The bill they don't want us talking about

We have to put on our special anti-zone-flooding glasses to sort through the chaos of this presidency, because Trump is a master at changing the subject.

A week into Trump’s second term, I wrote this post about being so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of shocking news coming out of this administration that I was struggling to figure out how or what to write. And even knowing that this is all by design and that Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy appears to be working hasn’t made it a whole lot easier to sort through what’s important enough to cover these days, when you can just take an hour long lunch break and come back to an entirely different news cycle about something even more batshit than you were planning on writing about that morning. At 9 am they defund Alzheimer’s research; by noon they’ve laid off half the air traffic controllers and ordered the deforestation of national parks; by happy hour they’ve deported two children with cancer and told U.S. poultry producers they can stop bothering to check for salmonella. It feels like this every day, essentially:

And it’s true that all these horrible things are actually happening and are worth talking about individually. But I’ve also noticed a larger pattern with the news cycle that played out in an especially obvious way yesterday: When Trump or one of his minions makes an especially unhinged announcement that’s so obviously illegal and unprecedented, flies in the face of the Constitution, and sends the press into a feeding frenzy, he’s almost always trying to change the subject from the much more insidious thing he and Republicans have done that’s a lot harder to justify to his own base.

Here’s how that played out yesterday: Overnight on Wednesday, House Republicans passed Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” tax bill by one single vote. This absolutely monstrous piece of legislation, as The Cut explained, will screw over basically everyone. If enacted, it would be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history. Its Medicaid cuts ($698B) would leave 8.6 million more Americans uninsured by 2034; it makes the biggest cut to SNAP ($267B), or food stamps, in the program’s history. It literally takes food out of hungry children’s mouths. And it does all this while adding $3.8 TRILLION to the national debt via tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and increased defense and border spending.

Medicaid cuts, in particular, are so deeply unpopular across red states and blue states that even Republican Senator Josh Hawley (Mo.) has called them “morally wrong and politically suicidal.” And the press coverage of this bill yesterday morning was pretty ugly for Trump—even the right-leaning, fiscally conservative Wall Street Journal framed it in terms of its obvious cruelty and who it hurts.

Trump still needs Senate Republicans to sign off on this thing, and all anyone was talking about was how many kids have to go hungry to give more tax breaks to Jeff Bezos. So that’s why, around 2 p.m., he had Kristi “Puppy Killer” Noem announce that she’s terminating Harvard’s foreign exchange student program because the school won’t cooperate with the government’s fascist agenda. Nevermind that the government can’t legally do that; Harvard’s lawyer’s challenged it this morning and within about 10 minutes, the judge had already sided with the school and granted a temporary restraining order. This was a perfect conversation change for Trump: His base tends to hate Ivy League schools and higher education in general, and they also tend to be xenophobic. The administration’s line that “foreign students are our guests and should keep their mouths shut if they want an education here” plays pretty well with the average Trump voter. He’s taking on the elites! America first! They don’t mind him lighting the Constitution on fire when it doesn’t directly hurt them.

But that wasn’t the big story yesterday. The story was Republicans attempting the biggest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history and ripping away their own constituents’ food and health care. And while it pains me to no end that Trump is forcing a brain drain in this country and scaring away international students and punishing scientists and trying to turn us into dumb, isolationist North Korea, I think what may be more of a priority right now as the courts deal with the more blatantly absurd and illegal shit is to make his own voters aware that he is literally trying to kill them to make himself and his friends richer. Red states hate Medicaid cuts; everyone hates SNAP cuts. Everyone needs health insurance. Letting the water cooler conversation be about Harvard’s foreign exchange student program is the biggest gift the media could give to Republicans right now.

Another important thing.

On a final note, I just want to acknowledge the horrifying story of Adriana Smith, the Georgia woman who’s been kept on life support for more than 90 days without her family’s consent because she was nine weeks pregnant at the time doctors declared her brain dead. This is, of course, about abortion: Georgia bans the procedure after the fetal “heartbeat” can be detected, which happens around six weeks, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. But an embryo before ten weeks is still a clump of tissue that looks like this:

Tissue from five weeks of pregnancy to nine weeks. Photograph: MYA Network

And Smith’s family has been forced to pay to keep her on breathing machines for months now in order to grow a fetus inside her, as if she’s nothing more than an incubator for the state. “It’s torture for me,” her mom, April Newkirk, told a local news station. “I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there.” The family also said they’re worried about the health of the fetus, which is experiencing complications inside of a woman who can’t even breathe on her own.

State Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican ghoul who sponsored the abortion ban that’s putting Smith’s family through this torture, said in a statement: “I’m thankful that the hospital recognizes the full value of the small human life living inside of this regrettably dying young mother.” Here’s what he looks like:

Democrat Nabilah Islam Parkes, who’s been a strong advocate for the family in lieu of them having actual legal representation, said, “That any law in Georgia could be interpreted to require a brain-dead woman’s body to be artificially maintained as a fetal incubator is not only medically unsound — it is inhumane.” Parkes and her colleagues are pushing to repeal the abortion ban, and godspeed.

But in the meantime, Smith’s family has no legal way to make the hospital take her off the machine if they’re afraid of violating the state’s abortion ban. And this feels like the logical endpoint of abortion laws, right? To exert full government control over women’s bodies and reduce us to mere vehicles through which babies are carried. Nothing has “gone wrong” for Republicans in the case of Adriana Smith; this outcome is the entire point of the exercise.