Totalitarian kitsch

To return to a theme we briefly discussed yesterday, Krugman does an excellent job connecting Trump’s open authoritarianism to his extremely cruel and unpopular domestic agenda:

That 4 percent income decline for the poorest 10 percent of Americans is the scale of economic damage you’d expect from a severe recession. But here it is being deliberately inflicted on the poorest Americans.

In the OBBBA, pain on the least well-off Americans is not a price that is being paid in order to reduce the U.S. budget deficit. Remember, the benefit cuts for those in the bottom decile of the income distribution are being paired with tax cuts at the top of the income distribution. So the net effect will be a large increase in the U.S. budget deficit.

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The fact is that there’s no reasonable way to dispute the basic conclusion of the C.B.O.’s analysis. The Big Beautiful Bill is an immense exercise in reverse Robin-Hoodism, taking resources away from those who need them and giving the money to the already rich while driving up the deficit, increasing interest rates and crowding out investment..

The OBBBA is, in fact, so terrible that we need to ask how any party in a democracy imagines that it could get away with taking money away from 80% of the American public.

My answer is that the G.O.P.’s vicious tax and spending plans can’t be separated from the party’s contempt for democracy. The House has just enacted legislation that is desperately unpopular and would be even less popular if the public understood it fully. Why, then, did House members vote for it? Because they fear Donald Trump more than they fear the voters or because they don’t believe we will ever have fair elections again. Or both.

Also, what’s with the bill’s peculiar name? And yes, it is officially the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” While it might seem odd to focus on its name, there is a real, important link between a certain kind of vulgar tackiness and authoritarian rule. Milan Kundera, author of “The unbearable lightness of being,” called it “totalitarian kitsch.” By giving their bill a ludicrous name, because those were Trump’s words, G.O.P. politicians were engaging in performative self-abasement, demonstrating their willingness to humiliate themselves in order to curry favor with the Leader.

So by calling the legislation the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Republicans were in effect confirming that yes, Washington has turned into Pyongyang on the Potomac, where political survival depends on slavish flattery of the dictator.

One upshot of this is that Democrats don’t have to choose between talking about Trump gutting Medicaid to pay for an upper-class tax cut and Trump’s increasingly militarized authoritarianism, or accept pundit wisdom that the latter is a “distraction” — they’re intimately linked.

Relatedly:

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) told MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff that he was “escorted” to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference by FBI agents, where he was then manhandled by agents under the claim they didn’t know who he was.

Sen. Padilla found himself at the center of a maelstrom when he tried to ask a question Thursday at Noem’s briefing on ICE protests in Los Angeles and was brought to the ground and handcuffed by Secret Service and FBI agents. Noem and her agents falsely claimed Padilla didn’t identify himself as a U.S. senator and accused him of “lunging” in a threatening manner.

The incident sparked widespread shock and criticism, and an impassioned response from Sen. Padilla after his release.