Trump’s record suggests he won’t fight for working-class Americans — ProPublica

When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed reducing federal disability benefits of a quarter of a million low-income childrenon the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He tried to enforce a requirement that poor parents cooperate execution of child supportincluding having single mothers reveal their sexual historybefore they and their children can receive food assistance.

He tried adopt a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did adopt a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they earned more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, have run a campaign they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect ordinary Americans from an influx of people. immigrant workto return manufacturing jobs to the US, to support rural areas and families with children and generally stick it to the elites.

Critics respond by citing project 2025, a potential the plan for a second Trump presidency, which proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families, along with greater tax breaks for the rich. But Trump notwithstanding its clear connections with its authors, said that Project 2025 does not represent him.

However, his views on working class and poor people can be found in specific actions he tried to take when he had the power to make public policy as president.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as the regulations he has sought to pass or revise through his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, and quasi-independent agencies such as the National Council for Labor Relations and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an administration-wide agenda that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs, and job protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump has proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and moderate-income people than any other president, including Reagan, has ever done by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on budgets for Trump’s first term.

Trump has been prevented from achieving many of these goals, largely because he has been ineffective in pursuing them through the second half of his term. According to the reporters covering him at the time, he had been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He had control of both the House and Senate in his first two years in office, but used his only hits budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that cannot be obstructed by the opposing party) to reduce taxes for the rich and try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to draft new regulations, let alone pass them. federal regulation process and resolve any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies he seems focused in order not to repeat such mistakes he should win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress they said that this time, if they regain majorities in both chambers, they will use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts in social spending. Trump, meanwhile, is likely to introduce new regulations early in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them have a chance to be heard before a supreme court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If it is based on his proposals for the first term, this would mean:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
• cancellation almost a million children eligibility for free school lunches.
• Freezing Pell Grants for lower-income students so that they are not adjusted for inflation.
• Revising and substantially reducing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining individuals with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
• Elimination multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
• Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• It shrinks Job Corps and cutting funding for job training programs — which help people get off government assistance — by nearly half.
• restricting collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. It halved the open enrollment windows in which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA and cut over 80% of funding efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This has particularly affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of them and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the US rose in 2017 for the first time since the law was passed, then rose again in 2018 and 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came to power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the most important thing Trump has done with his administrative power during his first term – which he openly wants to do more of – is cutting the civil service, meaning the apolitical federal employees he collectively calls the “Deep State”.

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And that would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs that serve poor and working Americans. Agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance for lower-income families in times of need, relies heavily on mid-level staff in Washington, DC and local offices to process applications and get people help.

Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or if his agenda for the second term were different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do it again. “By unleashing American energy, reducing job-killing regulations, and enacting America First pro-growth tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the largest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

A new one apparent the pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending tip taxes.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without college degrees who feel that their economic situation has declined relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in growing numbers. In addition, some counties that have seen large increases in food stamp use in recent years keep voting for himdespite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s SUPPORTERS i am better on average than the media often it portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, incl stimulation controlsstarted during the Trump administration and has helped reduce poverty rates. But these efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were largely proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were not part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities, Vance has repeatedly expressed Appalachian-adjacent roots — it’s surprising journalists haven’t paid more attention to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Trump, having a second term, would continue that of the Biden administration efforts to make sure the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing poor people’s taxes? He would defend Biden’s welfare reformswhich aims to ensure that states actually use the money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, because the candidates and the reporters who cover them tend to focus more on the middle class.