Trump's lies on tax cuts are another gut punch to America's working-class

You know the old expression, numbers don’t lie?

Well, they do when the numbers come out of President Trump’s mouth.

Trump’s numbers don’t add up. If he were getting a math grade for his speech to the joint session of Congress, he’d fail miserably.

Trump is worse than a student who hasn’t done his homework. He’s a president who routinely lies to mislead the public, justify his wrongdoing and distract us from the real harm he’s doing to Americans and the lasting damage he’s doing to America.

Trump made a lot of promises about a new “golden age” for America. But in reality, he and congressional Republicans are getting ready to sell out Americans and our future so he can deliver massive tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk.

The budget bill House Republicans just approved is big, but it’s far from beautiful. Their top priority is providing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts whose benefits go overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. That will pile on even more national debt, leave us with less money to support families and communities who need it and force big cuts in Medicaid.

Budget experts report that the Trump-Republican plan would give the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers an average tax cut of more than $300,000 — and that the richest 200,000 multimillionaires would get more money than 187 million families.

While the rich would get richer, lower-income households would be even worse off when you factor in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that would be necessary to make his tax-cut boondoggle work.

As Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said in her response, “President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. He’s on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America. And to do that, he’s going to make you pay in every part of your life.”

She spelled it out: Grocery prices are going up, not down. Trump’s tariff attacks on our allies — what the Wall Street Journal calls “The Dumbest Trade War in History” — will hurt manufacturers and farmers. Premiums and prescriptions will cost more because Trump’s math doesn’t work without going after health care and maybe Social Security, Medicare and Veterans Administration benefits.

And then there’s Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE's goal seems to be to undermine the government’s ability to protect American workers, consumers and communities from corporate wrongdoing.

To justify the mass firings of public servants and all the families and communities that will be hurt by the decline in public services, Trump and Musk are lying about fraud.

Trump did it again in his speech, saying that DOGE has found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.” That’s not even close to true. DOGE’s own false claims about fraud and savings have been exposed, debunked and retracted so often it’s impossible to keep track. Trump repeated false and already debunked Musk's claims about Social Security paying benefits to 150-year-olds.

Meanwhile, Musk rakes in billions in government contracts while using his new power to fire public officials who have investigated his companies, and Trump’s corruption grows evermore brazen, enriching the crypto bros who backed his campaign and charging companies millions of dollars to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump treated Congress like one more MAGA rally, glorifying himself, recycling long-debunked lies, celebrating “anti-woke” censorship and vilifying transgender people. It is clear that in his golden age, Americans are being governed by a corrupted golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules, and the rules are made to benefit those with the most gold.

But a different future is possible, and there are some numbers that point the way.

A majority of Americans who voted in the 2024 election voted for someone other than Trump. A third of eligible voters didn’t participate. Most Americans do not support a tax scheme that funnels most of the benefits to those who are already at the top of the economic pyramid. And the overwhelming majority of Americans want to preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That’s many millions of people who can be mobilized to defend our neighbors, communities and country from the cruelty, criminality and corruption being imposed on us.

Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way.

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