Trump betrayed MAGA — and it wasn't an accident

Dear MAGA voter,

I’m not writing this to mock you. I’m writing because you were lied to. And it wasn’t by the people you were told to hate, but by the man you trusted the most.

You were pissed off when you voted in 2024. Honestly, rightfully angry. Your town lost its factory. Your kids can’t afford the house they’ve been dreaming of for years. The politicians in Washington kept promising you things and delivering nothing. In fact, Republicans even took away your Medicaid and food stamps as well as your kids’ school lunches. You wanted someone who’d finally blow the whole damn thing up and put regular people first.

So did I and millions of other Americans. The difference is who we trusted to do it. Let’s talk about what actually happened.

You were told Donald Trump would “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington, D.C. Instead, as former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene can tell you, Trump has built the most corrupt, billionaire-stuffed cabinet (13 of them!) in American history. Epstein buddy Howard Lutnick. Billionaire hustler Scott Bessent. Hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders as far as the eye can see.

And then he handed the core agencies of the federal government — with no vote, no vetting, no accountability to anyone — over to Elon Musk, the single richest human being on the planet. Not a populist or a Washington outsider: the most powerful oligarch alive, whose wealth came from Barack Obama bailing out Tesla and who now gets tens of billions in annual government contracts.

Musk’s teenage hackers stole your Social Security information and destroyed America’s soft power by gutting USAID: as Bill Gates said, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

This is your swamp now, one that’s already literally killed at least a million children around the world while handing our nation’s soft power over to Vladimir Putin.

Trump also said there would be no more “stupid wars.” Yet he’s spending $1 billion a day and has already destroyed six American lives over his attack on Iran and still can’t explain to us why he did it or what actual threat that country represented to America. It appears he just did it because Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jared Kushner all encouraged him to.

And now the Washington Post is reporting that Putin is giving the Iranians “targeting information” so they can kill American troops, just like when Putin put a bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan and that was fine with Trump during his first term. Is that the kind of war you want? Somehow I doubt it.

You were also promised lower drug prices. Remember that? Trump made it a centerpiece of his campaign pitch. He looked straight into the camera and said he’d take on Big Pharma. But the pharmaceutical industry is making more money than ever before, and now the same Republican Congress that cheers Trump’s every move has cut a trillion dollars out of Medicaid (the cuts come later this year).

That’s the national healthcare program that covers roughly one in five Americans, the majority of them in rural, working-class communities that voted for the same Republicans who gutted it on Trump’s orders. Your neighbors. Your family members. People who believed in him. Cuts made simply to pay for a trillion dollars of Trump’s $5 trillion tax break for himself, Mark Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and the other billionaires who put him into office.

And then there’s the tariffs, which he told you China would pay. But China isn’t paying: you are. Tariffs are taxes collected at the border and paid by American importers, that are then passed on to American consumers like you and me.

The people most exposed to rising prices on clothes, appliances, groceries, and cars are working-class families who spend a higher share of their income on the necessities of life. That’s you. The billionaires in his cabinet can absorb and even profit from Trump’s inflation; you can’t.

And while all this is happening, the national debt keeps exploding. It ballooned by $7 trillion during his first term. His second-term tax proposals are deficit-financed giveaways that only benefit corporations and the ultra-wealthy.

Trump talks about “no taxes on tips” and “no taxes on Social Security” but those cuts are very, very limited and expire in a few years; the tax breaks on billionaires are deep and last forever. Your grandchildren will spend their lives paying off Trump’s tax cuts for people who summer in the Hamptons. This isn’t fiscal conservatism: it’s looting dressed up in a red hat.

Remember the wall? Mexico was going to pay for it. Mexico didn’t pay for a single inch of it. And remember when Musk publicly defended keeping H-1B visas, the program Trump uses to import European workers for his shabby golf motels and that let corporations import cheaper foreign labor and hold down American wages? That caused a genuine civil war inside MAGA world for about a week, before the Murdoch/Ellison Epstein-class billionaire media moguls changed the subject. Trump sided with the billionaires; being one himself, he always sides with the billionaires.

Don’t forget Social Security and Medicare. He swore — repeatedly, explicitly — that he’d never cut them. Watch what the fine print says, particularly since he fired more than 7,000 Social Security workers to make it really hard on people who are trying to sign up. That’s about encouraging people to move to the Medicare Advantage scam plans that are so profitable to his insurance industry donors.

Watch what DOGE is circling. Watch the budget proposals coming out of his own party’s Congress. The cuts aren’t coming for the people at Mar-a-Lago: they’re coming for you.

And perhaps the cruelest irony of all: the communities hit hardest by Trump’s policies are the communities that supported him most. Farmers crushed by retaliatory tariffs from trading partners. Rural hospitals dependent on federal funding now facing existential pressure. FEMA cuts hurting people in bright red southern states. The economic pain is landing heaviest on the people who believed in him the most.

None of this is an accident. This is what happens when you elect a pathological liar who talks like a populist but governs for the donor class. Your anger was real. His betrayal is real.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. I’m not asking you to agree with me about anything except this: a man who fills his cabinet with hedge fund managers, hands power to the world’s richest oligarch, lets Big Pharma walk, starts a war to distract us from news he raped 13-year-old girls, and watches your grocery bill climb while calling it “victory” is not on your side.

He never was.

The swampy system you were furious at? It’s still there. It just has a new Dear Leader.

You deserve better than this. Heck, we all deserve better than this.

Join us…

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.