A memo to Democratic candidates on connecting Trump’s lousy economy to his corrupt regime.
Friends,
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TO: Democratic candidates in the 2026 midterm elections
RE: Connect Trump’s lousy economy to his corrupt regime.
The purpose of this memo is to help you shape your midterm
message around the crisis of affordability and Trump Republican corruption. I
urge you to present these two issues as aspects of the same underlying problem:
The economy is lousy for most Americans because Trump Republicans are enabling
super-rich oligarchs to siphon off most of its gains while exerting increasing
control over it. Their — and Trump’s — self-dealing is undermining trust and
confidence in the U.S. economic system.
1. Republicans in the House and Senate have put oligarchs
in charge of America.
They raided Medicaid to pay for Trump’s giant tax cut, whose
benefits are going mostly to the rich. Legislative efforts advanced by House
Republicans and signed into law have targeted up to $2
trillion in federal health care cuts, forcing millions of Americans
off Medicaid rolls to pay for these tax reductions.
They refused to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies.
This is causing average premiums to more than double and has
already pushed 1.2
million people off coverage because they can’t afford it. Coverage
losses are mounting as many who initially selected a plan or who were
automatically reenrolled have to drop coverage.
Big Tech oligarchs — centi-billionaires Bezos,
Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and other robber barons — paid for Trump’s 2024
election, his inauguration, and his ballroom and are major donors to Senate and
House Republicans. They’ve shown up at Trump’s inauguration, White House
dinners, and official visits to China.
In return, these oligarchs have been allowed to monopolize
and drive up the prices we pay and silence Trump critics. Bezos’s
Amazon, for example, won’t allow any seller on the site to post lower prices on
any other site, and Bezos won’t allow his Washington Post editorial
page to criticize Trump. Larry and David Ellison have bought CBS
and sanitized “60 Minutes” of Trump criticism and effectively canceled Stephen
Colbert. After buying X (formerly Twitter), Musk turned it into a pro-Trump
voice box.
The crypto oligarchs have bribed Trump and
congressional Republicans to allow them to create the world’s largest Ponzi
scheme — which is enriching Trump and his family while providing a means for
criminals to hide insider trades, child trafficking, and drug deals.
The Big Oil and aerospace oligarchs have bribed
congressional Republicans to allow Trump to go to war in Iran, resulting in
massive profits for Big Oil — while the rest of us pay $1.50 more per gallon of
gas — and giant profits for giant military contractors.
This war spending has also contributed to higher
inflation, which the rest of us pay for in higher mortgage rates and
higher rates on car loans and education loans. The average 30-year fixed
mortgage rate has surged to over 6.6
percent, reaching its highest level in nearly nine months, driven by
rising Treasury yields, higher oil prices, and broader economic inflation
concerns stemming from the war in Iran. The major beneficiaries of these higher
rates — who pocket the higher payments we have to make — are the biggest banks
and super-rich who make the loans.
Oligarchs have also bribed Trump and congressional
Republicans to (1) get no-bid contracts, (2) deregulate Wall Street,
(3) roll back environmental safeguards and worker safety, and (4) get massive
subsidies for their corporations — all of which have made them even richer
while making life for the rest of us more dangerous and more costly.
2. Republicans have created crony capitalism on steroids.
The system is an extreme form of crony capitalism.
Congressional Republicans have rubber-stamped Trump’s corruption or pretended
not to notice it, while average Americans get shafted and billionaires do
better than ever. Corporate profits have never been higher. But wages aren’t
keeping up with prices, which means most people are getting poorer, and the
confidence of average consumers has never been lower.
Trump and his family’s corruption are leading the pack,
setting an example for the rest of the American oligarchy.
Congressional Republicans have been silent in the face of
bribes paid to Trump and his family. They didn’t raise a word about
Jeff Bezos’s outright bribe to Melania Trump of $40 million for her film rights
and $35 million to promote it, for a total of $75 million, when the best-case
scenario is that Bezos’s Amazon earns $10
million on it.
But that’s just one example of the bribes coming Trump’s
way. Qatar gifted Trump a Boeing 747 luxury jet valued at $400
million. Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the United Arab Emirates’
“Spy Sheikh” secretly
bought 49 percent of the Trump family’s crypto firm. Months later, the
administration handed over America’s most sensitive AI chip technology to the
United Arab Emirates despite national security concerns. The Trump
cryptocurrency business has rolled out a stablecoin called (USD1) pegged to the
U.S. dollar. The
stablecoin was utilized in a subsequent $2 billion investment into the
cryptocurrency exchange Binance by MGX, an Abu Dhabi government fund. And so
on.
