Cruelty And Heartlessness - MAGA can’t help it
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Progressives sometimes talk about conservatives being driven primarily by their lizard brains, the most primitive parts governing “ fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication. ” Donald Trump wears his on the outside. He has no ideology. The man is all appetite and instinct. Insulated since childhood by his father’s wealth, primitive instinct has served him better than it would a poor man with no impulse control.
So when Trump suddenly discovers “affordability” the way last year he introduced the press to the word “groceries,” he has not developed late-life empathy. He’s reacting to a threat.
Republicans’ dramatic losses to Democrats last week spooked Trump. Especially Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City in a campaign won on lowering people’s cost of living. Suddenly Trump wants to address a problem he repeatedly claims to have solved.
Politico suggests we watch what Trump does, not what he says. He claims that cost of living talk is a con job by Democrats. Yet he’s announced a set of actions aimed at lowering it :
He’s announced a plan to send low- and middle-income Americans $2,000 checks funded by new tariff revenue , asked the Justice Department to investigate whether meatpacking companies are colluding to raise beef prices and, at an event flanked by pharmaceutical executives, announced a deal to lower the price of increasingly popular weight-loss drugs .
He’s also suggested sending money to Americans directly to help them purchase health insurance and floated a proposal pushed by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to establish 50-year mortgages, which could lower homeowners’ monthly payments.
Together, the moves demonstrate a White House more concerned with pocketbook issues than the president is publicly willing to admit.
Economist Paul Krugman is disappointed as many are by the “tactical weakness” of a group of Senate Democrats cutting a deal to end the government shutdown. But he turns this morning to “a different kind of weakness on the part of Donald Trump and MAGA as a whole — namely, their innate cruelty.”
Krugman writes , “They have a visceral dislike for policies that do anything to help the less fortunate, and can’t even bring themselves to be cynical, to help Americans temporarily while they consolidate power.”
But that just may be what Trump’s spooked lizard brain is up to, short term, even while Republicans kill Affordable Care Act subsidies and dramatically jack up the cost of Americans’ health insurance.
Krugman suspects:
Drastically increasing health care costs at the beginning of 2026, causing millions to lose insurance, certainly looks like a massive political blunder. My guess is that it doesn’t reflect a considered strategy. Instead, Republicans just stumbled into this because nobody in a position of power within the party understood how the ACA works.
Trump’s lunatic idea for sending money directly to Americans for buying their own policies from insurance companies proves Krugman’s point. That’s like claiming individual workers will get a better deal negotiating salaries with employers than they would through collective bargaining. Republicans hate that too.
Sure, the ACA enjoys overwhelming public support, “74 percent overall, including half of Republicans,” but that’s no reason for conservatives not to kill it. It’s who they are, even if Trump recognizes on a primitive level that doing so threatens him.
The political moral is that the humiliating cave over the shutdown isn’t the end of the story. Democrats can and should keep hammering Trump and his party over their indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans. They need to make sure both that Americans know who’s responsible for surging premiums now and that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will lead to savage cuts in both Medicaid and food stamps after the midterms.
MAGA can’t help being cruel. It can’t even pretend to care about other people’s suffering. And Democrats should take full advantage of this pathology.
But will they?
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The elections last week showed pretty conclusively that Trump and his policies are generally unpopular. This shutdown outcome will not change that fact.