This Trump scheme is burning up middle-class Americans — and now they're mad

The president is burning up the American middle class with the largest tax increase since the early 1990s, which itself is snowballing the price of everything from coffee to clothes to carpets to car parts.

Yet this isn’t a major, ongoing, attention-grabbing story.

To be sure, there’s plenty of reporting about Donald Trump’s approval ratings. He’s underwater on every issue you can think of, including immigration. His so-called deportation crackdown has lost support, even among men. Reuters said today that only 41 percent approve.

But even that reporting carries an undercurrent of uncertainty, as if the Washington press corps can’t figure out the cause of what is becoming a broadbased backlash against the president’s tariffs. In the absence of clarity, there are abstract questions, especially about the unknowable future, ie, how will "affordability issues” impact the midterm elections?

Meanwhile, the American middle class is practically screaming for attention in hopes that someone somewhere does something now.

In January, consumer confidence “collapsed” to its lowest level since 2014, the AP reported. That same month job losses piled up to their highest level since 2009, according to an independent report. (Tariffs are driving job loss and slowing hiring, CNBC reported.) Meanwhile, health care costs keep going up, as do housing and energy costs.

The news media is not making a major story out of the fact that Trump is burning up the middle class because it’s the middle class that’s getting burned up.

Last week, G Elliott Morris, the data journalist who publishes Strength in Numbers, found that among people who don’t pay attention to politics (they don’t know which party controls the Congress), the president’s approval on the handling of prices is negative 40 percent.

Trump’s polling is getting so bad some pollsters are doubting whether he has a floor of support at all. On Monday, after the new Q Poll showed Trump’s net approval with independent voters is at -27 percent, CNN’s Harry Enten asked: “Where is the floor for Donald Trump? I’m not sure he has a floor, because if there is one, Donald Trump, at least in term No. 2, has just fallen through it to another low level.”

All of this, in one way or another, is driven by Trump’s tariffs.

You would think that a president who is immiserating middle-class Americans with the biggest tax increase in over three decades would get the attention of a press corps that can otherwise be trusted to chase down every detail of every program that affects tax-payers.

As things stand, however, we can reasonably conclude that, to the owners of the county’s most lucrative media properties, taxes are less important than the question of who’s paying for them. They are not making a major story out of the fact that Trump is burning up the middle class because it’s the middle class that’s getting burned up.

Remember, they knew. Tariffs are taxes we pay for products brought into the US. It was never going to be foreign countries. It was always going to be us. But the press corps, in deference to Trump’s lies about what they really are, made it sound like it was a question of maybe.

Well, there’s no more maybe.

The Federal Reserve of New York said Friday that US consumers are paying nearly all the cost of tariffs (90 percent). A previous report by the Tax Foundation said average households are paying the equivalent of $1,000 in taxes. (That’s expected to climb to $1,300 this year.)

All that pain might have been a honeymoon. According to the Wall Street Journal, importers that had been absorbing costs are no longer going to. “After holding the line on prices for several months, companies — big and small — have begun a new round of increases, in some cases by high-single-digit percentage points,” the Journal said.

And more pain is on the horizon. The White House wants to impose a new tariff, or “cargo tax,” on imports as part of a scheme to revitalize domestic shipping, according to Roll Call. “To help fund shipyard improvements, the administration wants to impose a new fee on all foreign-built commercial vessels bringing merchandise into US ports.”

In its assessment, the Tax Foundation said in no uncertain terms that Trump’s tariffs amount to the biggest tax increase in 33 years, and what I was to know is: why don’t major media outlets say it just like that?

I don’t mean now. I mean then – back when saying it just like that would have mattered. If voters understood, truly understood, that he wanted to impose a tax hike bigger than any since 1993, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, would voters have made the same decision?

Kamala Harris tried to warn us. She said Trump’s tariffs were “a sales tax on the American people.” But she wasn’t taken seriously, not as seriously as Trump would have been had their roles been reversed – if Harris, not Trump, had proposed a historic tax increase that keeps increasing. In that case, there would have been saturation coverage about the peril of raising taxes in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

Why didn’t that happen to Trump?

I think part of the reason is media stereotypes. The GOP, not the Democrats, is seen as the anti-tax party. In addition to Trump’s lies, what prevents reporters from building a narrative about the largest tax increase since the late 20th century is a kind of cognitive dissonance. The story can’t be that big since it’s the anti-tax party that’s doing it.

But I also think part of the reason is media interest. Whenever Democrats talk about raising taxes, they mean raising them on rich individuals and corporations, asking them to pay their fair share for everyone’s benefit. Such proposals always get wall-to-wall coverage, because who’s getting taxed is rich individuals who own corporations.

Trump’s tariffs are different. They are part of the elite goal of making the US tax code more regressive, so that less of the responsibility for a civilized country falls on those who can afford to pay more. Though they are known as the anti-tax party, the Republicans don’t mind taxes, as long as it’s you, me and everyone we know who’s paying for them.

It’s because Trump’s tariffs are in line with this larger, and largely unknown, effort by elites that headlines about them rarely featured their real and politically-charged name: tax. And instead of saying definitively what they are, and explaining definitely what their impact would be on middle-class Americans already heaving under the weight of an affordability crisis, the news media turned a fact into a question.

The aligned interests of the Republicans and the billionaire owners of news media corporations is also why, no matter how loudly or how strenuously Democrats accuse Trump of implementing “the largest peacetime tax hike in US history,” the allegation rarely breaks through.

Basically, if it’s a tax on elites, elites make it sound like a tax on you. If it’s a tax on you, they make you wonder if it’s a tax at all. When you understand this double standard, you can see how the news media actually created conditions during the 2024 election in which some middle-class Americans unknowingly voted for their own immiseration.

And now they’re mad.

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