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midterm elections
The GOP Is Taking Our Healthcare to Fund Bombs and Tax Cuts; We’re Fighting Back
Republicans have decided that they don’t care about what the American people want, only about enabling Trump’s worst impulses. Our job is to make sure they regret that this November.
Apr 03, 2026
Last year, Republicans cut $1 trillion from Medicaid in the same bill that gave billionaires massive tax cuts. They also slashed funding for the Affordable Care Act, making healthcare unaffordable for Americans across the country.
As a result of these cuts, at least 1.5 million Americans have already lost their healthcare coverage, with an estimated 15 million set to lose coverage in the coming years. Nearly 450 hospitals, many of them in rural areas, are at risk of closing or shrinking.
Despite this devastation, Republicans are planning to make even deeper cuts to healthcare. Top Republicans, including House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), want to make even more cuts to the Affordable Care Act—to fund President Donald Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran. Trump himself is threatening cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, saying, “We’re fighting wars… It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”
Republicans have decided that they don’t care about what the American people want, only about enabling Trump’s worst impulses. Our job is to make sure they regret that this November, when every member of the US House and one-third of the US Senate is on the ballot.
The Trump regime and their Republican minions in Congress think they can ignore the people, but when we stand together, when we raise our voices together, we cannot be ignored.
That’s why we are launching the Stop Taking Our Health Care Campaign to hold Republicans accountable. This month, members of Congress are home for recess—and we’ll make sure that they hear from their constituents.
We are holding dozens of events in targeted congressional districts across the country, demanding that Republicans Stop Taking Our Health Care. But, we need your help to host even more. Take a look and see if there is an event near you. If there isn’t one, then please sign up to host one yourself. We will help make it a success.
To kick off the Stop Taking Our Health Care Campaign, we held a live stream with guests including Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas).
Rep. Underwood said: “Donald Trump and Republicans’ failure to address these tax credits has created a healthcare crisis for working families. When premiums go up and help disappears, families are forced to make impossible choices. Do they keep their health insurance, or do they pay their rent? Do they refill their prescriptions, or do they buy groceries?”
Every day, the Trump administration is spending at least a billion dollars of taxpayer money in Iran.The American people do not want this war. They want affordable healthcare. - @underwood.house.gov @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:01 PM
Rep. Casar said: “They’ve already gutted Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, kicking 15 million Americans potentially off of their healthcare. And now they want to kick off hundreds of thousands more everyday working families from their healthcare to pay for Trump’s completely unnecessary war of choice in Iran. We’ve got to put everyday Americans’ lives above more and more profits for the Trump administration and their rich friends.”
The Trump Administration already gutted Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.Now they want to kick off hundreds of thousands more working families from their healthcare to pay for Trump's completely unnecessary war in Iran. - @repcasar.bsky.social @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:05 PM
Theresa Luoni, a New Jersey mom and caregiver whose family relies on Medicaid, said: “Republicans in Washington have worked day and night to raise costs for families like mine and make it harder for us to make ends meet, and now they're doubling down, threatening even deeper cuts to Medicaid so they can pay for their war and continue handing out tax breaks to billionaires.”
Republicans in Washington have worked day and night to raise costs for families like mine.Now they're doubling down, threatening even deeper cuts to Medicaid, so they can pay for their war and continue handing out tax breaks to billionaires. - Theresa Luoni@unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:19 PM
Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, senior adviser at Social Security Works, said: “Our campaign and this month of action is designed to hold these people accountable for their vote on things like the Big Ugly Bill, which failed to extend the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act and cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid. Our message is simple: Stop taking our healthcare.”
During this month of action, we will hold Republicans accountable for the Big Ugly Bill.Rural hospitals and nursing homes are already closing because of them. - @jonbowzerbauman.bsky.social @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 12:17 PM
Unrig Our Economy Campaign Director Leor Tal said: “Republicans in Congress promised to lower costs, but instead, they cut our healthcare and made life even more expensive for working families. Now Republicans in Congress want to cut healthcare even more to pay for this unnecessary and expensive war that they've started, which is already driving up costs for working families. That's why we’re launching Stop Taking Our Health Care, a nationwide campaign fighting back against Republican efforts to rip healthcare coverage away from working families.”
