Calling H.L. Mencken

Can our politics get any more stupid?

Henry Louis Mencken, call your office.

What strikes me most about the Senate version of Trump’s Big Beautiful budget Bill is its stupidity. The GOP is in love with the idea that you can cut taxes by $4 trillion and still call yourself a fiscal conservative if you throw a few people off Medicaid for not working. Never mind that the deficit will still double and that somewhere north of 51,000 malingerers (the Yale Budget Lab’s estimate based on the House bill; the Senate bill cuts Medicaid even more), or imagined malingerers (most Medicaid recipients already have jobs) will die. Never mind that cutting Medicaid these days is political suicide. Never mind that the Hippocratic Oath never said, “I will heal only those people whom the state deems virtuous.”

We are living in an historic moment whose idiocy only H.L. Mencken, for all his many personal deficits, could describe, though I don’t think even Mencken ever encountered a president as stupid and mean as Donald Trump. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.