Start by calling Trump's next tax scam a 'billionaire bailout'

We need to make it clear who we're fighting for—and against.

Let’s head into the holiday with a bit of hope.

I was cheered by these 22 seconds from Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the end of last week, as it appeared Donald Trump and his boss Elon Musk had doomed us to a government shutdown over Christmas:

It’s an example of pointed, clear messaging that represents a course correction from what I think was the biggest mistake in the 2024 campaign: the Democrats' refusal to clearly explain who they were fighting for and against.

Like any election post-mortem, this represents my particular hobby horse more than any definitive quantitive conclusion about the election (which I believe was won by a massive disinformation campaign funded by one billionaire exploiting the destruction of our campaign finance laws). But it is something Anat Shenker-Osorio, a master message maker who endlessly tests and proves her messages with research, keeps reminding us:

We’ve done over 220 focus groups with conflicted voters since October 2020. “Conflicted” meaning disaffected Democrats and swing voters. And the one consistent refrain we hear from them is that “Democrats don’t fight.”

Fighting is tough for Democrats because a fight requires you to pick an opponent. And for many, this probably seemed excessive. We have Donald Trump! Who needs a clearer opponent than that? He’s an Epstein-loving orange Satan who overflowed our morgues with our loved ones and sent Nazis to sack our Capitol.

Well, a lot of voters apparently did.

In the midterm, isolating Trump’s extremism—still fresh in many minds from January 6th—by calling our opponents MAGA Republicans seemed to help. But by November of 2024, the normalization of Trump led by Elon Musk and his billions and a news media captured by billionaires had successfully allowed Trump to weaponize his grievance narratives. This allowed him to return to his 2016 posture of working for the “ordinary (white) man (and the people who identify with them).”

This was despite his record in office of massive giveaways to the richest and destruction of the things most of us care about most, Biden/Harris’s incredible record of actually delivering for “ordinary” folks, and the undeniable fact that one of Trump's first acts as president will be to give him and his fellow billionaires more tax cuts (while plotting to cut just about everything our government does to help “ordinary people").

Harris/Walz and other Democrats talked about Trump’s plan to give tax cuts to the rich. But they certainly didn’t go out of their way to call out  the “billionaire donors” whom Trump will serve almost exclusively as president. Now, with Elon standing astride like a giant puppeteer over the Republican Party, Jeffries must realize he has no choice.

I’ve come to this conclusion myself. The choice is stark: We can have billionaires or democracy, but not both, not with these billionaires, not with our current campaign finance laws, and not with our thoroughly corrupt Supreme Court. This has now become my mission in life: end this Gilded Age or die trying because we cannot leave this world to the billionaires who want to ravage us.

That’s why, you may have noticed, I’ve relaunched my newsletter as The Last Billionaires. In 2025, I will launch a podcast with the same name and, inshallah, an ebook that lays out how we begin a massive movement to get these billionaires out of politics before they do the same to us.

I don’t expect Democrats to be so radical. And I get the hesitation to call out billionaires for people like Kamala Harris because she had so many on her side, and they, unlike us, can get ahold of her pretty much any time. But Democrats need to come to terms with the reality that if billionaires aren’t hostile to our agenda, we’re not doing it right.

Every problem we face now—from the climate catastrophe to drilled holes in our safety net to the targeted scapegoating of immigrants and trans kids—is the result of massive concentrations of wealth.

Joe Biden took on these “economic royalists” more directly than any president since FDR and for his efforts and got almost no credit and a coup in his party that was made possible by him hiding the effects of aging but was fed by billionaire donors who wanted another Democrat in office but wanted Lina Khan and her wildly effective pro-worker stances, for instance, out of the Federal Trade Commission.

The good news is that the coming tax fight will provide essential clarity. Democrats will be forced to explain who they’re fighting for. And the villains will reveal themselves by demanding we give Elon, Jared, Mark, and Jeff billions in taxpayer giveaways for nothing while they also gut Social Security. The billionaires want their bailout. Making the case against a billionaire bailout is easy, especially when a pair of evil billionaires is literally running the country.

This will be a time for statistics like how the 25 wealthiest Americans “saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes.” That amounted to a true tax rate of only 3.4%. And that was before Trump’s giveaways to the rich began. What’s your tax rate? It ain’t 3.4%. But it’s also a time to clarify whose side we’re on.

Because it cannot be the billionaires.

The billionaires, the ones who matter most, don’t think we should have the right even to have a side. We don’t need to worry about radicalizing them. That’s done. It’s happened. It can only get worse and will as long as we aren’t the party of making climate change and wealth inequality worse. Now, we must figure out how we make people matter as much as money. That’s the hard part. Picking the right side is easy.