The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said Monday that GOP plans to target Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance to help offset the huge cost of their tax agenda encapsulates the economic agenda of the incoming Republican trifecta led by President-elect Donald Trump, who postured as a working-class champion during the 2024 race.

"You couldn't come up with a better distillation of the real Trump agenda than paying for tax breaks for the rich by gutting Medicaid and increasing child hunger," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement after a Washington Post report detailed internal Republican discussions on a possible Medicaid work requirement, cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other potential changes to the programs that provide health insurance and food aid to tens of millions of Americans.

"Following through on this plan would cause real hardship and increase the cost of living for millions of working families, but the votes are tallied and Trump is headed back to the White House, so his campaign trail populism is over and done with," said Wyden. "Ultra-wealthy political donors want their massive tax handouts, and as far as Trump and Republicans are concerned, everybody else can go pound sand."

The Trump-led Republican Party has made clear that a new round of tax cuts is at the top of its agenda as it prepares to take control of the House, Senate, and White House in January. In recent weeks, the GOP has discussed using the filibuster-immune reconciliation process to ram tax legislation through Congress before individual provisions of the party's 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of next year.

Trump also campaigned on slashing the corporate tax rate, even as he appealed to working-class voters who aren't reaping the benefits of record corporate profits.

Such tax cuts would likely add trillions to the U.S. deficit, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, leading the GOP to seek out offsets in programs they've long demonized.

"Trump wants to strip healthcare from poor people and increase grocery bills."

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) suggested to reporters last week that Republicans could aim to transform Medicaid's funding structure by instituting block grants—a change that analysts say would likely result in devastating cuts.

Edwin Park, research professor at Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families, wrote Monday that under a block-grant structure, states would "either have to dramatically raise taxes and drastically cut other parts of their budget including K-12 education or, as is far more likely, institute deep, damaging cuts to Medicaid eligibility, benefits, and provider and plan payment rates."

"That includes not just dropping the Medicaid expansion, which covers nearly 20 million newly eligible parents and other adults," Park wrote, "but gutting the rest of state Medicaid programs that serve tens of millions of low-income children, parents, people with disabilities, and seniors."

The Post reported that Republicans are also looking to curb SNAP benefits in the face of a nationwide hunger crisis. According to the latest federal data, 75% of households receiving SNAP benefits live at or below the poverty line and nearly 80% include either a child, an elderly person, or a person with a disability.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote on social media Monday that members of her party "must unite and fight back" against the GOP's push for draconian cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.

"Trump wants to strip healthcare from poor people and increase grocery bills," Warren wrote. "Here's the new Republican plan to pass tax giveaways for Trump's billionaire backers and giant corporations on the backs of struggling Americans."

Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government’s efforts to increasing their own wealth and power.

We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.

It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to “dark money” SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don’t list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

And none of that covers the additional billions in “free media” Trump got from FOX “News,” rightwing hate radio, and Musk apparently altering the Xitter algorithm to favor messages friendly to himself and/or Trump while suppressing anti-Trump or pro-Harris posts.

This is extraordinarily bad for average Americans: With billionaires calling the shots in the upcoming Trump administration we can expect more pollution, fewer consumer protections, a war on unions, a frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage, bigger subsidies and grants to billionaires’ companies (from the fossil fuel industry to defense and SpaceX), lower taxes on the morbidly rich, and cuts to social services and entitlement programs.

Reagan began the destruction of the middle class (which has gone from two-thirds of us in 1981 when he came into office to 43% of us having that wealth today), Bush and Cheney used 9/11 to expand presidential authority, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court granted king-like powers to Trump, and now the wannabee Mussolini is echoing traditional fascist rhetoric about women, minorities, the press, and his political opposition.

Soon, millions of Americans will be confronted with a choice. Will they, like “good Germans,” Russians, Chinese, and Hungarians did, abandon politics and go back to sports, music, and keeping their heads down? Or will they — like millions in Brazil, Chile, and Ukraine — stand up, protest, join the Democratic Party (while it’s still legal) and form a real resistance to an oligarchy that appears bent on morphing itself into America’s first raw tyranny?

Elie Wiesel said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” and Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

We still have the power to make the choice to resist, awaken others, and organize. Seize it, before it’s gone.