things like John Oliver saying, “if you asked me to draw a man who fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” referring to Vance and the false rumor that he wrote about having intercourse with a couch in his autobiography (which every liberal believed, because no liberal actually read the book, and because every privileged leftie is totally willing to believe that poor people from Ohio fuck their couches as a favorite past-time). As Atlantic journalist Xochitl Gonzalez’ has written, “classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice” in America today.

And let’s not even get into how the Democratic political machine lied to us about Joe Biden being fine, fine, fine until it was practically too late to do anything about it.

In other words, there’s no denying that democrats fucked up in this last election, and I don’t and won’t hold it against anyone who voted for Trump (i.e. the popular majority of Americans).

But now. Now, my friends, it’s time to stop lying to ourselves.

With the passage of the One Big Fugly Turd Bill, Trump has made it clear that he has absolutely no intention of making things better for the American working class. It is, simply put, the largest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in American history (see chart below, taken from @rutgerbregman ‘s IG account).

Here's another graph from The Economist breaking down the savings and costs, showing clearly just HOW MUCH these tax cuts are going to cost us in debt and cuts to social services. And of course, we are allocating even MORE budget to ICE and the military, after having completely gutted other essential American government services.

The bill is basically just one big giant tax cut for the ultra rich, meaning the Federal Government will raise $4 trillion less in revenue over the coming decade. As Annie Lowry writes for The Atlantic, “If you’re looking to give $29,999,999 to your heirs, this bill is for you.”

Yes, it’s true that EVERYONE will get tax cuts under this bill, not just the ultra wealthy, and that is, of course, how Fox News has been promoting it. But households in the top 0.1% are going to get $296K in average annual tax breaks, while the average family in the bottom fifth will get only get a break of about $160. Fox News has similarly been emphasizing provisions in the bill that allow people to deduct taxes from tipped and overtime wages, even though many of the people who rely on tips and hourly wage labor do not make enough money to pay federal income taxes anyway, and experts believe that the loophole will simply be exploited by the rich who will do everything possible to make their earnings qualify as “tips.” And of course every Boomer I know is beside themselves with joy over the no-tax-on-social-security provision (as if Boomers—the richest generation in history holding some $80 trillion in assets—really needed economic help).

Then there’s the Child Tax Credit, which was set to expire this year. Enacted in 1997, the credit currently provides up to $2,000 per child to about 40 million families every year. During the Biden administration, The American Rescue Plan increased the amount of the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $3,600 for qualifying children under age 6, and $3,000 for other qualifying children under age 18, and was made fully refundable, meaning it could be claimed even if you didn’t make enough money to pay federal taxes. Research estimated that this reduced child poverty by 26% or more. The boost to the CTC under the The American Rescue Plan expired in 2021, and is now back to it’s original $2,000, which itself is set to expire and return to $1,000 in 2025 if nothing is done. One Big Beautiful Bill Act bumps it up to $2,500 from 2025 through 2028 after which the credit’s max value would fall to $2,000 and be indexed for inflation BUT it also restricts eligibility to parents or guardians who have valid Social Security numbers, regardless of whether the child has a valid social security number. For all of the Republic party bluster about being pro-family, this is not much of a boost. And it certainly doesn’t justify the rest of this monstrous bill being passed.

Meanwhile, in order to offset some of the massive, massive expense of these tax cuts, the bill will cut billions from Medicare and $1 trillion from Medicaid, thereby causing millions of people to lose healthcare and killing an estimated 51,000 Americans per year.

It will also cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and require veterans, homeless people, and foster youths to comply with a work requirement to benefit. As many as 16 million children will lose access to free school meals.

It slashes funding for green energy, which will increase American’s energy bills and could potentially kick off an energy affordability crisis, and gets rid of billions of dollars of student debt relief.

Most economists agree that it will do NOTHING to spur economic growth, as @keds_economist explains here. If you still believe in trickle-down economics then let me summarize economist Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21^st Century for you: when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, as is currently the case, the result is concentration of wealth, which can only be fixed through taxation. He also thinks we are going to start seeing some heads roll, much like during the French Revolution, if we don’t fix it soon.

