Democratic viewpoints on politics, policy and activism

Trumpcare Will Kill Trump Supporters The Most

Trumpcare—for surely we must call it this as our duty now to exercise our historical right to collectively practice ignoramus politicalpsychosis juvenilia—exposes, again, that our new emperor is a liar and a sham populist, but still it’s unsettling and unnerving on a couple of even more deeper philosophical levels.

Perhaps the most philosophically unsettling layer of the new health care plan rollout by Trump and his Republican dumbass mob this week, at least for me, is how it was greeted by feigned and rote media surprise over its dire consequences, which have now been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Oh really? My, my, who would have even guessed it would benefit the most wealthy in our country? Are you really telling me Republicans want to stop poor people from having medical access? Really? Oh no, I’m going to faint, that just can’t be true.

Eventually, if this repeal of Obamacare gets signed into law, the CBO estimates that 24 million Americans will eventually lose their health insurance or, to put it more accurately, medical access or, well, to put it in reality, they will die. These are mostly people, we can surmise, that either voted for Trump and/or wanted him to win so he could make them poorer and sicker. That they’re sick mentally is a certainty, and, no, no, never try to engage them in their sickness for it will make you sick as well. The time has come for closure with these rubes, who wear their rubeness as badges of honor.

Yet, and here’s my point, what did mainstream media journalists expect in terms of health care from Trump and the charlatan and ever-shifty, slippery, squirmy House Speaker Paul Ryan? Tax hikes on the rich to help the less fortunate? Compassion? Medicare for all? Haha. But the great Harvard/Yale-educated reporters responded with breathless reporting and righteous indignation that just one contrarian article by someone in their ranks will render obsolete in the five minutes it takes to read. It’s what passes as intellectualism in this country these days.

So the script remains the same, and it’s so sad, and that’s not a Trump “sad.” It’s a real, depressing sad that leads to people dying. The Republicans lie about their intentions on any given policy, and well, on everything, under the false rubric of reform, give tax breaks to the rich and take from the poor, and the media then acts aghast and frantic because the GOP and Trump are doing just what they have indicated they will do and have done for decades now. What is new here? Not the media’s response, that’s for sure.

The media script is by now so depressing and so rote it’s become numbing—I actually believe it will lead to an astronomically rise in patients with depression and anxiety—in the era of Trump, which will lead to more deaths. Has the mainstream media become an abusive parent, gaslighting children/readers? I think so. See, we’re supposed to believe we’re the sick ones because we want medical care and decent wages as the media dutifully reports the Republican position.

As I written here several times since Trump’s election, I support the new stated commitment to the truth by such august media outlets as The New York Times and The Washington Post, but it appears they’re slipping back into the old routines of he-said-she-said journalism and mind-numbing breathless horse-race reporting—will the Trumpcare bill get the necessary [insert numbers] votes from these particular senators or representatives [insert names]?—rather than bluntly telling the truth that people will die if this bill is passed.

People will die because of this Republican and Trump initiative. Death of the media. Death of people. It ends together in its symbiotic way.

Trumpcare will kill people. But will the media even call it Trumpcare, even though it didn’t hesitate for one second to adopt the GOP nomenclatures and framing on Obamacare or Hillarycare? Trump owns this legislation. He’s put his full political weight behind a dystopian anti-health initiative that will kill people and transfer money to the extremely wealthy.

What part of the last sentence isn’t clear to mainstream media reporters at the major outlets?

The second point one can make about the repeal effort, and it’s been pointed out by other columnists, is that Republicans have no intention of governing beyond recklessly and intuitively increasing income disparity between the rich and everyone else. That’s what this bill does by granting tax breaks to the wealthy while making it more difficult to get medical care. Academics and writers, such Paul Krugman, who writes for The Times, have pointed this out but basic reporting on this issue has, again, degenerated into the flat GOP script that trickle-down economics leads to shared wealth as an argument rather than a proven lie. The fact the media still debates this is ‘fake news” at its finest.

Until the nation’s reporters take on bolder language to challenge Trump and Ryan on their lies and the world’s neoliberal agenda that has lead to massive corporate wealth and income disparity, this country and the world faces a tragic, dystopian future. The only question is how long can the republic last under the unsustainable model in which the top 1 percent of the richest world citizens accumulate virtually all the world’s wealth while people continue to die because of hunger, disease and lack of medical access. This is already happening throughout the world and even here in this country, and, if passed, the new Trumpcare bill will increased the numbers who suffer and, yes, die lonely, miserable deaths here.

Those homeless people on the streets of our big cities are only going to increase in the Trump era, and now that Trump, and his family, and his Republican surrogates are effectively using the government in a manner to increase their own wealth as despots do, the sham is apparent. We need truth from our reporters, who aren’t the enemies of the people.

Yet I will not believe reporters are truthful if their reporting during the Trump tyranny leads to any normalization of making people poorer and sicker under some type of long-gone, nostalgic journalistic frame of objectivity. Fire all the bigwig editors now, hire people like me, and maybe we can have hope.

But getting back to Republicans. They may hold all power in Washington and in many states now, but their party lacks any substance on a humane policy level; it exists to destroy lives, mostly, and here’s the irony, it’s the destruction of people who vote them into power. It’s not difficult to see how they get people to commit to slow suicides and miserable lives. They lie on the most crass level, use simplistic slogans that appeal to ignorance racists and work to limit the number of votes cast by minorities. It’s not some intellectual strategy or Russian plot.

Trumpcare is emblematic or, more specifically, a rhetorical container of this suicidal destruction. Don’t spend a minute getting lost in the details of this latest immoral Republican spectacle, the “whatever” health care act that should only be called Trumpcare. It’s a disaster, and it can only pass if the mainstream media normalizes it and declines to tell the truth about it.