Republicans in Congress promised to lower costs. Instead they cut our healthcare and made life even more expensive for working families. And now they want to cut health care even more to pay for this unnecessary and expensive war.- Leor Tal, @unrigoureconomy.bsky.social
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— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 2, 2026 at 11:55 AM
The Trump regime and their Republican minions in Congress think they can ignore the people, but when we stand together, when we raise our voices together, we cannot be ignored. It’s time to demand healthcare not warfare!
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Trump Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World
There has never been a bigger sociopathic megalomaniac in Western democratic polities than Donald J. Trump.
Apr 03, 2026
Does President Donald Trump have an endgame in Iran? Are personality traits a factor in Trump’s foreign policy behavior? How different is Trump from his postwar predecessors? Will he end US democracy? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek journalist and writer Alexandra Boutri, but does not hesitate to point out that whoever thought that some of the acts associated with mad Roman emperors (like Caligula’s war on Neptune) belong to a bygone era probably hasn’t been paying attention to how crazy and disruptive things are in the Trump era.
Alexandra Boutri: The war in Iran has entered its second month and one cannot rely on the US president for when it might end. Trump refuses to give a clear timeline, although he has boasted on numerous occasions that his war was won. In your view, what is Trump’s endgame in Iran?
C. J. Polychroniou: Let me start with the following statement: The second Trump presidency is far more dangerous than its first but no less incompetent. Whether it’s the economy and his “beautiful” tariffs or world affairs, Trump has no clue what he is doing. His decision-making style is governed by self-interest and a gut-instinct approach. And he has, given who he is, surrounded himself not only with loyalists but with subservient yes-people.
Indeed, it is most unlikely that Trump engaged in a comprehensive review of intelligence reports and military analyses before he initiated military action against Iran. My guess is that he simply became convinced by war-criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the most pro-Israel officials in his administration that the strategy of taking out Iran’s leadership would paralyze the country and lead to regime change. That was a gamble, not a plan. The Iranian regime did not collapse after the decapitation strikes because it is not a one-man dictatorship like Iraq was under Saddam Hussein. The power hierarchy in Iran is very complicated. Power is actually distributed throughout several layers of the government, and there are parallel armies and intelligence services. Of course, the fact that power is not concentrated in the hands of one man does not make the Iranian regime less brutal. But it makes it less likely to collapse because of an attack on the country’s top political and military leaders.
The Trumpian nightmare has a long way to go before it is over, and it’s bound to get much worse.
Incidentally, and this needs to be strongly emphasized, the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership is criminal and illegal. Trump’s war on Iran is in violation of international (and US) law. It’s a war against the United Nations Charter. Israel and the United States don’t give a hoot about international law and human rights, but it doesn’t mean the world should allow them to think that they are being perceived as anything other than rogue states.
We live in dark, perilous times for humanity and the planet as a whole. Whoever thought that the acts of mad Roman emperors (like Caligula’s war on Neptune) belong to a bygone era probably hasn’t been paying attention to how crazy and disruptive things are in the Trump era. The current occupant of the White House is mentally unhinged. He threatens to bomb Iran “back to stone ages” and do whatever he wants with Cuba. I fear he is capable of unbelievable acts of cruelty and madness. In fact, and I said this about his second presidency long before he decided to go to war with Iran, we haven’t seen anything yet. The Trumpian nightmare has a long way to go before it is over, and it’s bound to get much worse.
Alexandra Boutri: How much worse can it get? What is it that you are really worried about Trump and his actions?