Contrary to spurring economic growth, the bill is likely to kick off a debt crisis, in which rising deficits cause interest rates to rise, which causes the government to borrow more, which causes rates to rise more. At some point, America is going to have to start spending a very large portion of it’s tax income just paying back interest on it’s debt to China, instead of on social services for Americans. No one knows exactly how this will play out in the long-term or how it will affect Americans in their day to day, but most experts on the left AND right agree that it is not good.

So if you read Fox News, you get the impression that this Beautiful Bill (which is actually a Fugly Turd Bill) is going to save working class families by alleviating tax pressure on wage workers, tip workers, and boosting the child tax credit, when in fact it is just a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich that will only hurt the working class and potentially cripple the American economy.

And I should probably just end this newsletter right here but I’m not done. Because Trump’s promise to make life more affordable for the working class is not the only promise he has broken.

Clearly, Trump can no longer claim to be the Peace President. Regardless of what you think about whether America’s strikes on Iran were justified or not, bombing the shit out of a foreign country does not count as peace. Donald Trump thinks it counts! In his Instagram announcement of the strike, he said, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.” Since then he has simultaneously insisted on the fact that this was a one and done deal, while also saying that he would like to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN by facilitating a regime change. Sounds an awful lot like another Middle Eastern war America was involved in recently, no? Again, whether or not you support intervention in Iran, this is NOT what DT promised.

Finally, it’s time to own up to the fact that Trump’s McCarthyism is WAY worse than the left’s. The soft power that the liberal elites use to control language and ideas is very real and very scary, but at least they aren’t disappearing people to foreign prisons without due process. Regardless of your stance on immigration (and I think many Americans are right to want less immigration), you don’t just SKIP due process. Not to mention the unwarranted arrests based on racial profiling, pulling foreign PHD students into “little black rooms” on their way back from visiting family abroad, the attacks on universities and on funding for science, all of which are rapidly becoming “normal.” Federal funding is being pulled from studies that have the key word “women” in them, as if we didn’t represent half the population and our bodies didn’t merit research, because it’s too “woke” to study the menstrual cycle. Even the passage of the One Big Fugly Turd Bill was apparently just a bunch of Republican law-makers cowing to the authoritarian power of DT, who promises swift retribution for his political enemies, even though they know they are breaking promises to their constituents and are likely to pay for it in the midterms.

Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening. Hopefully I didn’t just alienate all of my sponsors and readers. But fuck it, this is my newsletter, and some shit needed saying.

I think the real question is: now what?

Well, for one thing, it would be great if everyone would pretty please collectively agree to vote out every member of congress who is up for election in the midterms and who voted in favor of the Big Fugly Turd Bill, effectively crippling DT’s ability to pass more crappy legislation in the second half of his term. That includes, to my knowledge, every Republican senator with the exception of Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Rand Paul of Kentucky and every Republican House Representative except for Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania (bravo to the Republican opposition on this one).

I know I am probably not changing anybody’s mind here because we are all basically born Republican or Democrat these days and humans are tribal creatures who like to stick with their clans no matter what. It’s hardwired. That’s the problem with an entrenched two-party system (which, by the way, we could choose to change if we cared to—there are other things that work better—but that’s a rant for another day). That said, if you are a Republican or Independent and you read this and you maybe changed your mind a little bit on something, then please let me know because I will feel validated in shirking my book-proposal-writing to spend my morning trying to convince you to pretty pleeeeeeeeeease look at the data and believe me that DT is a no-good guy with no-good plans for our country.

And I love our country! Really. I miss it every day. Sure, we’ve got hot baguettes and croissants over here but they can’t beat Yellowstone’s geysers or Halloween or the absurd Christmas decorations my neighbors insisted on putting up every year (you could literally tune your radio station to the lights and have a synchronized show). I miss air conditioning and country music and 4^th-of-July barbecues. I miss the ruggedness of the American West (whenever you go hiking in France, even in the most remote locations, you always seem to pop out at a bar/restaurant/hotel at the end, which I guess is a plus for some people, but definitely kills the remote vibe).

The pluralism and diversity of political opinion in America is an asset, not a curse. Republicans are not always wrong about everything, and we need healthy disagreement, but they are wrong about this bill and I am convinced that if more people knew what was really in it and what the consequences tare, they would be just as mad as I am. Then again, if you’re happy with it, go ahead and ignore me and we’ll get back to the hunter-gatherer research shortly…