NAMES can and do mislead. Especially when they are deployed to disguise betrayal as benevolence. The US Senate has just passed what Donald Trump hails as ‘one big, beautiful bill’ — a sweeping tax package projected to add $3.7 trillion to the national debt over a decade. Upon narrowly passing the Senate in a 50–50 tie, broken only by the vice president’s vote, it cleared the House on July 3, 2025, with a slim majority — just in time for the 249th Independence Day. Marketed as relief for working Americans, the so-called ‘Trump 2.0’ bill reprises a now-familiar playbook: slashing marginal tax rates for the wealthy, expanding business income deductions and inserting sunset clauses that obscure its long-term costs. Draped in patriotic spectacle, it is not a gift to working families but a calculated transfer of wealth upward — a deepening of government capture by capital interests. This is not a policy mishap; it is a deliberate design, the culmination of an ideological project that recasts governance as a vehicle for private enrichment, cloaked in the language of populism.
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Reforms, regression
TO UNDERSTAND Trump 2.0, we must revisit its predecessor. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It was sold to the public as a ‘big, beautiful Christmas present.’ In practice, it was a regressive windfall for corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The corporate tax rate was slashed from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. Pass-through income became more favourable. The estate tax was gutted. Individual income taxes were temporarily lowered in a way that disproportionately benefited higher earners. All this was justified through the old supply-side mantra: cut taxes, unleash growth.
The results were unsurprising. Shareholder pay-outs topped $1 trillion within two years. Real wage growth stagnated despite a tight labour market. Labour productivity continued its decoupling from compensation. The national debt surged — with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act alone projected to add $1.9 trillion over a decade. What was billed as a populist tax overhaul ended up as a textbook case of elite enrichment. Trumpian populism did not challenge elite capture; it theatrically rebranded it.
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Plutocracy
THE act was not merely flawed; it marked a turning point — a clear declaration that the US had fully embraced plutocratic governance. It institutionalised what scholars increasingly call a ‘war on welfare’ rather than a mere ‘reluctant welfare state’: a government that lavishly subsidizes capital through ‘corporate welfare,’ or crony capitalism, while stubbornly resisting meaningful social investment. It replaced solidarity with symbolism and redistributive justice with spectacle.
While Trump thundered against globalism, the act also facilitated offshore tax avoidance and corporate inversions. It promised to revive American manufacturing but delivered only token gains. The true beneficiaries were hedge funds, private equity firms and real estate trusts — including many tied to Trump’s own empire. Economic nationalism was the façade; elite self-dealing was the reality.
If the Clinton-Bush-Obama years masked upward redistribution in the language of meritocracy, innovation, and economic dynamism, Trump stripped away the pretence. The effect was the same: public austerity financing private luxury. But under Trump, the plutocratic project was rebranded as patriotic duty.
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Biden’s rhetoric, Trump’s architecture
TO HIS credit, president Biden has sought to unwind some of this damage. He’s proposed modest hikes in corporate tax rates and invested in infrastructure, green energy, and domestic manufacturing through the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. Yet his efforts remain constrained by the architecture Trump entrenched: a tax regime tilted toward capital, a political culture in thrall to donor interests and a bipartisan allergy to redistributive justice.
This is the iron grip of path dependence. Once a policy regime is rigged for the powerful, breaking free becomes institutionally and politically difficult. Biden may speak the language of equity, but his policies remain bracketed by the fiscal boundaries Trump codified.
Trump promised to ‘make America great again.’ But his tax policies — both in 2017 and now in 2025 — achieved the opposite. They hollowed out the tax base, exacerbated inequality and mortgaged the nation’s future to subsidise the rich. They made America small — not in gross domestic product, but in imagination. Smaller in solidarity. Smaller in its capacity to care for the vulnerable or invest in the common good.
The aftershocks of these bills will be long-lasting. As interest payments devour an ever-larger share of the federal budget, programs vital to education, health care, and climate resilience are being squeezed. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act normalised a cynical model: deficits are perfectly acceptable when they benefit the rich, but must be invoked as moral panic when aimed at helping the poor.
Even progressive taxation, once a bipartisan pillar of American democracy, has been pushed to the margins. What remains is a quiet — or at times overt — war on welfare, waged in the language game of fiscal realism. Budget hawks sound alarms about spending only when it threatens to uplift those outside the elite.
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Trump and illusion of prudence
THE Trump 2.0 bill continues this war by stealth. Though advertised as relief for middle-class families and small businesses, it entrenches the very tax privileges that benefit the top. It sustains loopholes for investment income and codifies leniency toward inherited wealth. Sunset clauses give the illusion of fiscal prudence while conveniently deferring the real pain until after the next election cycle.
But the impact will be brutally real. This is not just a redistribution of wealth; it is a redistribution of vulnerability. The true costs will emerge not in political advertisements but in shuttered schools, overwhelmed hospitals, broken public transit, and gutted emergency services. These are not abstract policy trade-offs. They are lived realities — and the burden will fall on those least able to bear it.
Compare this with the New Deal of the 1930s, a radical re-centring of the economy around public purpose. That era saw the birth of Social Security, labour rights, and regulatory oversight. As Karl Polanyi, economic historian, famously described, this was the great transformation, a re-embedding of markets within social protections.
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act and its sequel represent the inverse, a great betrayal. They unravel the post-war consensus that taxation should support shared prosperity and that governance must serve the public good. Reagan’s revolution began the unmaking of that consensus by casting taxes as theft and markets as moral arbiters, invoking Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, the idea that a laissez-faire economy, when left to its own devices, naturally leads to fair and efficient outcomes for all. Trump’s bills completed the rupture: they reasserted capital over community, illusion over equity and wealth over welfare.
Even the Obama years, despite being boxed in by the post-Reagan consensus, managed to sunset some Bush-era tax cuts and expand refundable credits. Trump’s bills go much further, codifying plutocracy as permanent policy under the guise of populist reform.
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Undoing architecture of inequality
THESE bills did not merely rewrite tax law — they rewired political common sense. They taught lawmakers that upward redistribution could be sold as patriotic reform, that populism could deliver plutocracy more effectively than technocratic moderation, and that debt only matters when the public stands to gain.
Undoing this legacy demands more than piecemeal reforms. It requires a new deal — not as nostalgic replication, but as a bold reassertion of public power over private interest. A tax regime that treats extreme wealth concentration as a threat to democracy. A politics that aligns governance with shared flourishing, not shareholder returns. As Thomas Piketty argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the rate of return on capital has far outpaced the growth of wages, leading to a disconnect between the financial markets and the labour market — a structural inequality that compounds over generations. Trump’s tax regime did not merely ignore this imbalance; it entrenched it, privileging capital income while sidelining the working majority.
That reckoning is overdue. Until it arrives, Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ — what most democrats privately deem an ‘abominable’ and ‘ugly’ monument to inequality — will remain embedded in the bones of the body politic. Not just as statute, but as ideology. Engraved into the national balance sheet and borne, predictably, by those promised the most and delivered the least.
And so, the hyperbolically named ‘one big, beautiful bill’ returns as a bitter gift — passed with a narrow House majority on the eve of American independence. A day meant to honour liberty and democratic aspiration instead delivers its final irony: upward redistribution dressed as reform, economic cruelty clothed in patriotic spectacle. The privileged few walk away with the treat. The silent, or silenced, majority, in a cruel reversal of the American promise, get the trick.
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Dr Faridul Alam is a retired academic based in New York City.