C. J. Polychroniou: Trump is a real threat to world peace. That’s already well established. He has unleashed what can be best described as lunacy imperialism. He is also dismantling US democracy at unprecedented rate and has launched an equally unprecedented assault on the environment. He is a wrecking ball, and it’s simply shocking that there is still a sizeable portion of the citizenry that thinks he is doing a great job. But what else can one expect from people who believe that explosive conflict in the Middle East will trigger Christ’s return and see Trump as the man God has chosen to defeat the satanic forces in the United States and Christianize it? No wonder why Trump behaves like a king and views himself as an emperor who can do whatever he pleases. There has never been a bigger sociopathic megalomaniac in Western democratic polities than Donald J. Trump, which is why he lacks self-awareness, lies about everything, all the time, and is so fixated with attaching his name to institutions, buildings, and symbols.
If it was entirely up to Trump, US democracy would be already dead by now.
Imperialist adventuring is standard US foreign policy. But Trump’s foreign policy agenda, I would argue, seems to be less about the advancement of US interests than about his own legacy, his own personal political immortality. The US doesn’t need Greenland for national security; it can access its resources without gaining sovereignty over land. The US doesn’t need Venezuela’s oil (there is a global oil oversupply anyway), and leaders of the industry have shown little interest in making the massive investments needed to revive its outdated infrastructure, despite the fact that Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world. Annexing Canada and making it the 51st state will not make the US necessarily richer or more secure. But there is no doubt that Trump likes the idea of being the president who expanded the country’s borders. This is how he may be remembered by the future generations.
In saying all this, I do not doubt that there are “strategic” rationalizations circulated by Trump’s national security team for the revival of naked US imperialism. Or that these rationalizations are insignificant in the making of foreign policy. But, for Trump, I believe the foreign policy decisions that he ultimately reaches are based on how he thinks they may cement his own legacy. And most of these decisions are as irrational as those driving his domestic agenda. Abstract theorization about the revival of US imperialism under Trump II is fine and well, and much needed, but I think this is one outstanding case where personality becomes an important factor in decision-making and therefore adding to our understanding of both domestic and foreign policy behavior.
Alexandra Boutri: How different is Trump from his recent predecessors? Also, I can conclude from what you have already said that you don’t expect Trump to go down without a fight. But does he really want to end democracy in the United States?
C. J. Polychroniou: Trump is a very different president from all of his postwar predecessors in several critical ways. First, he has monetized the White House. Trump and his family have made huge amounts of money off of the presidency. Second, he views himself above the law and makes everything about his own ego. Third, he suppresses and ignores scientific research and findings like no other president I am aware of and simply doesn’t give a hoot about public health and the environment or the lives and the livelihoods of anyone outside his own family and his rich donors. Fourth, he is a racist, misogynist, and bigot who also hates working class people and the poor. Fifth, he is carrying out an anti-democracy project both inside the United States and across the globe, while also seeking to create “a kind of a Trump world.”
It would be naive and dangerous on the part of anyone to think that Trump will go down without a fight. His numbers are collapsing, and he is terrified of the possibility that the Democrats will flip the House and the Senate while he is still president, which is why he is trying to undermine this year’s midterm elections. If it was entirely up to Trump, US democracy would be already dead by now. But he is trying to rig the 2026 midterm elections, and my fear is that he may succeed. Also, I don’t think it is far-fetched to say that he may declare martial law to keep the Democrats from winning. I hope I am dead wrong, but I am of the view that the worst is yet to come with Trump.
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Urgent Message to Democrats: Stop Dragging Your Feet and End Trump's Iran War
Many congressional Democrats seem more interested in using Trump's war on Iran to score victories in the midterms than to use what power they do have to bring it to an end.
Apr 02, 2026
President Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that:
A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.
Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “the administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”
For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians
At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”
On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep US troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet.
Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”
Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like?... Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.
And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts—the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”
“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!
“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”
Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.
Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:
If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government... you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you... proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform...
Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At The Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”
By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89%.”
Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war:
The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences... They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security... This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.
“A Gift to Our Country”
Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.
More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim-American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”
He wrote:“The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”
Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.
It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human, and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare for All. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”
In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan... None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed... Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good healthcare or good schools.”
Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past 50 years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.
Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
* * *
Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.
After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.
Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.
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