Grift As Governance— And Who Ever Said The Ratchet Effect Couldn’t Be Reversed?

Will The Bill Come Due In 2026? Señor TACO’s Agenda Is On The Ballot

A new poll for the Associated Press found about two-thirds of Americans expect Señor TACO’s Big Ugly Bill will help the rich, not their own families. With immense resources at their disposal from the billionaire class, “Republicans have already begun airing advertisements framing the legislation as a tax cut for all Americans, highlighting new deductions on tips and overtime income… [But] even many Republicans agree that the wealthy are likely to benefit from the tax and spending law. About half say the law will do more to help the wealthy. A similar percentage say this about middle-class people, while about 4 in 10 Republicans think it will do more to help than hurt low-income people.”

Meanwhile, with inflation ticking up, July’s University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Report: “Consumer remains a substantial 16% below December 2024 and is well below its historical average.… expected personal finances fell back about 4%.”

What is Trump doing to save the economy? Well… plenty— at least for the Trump family economy. Brian Slodysko and Will Weissert reported that “if one theme has emerged in President Donald Trump’s second term, it's this: He's leveraged  the power of his office for personal gain unlike anyone before in history. From crypto coins to bibles, overseas development deals to an upcoming line of cellphones, Trump family businesses have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars since his election, an unprecedented flood of often shadowy money from billionaires, foreign governments and cryptocurrency tycoons with interests before the federal government. ‘He is president and is supposed to be working in the public’s interest,’ said James Thurber, an emeritus professor at American University, who has researched lobbying, campaign finance and political corruption for decades. ‘Instead, he is helping his own personal interest to grow his wealth. It’s totally not normal.’ The sums amassed by the Trump Organization are far greater than those collected by the family during the president’s first term, when patronage of his hotels, resorts and golf courses was de rigueur to curry favor with the famously transactional commander-in-chief. The second time around, the Trump family’s ambitions are far grander, stretching from cyberspace to far-flung regions across the globe. One of Trump’s cryptocurrencies is conservatively estimated to have pulled in at least $320 million since January, while another received a $2 billion investment from a foreign government wealth fund. A third has sold at least $550 million in tokens.”

While Democrats have condemned Trump for his overlapping roles as a beneficiary and president, he is not likely to face any immediate repercussions for such extensive conflicts-of-interest. Congress is controlled by fellow Republicans, and his administration is stocked with loyalists who have dismantled many guardrails of oversight. Last summer, the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority cemented by Trump, ruled that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.

Even in the rare cases where Trump’s allies have urged caution, the president has ignored them. That’s what happened when he accepted a $400 million “beautiful, big, magnificent, free airplane” from the Qatari government. Trump said the Boeing 747 “would go directly” to his presidential library upon leaving office.

“It’s the Mount Everest of corruption” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat.

Will it matter in next year midterm elections, when Trump isn’t on the ballot but allies like MAGA Mike Lawler, in the suburbs north of NYC, are? Mike Sachs, his progressive opponent, told us that “Lawler can no longer pretend to be a moderate up here in NY-17 while voting MAGA down in DC. He's just more proof that when Republicans are in power, they hurt people, tank the economy, and then distort our democracy to preserve their power because hurting people and tanking the economy are unpopular. He may think the people of this district are stupid, but we see it all, and his days in Congress are numbered.”

Dave Weigel noted that Señor TACO wanted a suite of tax cuts by July 4, and it got them, DOGE to hollow out ‘woke’ federal agencies and it got that, to defund public media and end foreign aid, and it got all, impounding the money, then getting a GOP majority to claw it back. “[M]onth by month the administration is dismantling government programs that would be hard for anyone to reconstruct, and setting new priorities that will be hard to reverse. Specifically: Republicans have learned, three times this century, that if they cut income taxes, Democrats will keep most of the cuts in place. When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Republicans promised to repeal it. When they passed the Inflation Reduction Act, Republicans promised to repeal it. They largely failed at the first task and largely succeeded in the second. But even in friendly rooms, Democrats are not promising to repeal the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in toto.

Will Democrats fully restore the Department of Education? Recreate USAID? They haven’t said so. Tim Walz, arguably the most progressive of the Democrats showing up in primary states, told me that the next Democratic president had “an opportunity to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place.”

Would Democrats fully refund NPR and PBS? It will be three and a half years, at least, before they get a chance to, and they don’t know what of those institutions will be left. Would they repeal the new ICE money that has turned it into one of the best-funded law enforcement agencies on earth? Jeffries has promised “aggressive oversight,” not defunding.

Would they repeal all of the new tariffs? They didn’t when Biden was president. Restart DEI offices? Please. Democrats see the new stories of migrants self-deporting as an anti-American horror. Republicans see homes and jobs that will be freed up for citizens, and migrants who’ll never come back.

The real Democratic conversation about a post-Trump agenda won’t get underway until 2027, when their presidential candidates stop being so coy about what brought them to Charleston and Nashua. But Republicans have stopped fearing “the ratchet effect,” the theory that government programs never contract once expanded.

Think of what survived in the Biden interregnum: The border wall (which activists wanted him to dismantle), the US embassy in Jerusalem (with its commemorative Trump plaque), the Space Force, the 2017 tax cuts. There was plenty of “chaos” coverage when Trump notched those wins, but it didn’t really matter. Democrats are confident that they can run against the OBBBA and its Medicaid cuts, and some Republicans have already grown wobbly about them. But the rest of the Trump agenda? The ratchet effect is going the other way.

As everyone has been saying all year, the cruelty is the point— but now it’s also the structure. And while Democrats are still focus-grouping the language of partial restoration, Trump and his congressional allies are pouring concrete. By the time the tide turns, the outlines of American governance may be permanently altered… perhaps less a republic than a franchise, with its assets stripped, its mission outsourced and its moral compass sold off for parts. This more deliberate, gleeful, corrupt entropy that just the ratchet effect in reverse. The Trump years seem to have taught Republicans how to govern as vandals and get away with it. The Clinton-Obama-Biden years taught them they’d never have to clean up the mess. Unless Democratic leaders like Schumer and Jeffries— and conservative careerists trying to move up the ladder like Angie Craig (MN), Haley Stevens (MI) and Colin Allred (TX)— stop pretending there’s time to rebuild later, there may not be much left to rebuild.