The Cruelty of a Trump Christmas
Republicans aren’t Scrooges — they’re much worse.
By Paul Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
·
Dec. 23, 2019, 6:57 p.m. ET
Credit...Pete
Marovich for The New York Times
By Trump-era standards, Ebenezer
Scrooge was a nice guy.
It’s common, especially around this
time of year, to describe conservative politicians who cut off aid to the poor
as Scrooges; I’ve done it myself. But if you think about it, this is deeply
unfair to Scrooge.
For while Dickens portrays Scrooge as a
miser, he’s notably lacking in malice. True, he’s heartless until he’s visited
by various ghosts. But his heartlessness consists merely of unwillingness to
help those in need. He’s never shown taking pleasure in others’ suffering, or
spending money to make the lives of the poor worse.
These
are things you can’t say about the modern American right. In fact, many
conservative politicians only pretend to be Scrooges, when they’re actually
much worse — not mere misers, but actively cruel. This was true long before
Donald Trump moved into the White House. What’s new about the Trump era is that
the cruelty is more open, not just on Trump’s part, but throughout his party.
Now,
the conventional wisdom about today’s Republicans is indeed that they are
Scrooge-like. That is, the story is that they want to serve the interests of
the rich (which is true), and that the reason they want to slash aid to the
poor is to free up money for plutocrat-friendly tax cuts.
But is that really why the right is so
determined to cut programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits?
After all, the explosion of the budget
deficit under Trump shows that Republican claims to care about fiscal
responsibility were always humbug, that they’re perfectly willing to slash
taxes on the rich without offsetting spending cuts. Furthermore, because
America spends relatively little money helping the poor, even harsh cuts — like
the Trump administration’s new rules on food stamps, which will hurt hundreds of
thousands — will at best save only tiny amounts compared with the cost of tax
cuts.
And in important cases, the right is so
eager to hurt low-income Americans that it’s willing to do so even if there are
no budget savings at all.
Consider
the case of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which a 2012
Supreme Court decision made
optional: States could choose not to participate.
Why
would any state make that choice? After all, the federal government will pay 90
percent of the cost, and experience shows that expanding Medicaid
produces indirect cost savings —
for example, by letting states reduce aid to hospitals for uncompensated costs.
Furthermore, the federal funds brought
in by Medicaid expansion boost a state’s economy,
which raises tax revenues. So expansion is, from a state fiscal point of view,
neutral or even net positive. Why would any state turn it down?
Yet 14 Republican-controlled states,
many among the nation’s poorest, are still refusing to
expand Medicaid.
At the same time, a number of states
are trying to limit access to Medicaid by imposing stringent work requirements.
This may sound like a cost-saving measure, but it isn’t — trying to enforce
work requirements, it turns out, costs a lot of money.
The point is that these state
governments are only pretending to be penny pinchers. In reality, they’re
actively trying to make peoples’ lives worse, and they’re willing to lose money
to accomplish that goal. But why?
In 2018, The Atlantic published a memorable essay by
Adam Serwer titled “The Cruelty Is the Point,” about the political importance
of shared pleasure from other people’s suffering. Serwer was inspired to write
that essay by photos of lynchings, which show groups of white men obviously
enjoying the show. Indeed, in America, gratuitous cruelty has often been
directed at people of color.
But
as Serwer also noted, it’s not just about race. There are more people than we
like to imagine who rejoice in the suffering of anyone they see as unlike
themselves, especially anyone they perceive as weak.
In fact, I suspect that this mentality
is part of the explanation for the seeming paradox of strong Republican support
in places like eastern Kentucky where
large numbers of poor whites depend on programs like food stamps: Those who
aren’t receiving aid actually want to see their poorer neighbors hurt.
What Trump has brought to his party is
a new willingness to be openly vicious.
I’m not saying that he’s honest about his
motivations. He and his aides still go through the motions of pretending that
actions like denying aid to storm-ravaged Puerto Ricans or cutting off food
stamps for hundreds of thousands are about fighting corruption or enforcing
fiscal responsibility.
But their attempts to justify cruelty
as being somehow in the national interest are low energy, especially compared
with the enthusiastic nastiness Trump exhibits at political rallies. Trump has celebrated and reportedly wants to campaign with
servicemen he pardoned after our own military convicted them of or charged them
with war crimes, clearly because he likes the idea of indiscriminate killing —
and so do some of his supporters.
So
I’m going to stop calling today’s Republicans Scrooges. We’d be in much better
shape if Trump and company were merely heartless misers. What they really are
is much, much worse
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