Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash, Trump to Average Americans: Starve Now or Work Until the Day You Die

May 18th 2020

President Donald J. Trump, joined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, left, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Stephan Monroe, associate director of the CDC, right (The White House)

By Thom Hartmann

The coronavirus pandemic has presented Donald Trump and the Republicans with two opportunities.

Big business and giant corporations that routinely give millions to the Republican Party were freaking out as their stock price was collapsing, a particular problem for their senior executives who are compensated in large part through stock options.

Meanwhile, average working people are freaking out because they have lost their income and $1200, when you can get it, is nothing close to what most families need to live for a few months without a paycheck.

Trump and the GOP have a simple response to these twin crises.

Multimillionaire former investment Bankster Jerome Powell has promised an “unlimited“ stream of money for the giant corporations to keep them afloat and keep their stock price high: so far it’s over $6 trillion and it is keeping the stock market afloat.

And for the average working person, former right wing congressman from Kansas and Koch brothers acolyte Mike Pompeo, now Secretary of State, has proposed letting Americans take a one time $10,000 cash payment from Social Security, in exchange for slashing the benefits they will receive when they turn 67.

So this is the Trump plan: stockholders, CEOs, and senior corporate executives get to keep their huge paychecks and obscene bonuses and Wall Street gets to make more money, while average working people get thrown a short-term life preserver that, if they use it now, will force them to choose between working until they die or starving when they reach retirement age…and if they don’t use it now, they get no further benefits so they can become homeless today.

This is the GOP we’ve known since the 1930s; they only take care of people rich enough to make large donations to Republican politicians, and are so wealthy that they don’t even need Social Security.

The rest of us, in their minds, are just “useless eaters” and can die.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.