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Breadlines & Billionaires: Trump’s Great Gatsby Revival — With Medicaid Cuts on the Side [1]

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Date: 2025-06-30

Let me paint you a picture:

It’s June 2025. Inside a ballroom so bright it could blind the truth itself, billionaires swirl champagne in crystal goblets that cost more than your first car. A chandelier the size of your living room sparkles overhead. Down the road, Trump’s staging a taxpayer-funded military parade to mark his birthday, timed, not coincidentally, with the Army’s anniversary, so the Treasury foots the bill.

This faux opulence isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. This is Trump’s Gatsby — a garish spectacle where the poor stand at the gates, not even allowed to peek inside. Because beyond those velvet ropes, the guests are dancing on Medicaid’s grave.

“This isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. This is Trump’s Gatsby — a garish spectacle where the poor stand at the gates, not even allowed to peek inside.”

The Party on the Hill

While America’s billionaires throw themselves what The New York Times gleefully calls “the wedding of the year,” the Senate is busy advancing Trump’s flagship policy: a bill that slashes Medicaid by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, stripping health coverage from nearly 12 million Americans. That’s not theoretical — that’s families finding out mom’s cancer treatment is no longer covered, with kids showing up to clinics that can’t afford to stay open.

Meanwhile, Trump watched his narcissistic birthday parade float by, red tie shimmering, waving like a monarch to crowds who are unwittingly paying for the performance.

In the ballrooms, Jeff Bezos drops hundreds of millions on wedding fireworks and custom orchestras while his effective tax rate sits at a cushy 3.4% on billions in gains. Elon Musk shrugs it off — after all, what’s the point of sharing with the rabble when you can buy a new Mars colony instead?

The rich are making money hand over diamond-encrusted fist, pocketing $401 billion more this year alone, while quietly pushing tax tweaks that keep their liabilities vanishing like the foie gras on their plates.

Meanwhile, in the Breadlines

All this largesse isn’t coming from nowhere. The same legislative policy suite that underwrites the gilded Gatsby party is gutting wind and solar investment, thanks to a surprise tax buried in Trump’s Senate bill that could slash new installations by up to 72% over the next decade.

So, while billionaires toast “the good life,” small-town wind turbine manufacturers shutter. So much for “all-American jobs.”

And as if that hypocrisy weren’t rich enough, the bill that slashes Medicaid and stabs the clean energy transition in the back adds at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal responsibility. Turns out the only “waste” Trump and his allies see is funding that keeps the sick alive and the planet habitable.

The Moral Inversion

Remember when America’s wealthy at least pretended to bear some civic burden? Kennedy called it “noblesse oblige” — the idea that privilege came with responsibility. Today’s billionaires can’t even fake it.

MacKenzie Scott, the former Mrs. Jeff Bezos, gave away $19 billion in just three years to grassroots organizations feeding, housing, and educating people. Her giving was so transformational that it embarrassed the rest of the gilded class. Meanwhile, Musk — the self-appointed messiah of Mars and memes — said she was the reason Western civilization died. It was as if charity, not unchecked greed, were the problem.

This unprecedented obsession with wealth is a moral inversion so complete it could make Jonathan Swift blush. The billionaires keep feasting, and the press keeps fawning — writing about Bezos’s wedding menu in breathless detail while skipping over the families losing Medicaid.

Trump’s One-Man Show

And Trump? He’s the carnival barker in chief. His signature legislation guts health care, hobbles renewable energy, and balloons the debt to pay for military vanity shows that double as his birthday parties. His loyalists in Congress cheer him on. The billionaires cut campaign checks and smile for the cameras. The machinery of state churns on, converting public good into private luxury.

“Meanwhile, nearly 12 million Americans stand to lose basic medical coverage, just as heatwaves and floods — turbocharged by the very climate sabotage in these bills — grow deadlier by the season.”

Finale: The New American Hierarchy

So, here’s the 2025 hierarchy, in all its Gatsby rot:

· Billionaires are throwing $45 million parties.

· Bezos and Musk are crowing that charity is a sign of societal collapse.

· Trump draping himself in gold, throwing parades on your dime, while slashing the programs that keep your children healthy.

· The press claps — the donors toast. The middle class foots the bill. And the poor? They’re not even allowed to watch from the gates anymore.

So yes, this is Trump’s Great Gatsby revival. But without the romance. Without the music.

Just gold forks scraping empty plates.

Trump’s not just leading the parade. He’s selling tickets to the feast, and your kids are picking up the tab.

Need I say more?

~Dunneagin

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