From “Another report suggests Medicaid cuts could lead to thousands of deaths” by Berkeley Lovelace, Jr. at nbcnews.com: “The Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s domestic policy billcould result in more than 1,000 additional deaths every year, according to a report published Wednesday in JAMA Health Forum….The cuts could also lead to nearly 100,000 more hospitalizations each year, the report found, and around 1.6 million people may delay seeking care…Wednesday’s study reaches a similar conclusion to an analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in June, which also found that the cuts could lead to thousands of preventable deaths annually because people delay care and get sicker…Medicaid is jointly funded by states and the federal government…Trump’s legislation — dubbed the “big, beautiful bill” — includes nearly $1 trillion in cuts to the program, mainly through work requirements and reduced federal funding. Most of the changes aren’t slated to take effect until 2027 or 2028…The new report’s projections are based on an earlier estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that found changes to Medicaid could result in 7.6 million people in the U.S. losing their health insurance by 2034…A worst-case scenario in the report projects double the number of additional annual deaths — around 2,000 — and estimates that up to 2.5 million people will delay seeking care…By 2034, more than 100 rural hospitals could be at risk of closure, the report found. More than 300,000 jobs could be lost, and the economy could shrink by about $135 billion, the report said. (In the worst-case scenario, the job losses were 408,000 and the economy took a $182 billion hit.)”
Sal Gentile has a worthy read, “The Lesson for Democrats From Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign? Be Normal. The Democratic mayoral candidate owes some of his success to the fact he doesn’t come off as weird or off-putting as his rivals” at The New Republic. An excerpt: “Mamdani’s critics would have you believe that he is somehow unusual or out of step with the values and interests of ordinary people. But as someone who has spent more than ten years cataloguing the weird, unsettling, and sometimes inscrutable behaviors of politicians in my job as a late night comedy writer, I can say with near certainty that the opposite is true. The core of Mamdani’s appeal is that he is aggressively, perhaps even radically, normal…Mamdani has his own standout qualities and electoral advantages, and it may not be possible for other Democrats to replicate them all. He’s a wildly talented politician and a gifted public speaker. He’s telegenic and charismatic. He’s one of the few politicians who, somehow, does not seem out of place in TikTok videos with comedians. He deftly managed a sprawling campaign apparatus that reached across a city of eight million people. His canvassing and phone banking operations were so impressive that he even outperformed expectations on Staten Island, of all places (a borough consisting entirely of uncles who work in sanitation, if my own family experience is any guide)…And just as important as the way Mamdani talks is what he talks about: buses, childcare, rent. Normal stuff that normal people care about. His appealing brand of democratic socialism—borrowing in part from Milwaukee’s so-called “sewer socialism”—was hyper-fixated on simple, straightforward, broadly popular ideas for making municipal government work better for regular people.”
Gentile adds, “He was singularly focused on the cost of living. When he talked about making the slowest buses in the country faster, he made a point of noting that long commutes were robbing New Yorkers not just of their “time,” but also their “sanity.” His campaign was focused relentlessly on making normal life for normal people more… normal…This vision of politics recognizes that government can and should provide normalcy. You should be able to get to your job within a reasonable amount of time. You should have access to affordable groceries in your neighborhood. You should be able to afford an apartment and be able to send your kids to preschool. You should be able go about your day without secret police snatching you off the street or demanding to see your papers. You should not have to make tradeoffs between medicine and housing, childcare and food—especially in the richest city, in the richest country, on Earth. This is a set of policies organized more than anything else around the principle that life should, simply put, be livable…Social media gimmicks will continue to fail if they don’t begin with a bold and authentic set of ideas. In Mamdani’s case, a simple, straightforward policy program seeking to fix a broken system and make normal life more normal—and more affordable—for ordinary people. The last ten years of American politics have been a ceaseless barrage of deprivations, vindictiveness, cruelty and exhaustion. Everyone is overwhelmed; American civic life is overwhelming. People need relief. Mamdani promises a new chapter of humane, joyful normalcy. In other words, he’s sitting down at the table of success—and inviting everyone to join him.”
In “Trump Owns It All Now” at The New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall writes: “Instead of authoritarianism, Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, has coined two phrases to describe the Trump agenda:
Trump’s immediate goal is better described as creating a governing system I call competitive sycophancy, where all power centers inside and beyond the federal government are run by competing sets of people vying to flatter him and manipulate resources and rules to his personal and family advantage. They do one extreme thing after another, try to outdo each other, and he chooses who to back, with shifts and chaos and unpredictability week after week…Patrimonial corruption is the only through-line result, along with sheer inefficiency and incompetence at key institutional and public-regarding tasks.
Trump, in Skocpol’s assessment, has so far been successful:
Thanks to the fawning of the G.O.P. and of most elite-run U.S. institutions, he already basically has this system in place. One part of it that is a possible route to pure coercive authoritarianism is the new ICE-centered private army run without limits by Stephen Miller — and there will be constant efforts to push that into a centralizing and terrifying threat against all political opposition.
But, Skocpol contended, “we are not there yet”:
We need to stop proclaiming how smart and victorious Trump has proved to be. The real issue is how ineffective and opportunist U.S. elites in general are proving to be, each sector and institution trying to protect its own narrow interests, to the detriment of any longer-terms interests, their own or the nation’s…Trump owns it all now; that is the silver lining in all of this. Let him get all the blame for the messes that will unfold, let his childish efforts to shift blame look more and more desperate, silly and weak. Weak is the key.”
