Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not among the Democrats who protested at President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. Instead she stayed home and watched it on television. But she did register her objections in a different way: She broadcast a live rebuttal to her nearly 9 million followers on Instagram in the candid, digital town hall-style that she has made into a signature form of political communication.
The New York Democrat hammered home a critical point: The most important part of Trump’s exceptionally long speech wasn’t what he said, but what he didn’t. “Donald Trump said a lot of random things about studies and waste and all this other stuff, he did not talk about Medicaid, not once. And as a certain right-wing operative likes to say, ‘MAGA’s on Medicaid,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And MAGA: Trump is coming for your Medicaid. MAGA: Republicans are coming for your Medicaid.”
Trump knows that Medicaid cuts will be politically costly, which is why he spends so much time diverting his base’s attention from it.
As my colleague James Downie has pointed out, Trump has flip-flopped on Medicaid just weeks into his presidency. After promising to protect the program, which provides medical coverage for about 80 million low-income people in America, the GOP budget Trump endorsed commits to $880 billion in spending cuts, most of which will come from Medicaid. (This is to say nothing of possible future cuts to Medicare or Social Security under the guise of cracking down on “waste.”) Trump knows that Medicaid cuts will be politically costly, which is why he spends so much time diverting his base’s attention from it.
Trump’s go-to distraction tactics throughout his time in politics have mainly centered on vilifying migrants and talking about trade deficits as intolerable economic evils. But this time around, his DOGE operation and its outrageous misinformation alleging massive waste and fraud in the federal government are a key part of Trump’s rhetorical strategy — and featured heavily in his address. As Ocasio-Cortez points out, the emphasis on identifying waste as a way to return money to American taxpayers is a red herring.
“Don’t you think if you found a bunch of money in the couch cushions that you would put that to expanding Medicaid, improving schools, fixing our roads? Right? But that’s not what they’re planning on doing,” she said. “The reason they’re shaking all these couch cushions, and the reason they’re rattling off all these numbers, is because all those numbers they’re trying to add up into one of the most massive tax cuts for billionaires and the 1% probably in modern American history.”
Some angry citizens and activists are already clued into this dynamic and have been making Republicans’ lives harder at raucous town halls. As a result, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which helps Republicans get elected to the House, has told Republican lawmakers to avoid holding in-person town hall meetings. Ocasio-Cortez sees this as a move by the GOP party apparatus to condition its lawmakers to be able to pull the trigger on brutal cuts to social services. The NRCC wants to “extract Republicans out of their communities, out of their districts, so they don’t feel as connected, so they isolate them so they can be more easily manipulated and bullied into cutting Medicaid,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez is right to point out how Trump has mastered the art of distraction. Yet just as concerns about cuts to Obamacare helped Democrats win back Congress during Trump’s first midterm, Democrats can win the chamber again if they can focus voters’ attention on this vital part of the safety net Republicans want to cut. Democrats have a lot to work with and shouldn’t squander the opportunity to seize upon the unpopularity of cuts to massive government programs that help ordinary Americans.
