Trump’s America is Drowning (This Week’s Income Inequality Roundup, July 11, 2025)
We should stop pretending this isn’t intentional
In 2016, Kate McKinnon starred in a brilliant Saturday Night Live sketch—a parody of the famous cue card scene in Love Actually. She ended it with a grim joke: Donald Trump “will kill us all.”
The Republicans I knew back then laughed. But I believed it even then: Donald Trump, his enablers and every person who could have stopped him but didn’t — they all have blood on their hands.
More than 120 people died in the recent Texas floods. Natural disasters aren’t usually anyone’s fault — despite the unhinged claims of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But the response to a natural disaster? That’s on us. Or, more specifically, on the people Trump put in power.
Elon Musk and Trump slashed National Weather Service staffing through the DOGE plan, leaving emergency systems understaffed when people needed them most. I can’t stop thinking about the children who died in that flood. We may never know how many could have been saved — if only billionaires hadn’t been trying to save a few bucks.
Republican hands were already bloody
How many people needlessly died of Covid because of Trump’s poor handling? And how many people will die because he appointed anti-science nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the secretary of health and human services?
Trump’s bestie, Laura Loomer, thinks it’s funny to joke — if she’s even joking — about alligators eating the 65 million Latinos living in the U.S. She’s not the only one. Have you seen the Alligator Alcatraz selfies MAGA supporters are posting?
This is to say nothing of the cuts to Medicaid and the upcoming closure of countless rural hospitals, the cuts to SNAP and more.
MAGA celebrates a culture of death. When Trump reclaimed power, he didn’t just bring corruption. He brought a war on science, compassion and survival itself. MAGA doesn’t just tolerate suffering. It demands it.
I post these curated roundups every Friday, plus original work on inequality every Tuesday and Thursday. And don’t miss my serialized feature, Poverty and Privilege, every Saturday.
Subscribe now if you haven’t already — and if you like what you read, share it. This fight needs voices!
Shared by
Shared by
Shared by
Shared by
Shared by
Inequality, Part VI: Wealth and Power
Paul Krugman
Yet how, exactly, does this work? What mechanisms give the 1 percent and the 0.01 percent so much political power in the United States — especially compared with other countries? And why has their power increased in recent years?
Can America Get Unstuck?
Addison Del Mastro
Everyone but the very rich was squeezed out of urban housing markets, and the gates of economic opportunity closed. Today, Appelbaum writes, “too many Americans . . . live where they are able, not where they want; they experience their lives less as the result of their own decisions than as the consequence of vast and impersonal forces. And with that decline in agency has come a deep embitterment.”
We Do What We Can
Hans Jorgensen
Do you know what we never hear at church? We never hear, “We should build more concentration camps.” We never hear, “We should help out wealthier people with a tax cut.”
Will the working class win in NYC?
Kip Hedges, Workers Resist
If he is elected, the big question will be whether Mamdani will make good on these working-class campaign promises. Can he and does he actually want to mobilize the working class of the city to fight the rich?
The Average American Can No Longer Afford to Visit Their National Parks
Pil Pattiz, More Than Just Parks
It was once the most American of vacations.
You didn’t need a booking window or a credit card or a six-month plan.
You just went. Pitched a tent. Made sandwiches. Drove slow. Let the country unfold in front of you.
That idea is vanishing.
Today, the average American family can no longer afford to visit their national parks.
You Made Babies Unaffordable But Now You’re Mad We’re Not Having Them
Michelle Teheux, Untrickled
It’s pretty ironic that the people who are most worried about the birth rate are the same people who have made babies so unaffordable.
It wasn’t the lefties like me who decided to set up a system that is the very opposite of trickle-down. Our economic system is set up like a giant sponge. We’re all working our asses off and producing wealth like the world has never seen and almost all of it is being sucked into the pockets of a handful of people.
idly so — are hard to ignore. And few economic measures capture it quite as starkly as the yawning gap between CEO and worker pay.
Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely
Paul Krugman
There was a crucial turning point in both attitudes toward government and the resources devoted to public goods — basically, goods we can’t expect the private sector to provide, like, say, weather prediction and flood protection — in 1980. That was when Ronald Reagan, who insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, took office, and this attitude has been pervasive in U.S. politics ever since.
This Land Is Not Your Land
Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
Because Vance’s entire career has been built on pleasing more powerful right wing elites, from Yale to Peter Thiel to the world of Republican donors, he plays an important role of reassuring all of these people that Trump’s is not fully off the rails. His job is to add a sprinkle of academic justification to the administration's instinctive policies of retribution, and sell them both up and down the social hierarchy.
Mailbag: Will The Press EVER Treat Trump's Authoritarian Corruption As A Scandal?
Brian Beutler, Off Message
Republicans, for all their policy incoherence, agree to the person about the desirability of huge, regressive tax cuts.
Doing Work You Love Sounds Ideal Until You Try to Pay Your Bills With It
Michelle Teheux, Untrickled
My desire to perform a job that I am good at, find fulfilling and that serves society in some way is completely at odds with my desire to earn enough money to live a simple, decent life.
Don’t miss my current special series, Poverty and Privilege, which comes out every Saturday:
Poverty and Privilege is the story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them. The story is true but names and certain identifying details have been changed.
Part 1, Unlikely Allies in an Unequal America
Part 2, The Country Club Lunch
Part 3, One Family’s Fall From the Middle Class
Part 4, Billable Hours Don’t Pause for Birth
Part 6, How Marriage and Divorce Shape Financial Futures
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park
For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
--Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944
Just change anti-Semites to whatever phrase you prefer to fit the present.
The Continuing Resolution is a healthcare travesty on the least of our citizens. We exclude the poor and the marginalized from access. Did I say the marginalized? Who has marginalized in a free democracy and the wealthiest country in the world? Why are they marginalized?Racism kills, both fast and slow. Health Inequity. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/health-inequity