Robert Reich: Dems Ought to Be Able to Demonstrate that America Is Being ‘Shafted’ by Big Beautiful Bill

O’DONNELL: “Leading off our discussion tonight is Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor under President Clinton. He’s a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Inequality Media. Thank you very much for joining us tonight, Professor Reich. I want to begin at that juncture of these two policies, the Trump tariffs, seeing what they’re doing to that business in Vermont, seeing what they’re doing to truck drivers in California, at the port of Los Angeles, whose work hours have collapsed, whose ability to earn an income have collapsed, intersecting with a Republican budget bill that is going to take health care away from people, impose a work requirement so if you’re not working and you don’t have an income, you can’t get Medicaid coverage anymore, and you can’t work because Donald Trump’s tariffs have thrown you out of work. This is a vicious intersection that’s being constructed by these two policies.”
REICH: “And remember, Lawrence, he was elected because many Americans, particularly working-class Americans, felt that prices were too high, the economy was not working for them. Now, it’s going to be a major magic show for him and for his Republican acolytes in the House and Senate to try to sell both the tariffs and also this extraordinary budget, if it gets through the Senate, in terms of it robbing, essentially, from the poor and working class Medicaid, veterans administration, all kinds of nutrition assistance, in order to provide the wealthy, the super wealthy, a great big fat tax cut, another big tax cut such as like the first one he delivered, that generates a debt for the United States of 4.8 more trillion dollars of debt. And now this is going to be an interesting experiment, because it is possible, given the con man that Donald Trump is, it is certainly possible that he can sell working class Americans on the notion that they are not paying all this more for this product or that product, or everything else coming from around the world, and this budget, even though it gives a major, major tax break to the rich, is actually good for them. But I’m not sure. It’s going to be very hard to sell these things. And if the Democrats are smart enough and bold enough and clear enough and loud enough, they ought to be able to show and demonstrate to the working Americans that they are being shafted twice over by Donald Trump.”