Congressional Republicans have been silent as Trump has
executed thousands of stock trades, many in individual stocks affected
by his regime’s policies. And congressional Republicans won’t pass legislation
to stop the regime from profiting off its policies. They’ve been silent as
Trump praises and boosts corporations (as he did Apple on March 11) on the same
day he invests in them and won’t hold Trump or the regime to any ethical
standards.
Congressional Republicans have been silent in the face of
the Trump family’s looting of America. In his first year of his second
term of office, Trump increased his net worth by almost $4 billion to $7.8
billion by the end of 2025, according
to TIME.
Forbes estimated that in 2025, Eric Trump became
10 times richer, ending up worth some $400 million, and Donald Trump
Jr. became
six times richer, ending up worth some $300 million. Even Barron Trump,
while still in college, reportedly ended
up worth some $150 million in 2025.
Congressional Republicans have also been silent about
Trump’s “agreement” with the Justice Department to create a $1.8 billion slush
fund and immunity to all future IRS audits of Trump and his family. The
agreement was based on Trump’s withdrawal of his absurd $10 billion lawsuit
against the IRS for damages (after a contractor leaked Trump’s tax information
during his first term), when the federal judge to which the case was assigned
indicated she’d throw it out because Trump can’t be in charge of both sides of
the lawsuit.
So Trump’s own Justice Department then offered him — not as
an official legal “settlement” but as a kind of consolation prize — a $1.8
billion slush fund, enabling him to compensate anyone he feels has been
unfairly convicted. Likely beneficiaries would include fat-cat contributors to
the Republican Party, as well as those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January
6, 2021. The Justice Department has also offered Trump and his family immunity
from any IRS audit ever again — allowing him and his family to permanently bury
any and all illegal bribes they’ve received.
This is outright robbery from the citizens of the United
States. Billions of dollars that Trump and his family have pocketed — from
foreign governments, billionaires, and corporate supplicants — are now
untraceable, unaccounted for, and hidden for good.
Republican members of Congress are reportedly unhappy with
this agreement, presumably because their constituents are furious about it. But
they won’t take any action or even say anything about it for fear of angering
Trump; their silence about it is deafening.
3. The larger Republican scam is to replace our economy
with bribes.
The Republicans’ increasingly corrupt political system —
rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful —
inevitably produces a corrupt economy. That’s because politics determines the
rules by which an economy functions — and if those rules are products of
corruption, the economy is corrupted.
In such an economy, investors can no longer rely on a system
of stable rules and reliable laws. Everything depends on bribes and personal
deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and
plutocrats, billionaire and multi-billionaires, and monopolists.
This inevitably leads to economic sclerosis and decline, as
political and economic deal-making become personal transactions. Greed and
payoffs replace trust. It’s happened before, after America’s first Gilded Age
(see the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression).
4. A lesson: Péter Magyar’s victory over Viktor Orbán
relied on connecting the economic problems of ordinary Hungarians with Orban’s
corruption.
Finally, recall that the key to Péter Magyar’s remarkable
defeat of Viktor Orbán’s entrenched regime was Magyar’s ability to connect the
economic problems faced by ordinary Hungarians to Orbán’s corruption.
Magyar showed how Hungary’s soaring cost of living and
crumbling public services were linked to the illicit enrichment of Hungary’s
ruling elite. He exposed how state resources were siphoned into a
“mafia state” and showed that Hungary’s crumbling healthcare system,
dilapidated schools, and failing infrastructure were a consequence. The inner
circle of Orbán-aligned oligarchs had amassed immense fortunes while ordinary
Hungarians suffered from high inflation, stagnant growth, and an erosion of
their purchasing power.
Magyar’s anti-corruption message resonated because he
presented elite graft not merely as a moral or governance issue, but as the
root cause of Hungary’s cost-of-living crisis and declining standards of
living.
Democrats should do the same. The parallels between what
happened under Orbán and what’s happened under Trump and the Republicans are
almost exact.
5. The Republican Party is responsible for the
corruption. Democrats must respond with a plan to revive the economy and end
the corruption.
The Democrats’ record on corruption is not perfect, to be
sure, but Republicans are now in charge of the entire government — and we have
never before witnessed corruption on this scale. The twin issues of an economy
that’s unaffordable for most Americans and a system overwhelmed with corruption
are closely linked, and Trump and his Republican Congress are largely
responsible.
Most Americans are beginning to catch on, but Democrats need
to hammer this home — and propose ways to lower prices while fighting the
corruption.
Democrats should propose: (1) more vigorous anti-monopoly
enforcement, including busting up giant corporations, (2) prohibiting insider
trading by all elected officials and their families, (3) getting big money out
of politics (see here),
(4) raising taxes on the super-wealthy, including a wealth tax, and (5) using
the proceeds to improve the lives of average working Americans through Medicare
for all, universal childcare, paid leave, and free public higher education.
