MAGA’s cruel policies have a human cost

Last week, Chicago was smothered by another heat dome. The smell of sewage lightly perfumed the air.

On one of those horrible days, I walked down Michigan Avenue in the 100-degree heat and there he was — the same homeless man I pass almost every day. His filthy clothes were torn into vertical strips, like one of the ghillie suits hunters and military snipers use for camouflage. A large man, he was semi-nude below the waist. The crowds on the sidewalk streamed past as if he were invisible.

A few minutes later I came upon another man, who was digging through a garbage can for something to drink. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was dirty and covered in sweat. As he threw one plastic bottle after another on the sidewalk in his futile search, I noticed a sign across the street that loomed large over his shoulder: Trump Tower.

This, I realized while standing there, was public policy in action, MAGA’s culture of cruelty and gangster capitalism run amok on the street level. And it was all made possible by the man whose name was on the sign, supported by his congressional lackeys and his tens of millions of voters. 

On Friday, the bleak economic figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the truth about what is happening in Donald Trump’s America. (Far too much truth, in fact; the president subsequently fired the bureau’s commissioner.) As Vox’s Eric Levitz noted on Monday, the “labor market is much weaker than previously thought.” Economic growth is slowing and inflation is once again on the rise — as is the chance of a recession. To quote an X post by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week, “The Trump economy has officially arrived.”

Friday’s numbers indicate the likelihood of stronger economic turbulence that would impact all of us, from the middle-class to the men I encountered on the street. They, and so many others like them, no longer have much of a social safety net. In an economy strangled by inflation, low wages and rising inequality, the number of homeless Americans will almost certainly grow.

The administration seems to be preparing for that possibility. In a grossly underreported story, on July 24 Trump signed an executive order designed to remove people from the streets, including institutionalizing or sending homeless people to mental health or addiction treatment without their consent, marking a policy shift away from 20 years of a housing-first approach. The order also directed Cabinet agencies to review federal grant programs and prioritize funding to cities that are actively working to curb illegal drug use and street camping.

Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center told NPR the order will “‘[force] people to choose between compassionate data-driven approaches like housing, or treating it like a crime to have a mental illness or be homeless.’”

Trump’s action came on the heels of his so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which includes drastic cuts to essential initiatives serving low-income Americans. The Wall Street Journal reported that the legislation slashes at least 1 trillion dollars from Medicaid and other federally funded health programs. Based on all available evidence and historical precedent, the Big Ugly Bill, along with the administration’s other cuts to the social safety net, looks likely to trigger a sharp rise in homelessness. 

The legislation strips away billions of dollars in food assistance. Nursing homes and end-of-life hospice care will face funding shortfalls. With the Big Ugly Bill’s cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, it has been estimated that nearly 12 million Americans will lose their health care. That number will likely rise: In 2026, more than 24 million Americans will see their premiums increase, with some facing spikes as high as 15%, according to the nonpartisan health policy and advocacy organization KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation). 

These numbers are particularly disturbing when considering that July 30 marked the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing into law the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid. Now, in the coming years, the sick, the elderly, the disabled — the dying — could face the cruel possibility of being cast onto the street, abandoned.

“It’s interrelated with the entire health care system,” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime pro-democracy voice,  recently told MSNBC. “We’re seeing the whole infrastructure of health care — from hospitals to doctors — come under siege.”

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Rural hospitals and community health programs stand to be eviscerated. “You know what’s so interesting and tragic in many ways? The people who will be most affected are Trump voters. It’s rural voters,” Ornstein said. “It’s poor white voters. It’s people in small towns that don’t have much health care infrastructure…We’re going to see problems throughout the system that we haven’t experienced nearly as much in the last 60 years.”

Power acts on people. Human beings will be made to suffer. 

Cassenda Nelson is a fellow, community health worker and advocate at Caring Across Generations, an organization that seeks to change federal and state policies — and societal narratives — about aging, disability and care. Last week, she traveled to Washington, D.C., from her home in southwest Georgia to celebrate Medicaid’s 60th anniversary on Capitol Hill, and to speak out against cuts to the program. “Not only would it affect my daughter’s medicine, but it would prevent me, as a mother, to be able to pay my light bill, because I have to worry about her meds. Food. It would just trickle down. It’s a variety of things that could just go wrong.”

In a recent essay published by Salon, Danilyn Rutherford shared a personal story about her daughter Millie, “a radiant young woman with thick hair, a brilliant smile and multiple disabilities.” Because she’s blind and can’t walk or feed herself, and she can’t communicate verbally or with signs or symbols, Millie is completely dependent on caregivers funded by Medicaid, Rutherford writes.

Medicaid pays the wages of millions of home health workers, aides and personal assistants, including Millie’s. My daughter is the definition of vulnerable. Left to her own devices, she’d die of thirst and hunger. If a fire broke out in our house, she would burn. Her caregivers feed her, toilet her, bathe her, strap her into her wheelchair, take her for walks and take her swimming. They accompany her to adaptive bowling and dances with other disabled young people, and if the noise is too much for her, they take her home. When I’m gone, they tuck her in, and at 2 a.m., when she pops up like a jack-in-the-box, giggling and whining, they sit with her until she exhausts herself and falls back to sleep.

Measure these stories against Trump’s recent announcement that he plans to spend $200 million to add a 90,000-square-foot state ballroom onto the White House. Critics have correctly described this as being Trump’s “Palace of Versailles” on the Potomac, and the embodiment of the self-enrichment and cronyism that typify his administration — and other autocratic regimes.

Superficial critiques of Trump’s ballroom focus on his ego, vanity and garish aesthetic sensibilities. (The new ballroom will be white and gold, which are Trump’s signature colors). But as historian Heather Cox Richardson recently warned, his latest change to the White House is, most importantly, a signal he has no plans of ever leaving — even if he managed to run for a third term and was voted out of office by the American people. 

Historically, the office of the president has embodied the state. Trump, though, imagines himself as the state — and the state is there to serve all of his and his inner circle’s personal and financial interests. The president is not delusional in this view; the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has basically given him that power. 

Under his “Big Ugly Bill,” the richest Americans are projected to receive at least $12,000 in the form of tax cuts and other subsidies from the American people and their tax money. By comparison, it is estimated that the “Big Ugly Bill” will cost poor and working-class Americans $1,200 each.

A healthy democracy depends on a humane society — and a robust social safety net. Autocrats and authoritarians know this. That’s why they attack and attempt to destroy social programs. They want to eliminate every possibility of a real social democracy to cement their rule forever. 

Donald Trump is well on his way.