What’s most important to remember about the monstrous “big beautiful” bill ginned up by Trump’s Reichstag is that Republicans are just being themselves. They’ve always pined to fatten the fat cats and screw the average citizen – to take from the needy and give to the rich, like Robin Hood in reverse. None of this is new.

What’s different now is the sheer scale of the cruelty, the scope of the destruction, and the spineless fealty to a fascist. And what truly galls me is the Republicans’ repugnant hypocrisy.

In 2011, President Obama proposed tax hikes on the rich in order to buttress crucial federal programs that help tens of millions of Americans. In response, the Pavlovian Republicans barked their favorite rhetorical mantra: Dems are waging class warfare!

On the Sunday talk shows, House bigwig Paul Ryan (remember him?) said, “Class warfare will simply divide this country more.” Senator Lindsey Graham echoed, “When you say you’re going to tax those (rich) people, that’s class warfare.” And when Obama floated similar priorities in 2015, Senator Orrin Hatch inveighed against “redistribution and class warfare,” while, on the House side, Republicans seethed that Obama was “returning to the theme of class warfare.”

If memory serves, the pre-Trump GOP began to chant that phrase, via frequent repetition, some time around 1992. I first heard it that year when Bill Clinton ran for president with a pledge to raise some taxes on the wealthiest Americans. In response, incumbent George H. W. Bush scoffed that his foe was waging “class warfare,” seeking to “divide Americans rich from poor, one group from another.”

See how the game works? Republicans have long instinctively understood, far better than their oft-bumbling opponents, that capturing the language is crucially important. When you do that, when you frame the terms of debate, you have a darn good shot at winning hearts and minds. Particularly weak minds.

I’ll leave it to the shrinks to diagnose the passivity of the Democratic mindset, to try to fathom why the blue party has long allowed class warfare to become a weapon in the GOP’s arsenal. In reality, the Bloated Billionaire Bill is teed up to engineer the most historic transfer of wealth from middle- and low-income Americans to the richest. It’s the GOP that has waged class warfare with great success, most notably in 2001 when George W. Bush’s top-end tax cuts helped exacerbate the growing disparity between the rich and the lower classes; and again in 2017, when Trump’s tax cuts were rigged for the rich at the expense of us lesser beings.

Republicans have long skated relatively unscathed with their insistence that taxing the rich will “divide this country” – when, in fact, the rich have long been reaping disproportionate rewards. I hesitate to cite statistics, because they’re boring and fact-free fools won’t believe them anyway, but here’s something the Wall Street Journal discovered years ago while examining the impact of the Bush tax cuts: “The average tax rate for the top 400 earners in the U.S. fell to as low as 16.62 percent in 2007, from a recent peak of 29.9 percent in 1995.”

As billionaire Warren Buffett said in a 2006 interview, “There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But the richest Americans always want more – hence the current unholy alliance of oligarchy and fascism – and it’s clear that the only way a Republican can risk telling the truth is to quit the game. Exhibit A is Thom Tillis, the North Carolina senator who announced he won’t run for re-election. Having freed himself from servitude, he’s openly pissed that the MAGAts he serves with are waging class warfare against his constituents – 663,000 of whom are projected to lose their Medicaid coverage because the rich supposedly deserve more money.

In theory, Democrats should be well positioned to reap an anti-MAGA backlash in 2026 and “class warfare” should be their battle cry. It’s past time for the blue party to own that phrase and buttress it with the abundant evidence. With that goal in mind, here’s some rhetoric they can use:

“The privileged princes of the new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, (have) reached out for control over government itself. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power…In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

So said Franklin D. Roosevelt, who waged class warfare against the rich and championed the working stiff.

Seriously, how hard should that be?

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]