Trump’s Medicaid cuts could push low-wage white workers—many of whom helped elect him—into the growing resistance movement.
As President Donald Trump greeted lawmakers upon entering the Congressional chamber on Mar. 4, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) made a quietly powerful statement by holding a small sign with the words, “This is not normal.” Soon after, Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) ripped the sign from Stansbury’s hands. Sadly, few Democrats attempted to defend or highlight Stansbury’s poignant message, allowing it to get instead lost in Trump’s chaotic congressional address. Only Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) challenged the president, shouting, “You do not have the mandate to cut Medicaid…” For his efforts, he too was censured. Immediately following the censured vote, progressive colleagues surrounded Mr. Green in the well of the House and sang, “We Shall Overcome.”
While there are some Democratic leaders, including governors and attorneys general, standing up to Trump, ultimately, it is we the people who need to fight back—the future of democracy is in our hands.
Bishop William Barber II underscored this point during his interview with Democracy Now on March 7. Barber is the president of Repairers of the Breach and national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, as well as the founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He predicted that with time, the resistance movement against Trump’s dangerous agenda will grow to include low-wage white workers, a third of whom live in the South and were perhaps initially pro-Trump.
Barber’s prediction bases itself on the Trump administration’s economic agenda, specifically its gashes in federal spending. House Republicans’ budget proposal would cut some $2 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, in large part to fund Trump’s tax cuts; the proposed budget would require massive cuts to Medicaid.
Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, falsely claims the government will go bankrupt without his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which plans to slice a trillion dollars from the deficit. Musk even drew bipartisan ire when he described Social Security as “a Ponzi scheme.”
“If an unelected technocrat can delete the financial commitments of a government established for the people and by the people—and we don’t say anything—we betray our moral commitments to liberty,” Barber underscored.
Indeed, the Republican tax plan would attack those who are most economically vulnerable. The plan calls for cutting around $880 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, callously ignoring the 72 million people enrolled in the program and the seven million in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Barber points to a new study, “The High Moral Stakes: Our Budget, Our Future,” to illustrate these consequences, detailing that, “about 39 [percent] of the enrollees in Medicaid are white, 18 [percent] are Black, 29 [percent] are Latino, 4.7 [percent] are Asian…”
Based on these statistics, 40 percent of everyone on Medicaid is white. So while Trump won with a significant portion of white, working-class voters, his policy in office may sway them to join a burgeoning resistance movement once they’ve absorbed the reality of his eviscerating cuts to Medicaid.
Ultimately, having these white, working-class voters in the fight against Trump would be critical to further building up the movement. The next step, according to Barber, is to call this community and others to action. “We abdicate our own moral capacity if we walk away from this moment. And we’re not going to walk away from this moment,” Barber said. “The only way a king becomes a king is if you bow. And we cannot bow. Bowing is not in our DNA. We have to stand in this moment.”
Amidst such an urgent and invigorating sentiment, one question looms large: Who else will join them?
