Big Butt-ugly Bullshit: Trump's Dump & What We Can Do About It...

A reader writes:

I want to know what to do about [Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”]. I look around and see people just keeping their head down and going about their lives like this isn’t going to end with their lives being sucked out like a juice box while they get slow poisoned. I want to know if there’s anyone here that has any fight in them.

I reply:

Because the "Big Beautiful Bill" (BBB) is a bill we are limited in what we can do. Of course, we push our reps, which has limited impact given that the GOP holds both chambers of Congress. Still, there were enough Republican defections that the bill only passed by one vote in the House (and a few shitty things got stripped out of it).

Senate Republicans can only lose three votes for passage (if the Dems stay together), something that could very well happen if they keep in cuts that heavily impact red states (specifically, Biden’s infrastructure money). Trump refusing FEMA aid to North Carolina – a state that voted for him three times – won’t help BBB in current form, especially if cuts to FEMA stand. All this makes passage in the Senate harder, but not impossible. The key to how much bad shit stays in BBB is how much noise we make. It will probably pass the Senate but not in the form it is in now. And once it passes it will get fought over again as both chambers negotiate the final deal, which will be voted on again, which is another opportunity to pressure legislators. So, there’s still a lot to go.

I disagree that people are walking around despondently with their heads down over this bill or anything else. Though there's a good portion of the country not paying attention to the news (and have no opinion on BBB), when Trump's shitty stuff does get to people on the ground, they oppose it, as we've seen time and again at Republican town halls. For the same reason Republicans stopped doing town halls, they've held hearings for BBB at 1 am and kept many of the detail secret until it passed (and now that the details are out, people are learning how bad this thing is). If there is lack of public outcry, its partially because they are doing a lot of this in secret, which makes it tough to reach people who don't read the left press or even mainstream sources like the New York Times or Washington Post.

We have an active and growing protest movement, with protests happening every week in all over the country and in places where protests normally don't occur. The protests alone won't stop anything, but they serve as rallying points and spectacles that get the message out. They also are a safe place for dissent (at least right now). Ultimately, they are a place to build from, to funnel people's energies into bread & butter things like pressuring reps and hopefully more - though if you are expecting riots in the street, I'd recalibrate.

With this fight, public unrest is not going to happen, and it would be pretty damn dangerous if it did. Without a large, active, organized movement with a solid legal infrastructure, riots or any other violence (real or perceived) would cause a severe police reaction and give Trump an excuse for declaring martial law. We do what we can do given the environment we are in and the resources we possess in the venues where the fight is happening.

Right now, the fight over the BBB is in Congress. Yes, there should be protests (and have been/will be more) and there should also be heavy pressure on reps, which nearly succeeded in stopping the bill. They passed it by one vote, which means that pressure worked to the extent that it could (recognize that with Republicans the challenge is to get their constituents to become a larger threat to their careers than a Trump challenge, which has ended many GOP careers already). Given all we are up against, narrowing the victory to one vote, while not success, is an accomplishment to build on.

So, what does building on that close vote mean? First, we take the fight to the Senate, again pressuring senators to reject the whole bill while singling out the most egregious parts. Getting rid of everything or most of the bad is difficult, if not impossible, given that the whole BBB is a disaster; however, we’d be stupid not to center on Medicare and Medicaid, as they are essential to most of us, especially as we age. Food aid, especially to kids, has to be defended. Any stripping of rights and hardening of immigration policy must be opposed. The tax cuts? Deficit? The GOP knows how to sell tax cuts and the deficit doesn’t move anyone. Building a message around either won’t move anyone. Standing up for Medicare will. Doubling down on the message that we paid for this shit and now they are ripping us off, thinking we are idiots, is essential.

It is also important to put yourself in a realistic state of mind. The left tends to be all or nothing, aspire to revolution or at least revolutionary change and then give up when “nothing happens.” That mindset completely misreads how change happens in the United States, which is incrementally, at a crawl, and with backlash and backsliding. We see that especially in the fight for “minority” rights.

Note that I am commenting on my understanding of how change happens, not on what I think should happen. Me? I want it all and I want it now. And, I know that there are very powerful forces that don’t want me or my kind to get shit and will fight hard to get their own way. They have people behind them, though not as many as we have or we potentially have, but they are very active and have a lot of resources. So, if we want to get what we want, some of what we want, or to make progress towards what we want, we have to engage and pressure and protest to push things forward, knowing that we are pushing against something that doesn’t want to be moved.

When power is as entrenched as it is and the worst and greediest among us dominate the levers of power, our fight is much harder than it would have been under Biden or Obama, when we mostly kicked it and hoped that others would make change for us. We not only miss opportunities for making change, we allow whatever foundation of resistance (built during George W. Bush and Trump’s first term) to atrophy, making our fight harder as we have to rebuild a movement again.

So, yeah, it’s tedious and tiring and victory seems so far away; but as I’ve written many times, we never really have a sense of what is happening in the middle of a fight. Charting progress is always tough, but it becomes impossible when expectations warp reality. Worse still is staring into the abyss, succumbing to the American myth of salvation and looking for hope in a place where there isn’t any. Stop staring into the abyss, resist bright-siding and revolutionary theater, and start doing the basic shit that needs to be done, with an eye not only on the individual battles at hand but also towards what we want our future to be.

I’m taking off for a couple weeks. I will probably post some stuff on the Circus facebook page and in Substack notes. And maybe I’ll knock out a few longer pieces. Whatever, don’t fret if you don’t hear from me for a bit.