Is punishing the poor Trump’s last hand to play?

The pre-midterm defenestration of ACA enrollees looks like political madness, but the president appears to believe hitting poor people might work for him

There is a manic quality to Donald Trump ’s desperate dash to do something, anything, ahead of November’s midterm elections to convince beleaguered Americans that he can make the pressures his policies have imposed on their livelihoods go away.

The US president offered to lower barriers against beef imports to limit surging meat prices, only to consider backtracking under pressure from the cow lobby. He offered to stop diesel exports, only to find oil companies were not interested . He weakened fuel efficiency standards, claiming this would trim the price of a new car (and forgetting to point out it will also raise spending on gas.) In early October he started mailing $500 checks to nearly a million people touting his healthcare “wins”. Oh, and he promised adult Americans a $5,000 check if Republicans maintain control of Congress. That, too, will go nowhere .

In the face of such setbacks, maybe Trump felt he had to demonstrate he still can get something done. Still, it is somewhat counterintuitive that the administration, in the shape of Vice-President JD Vance, decided to broadcast the one initiative it did manage to bring to fruition: ejecting more than 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance marketplaces, on grounds that they are not entitled to federal subsidies.

Trump could argue that the cuts fit within the administration’s promised commitment to restore fiscal discipline. But that part of the platform, which came as Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, promised to trim the budget deficit to 3% of US gross domestic product, was never more than a rhetorical feint.

The pre-midterm defenestration of ACA enrollees by Trump’s “fraud taskforce”, by contrast, looks a lot like political madness, given the persistent economic anxieties articulated by Democratic and Republican voters across the country.

The savings from the ACA maneuver, estimated by the administration at $2.2bn per year, are chump change compared to the centerpiece of Trump’s fiscal policy, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from 2025 that is expected to add $4.1tn to budget deficits over the next decade, largely due to tax cuts benefiting the most affluent Americans.

Pace Bessent, the budget deficit is growing rapidly, expected to rise to some $2tn in the fiscal year of 2026, roughly 6% of GDP and some 18% more than in fiscal 2024, the last year of the Biden administration.

Rather than stem budgetary red ink, it’s as if Trump’s objective is to spread misery beyond the 3 million Americans who had to drop their health insurance after the administration last year cancelled subsidies offered by the Biden administration.

The effort is something out of the playbook of Elon Musk’s Doge . His promise to rid the government of “waste” and “fraud” probably caused the deaths of millions of children in the developing world after the dismantling of USAID, but proved largely irrelevant to the task of saving money for the government. It may serve as a masterclass in trolling. But it is not a vote-winner.

Part of Trump’s brain seems to understand this. Trump paid in part for the “beautiful” bill’s colossal tax cut by cutting funding to Medicaid and the Snap food stamp program for low-income Americans. But he engineered most of the cuts to kick in after the midterms to minimize the political cost. The thinking was that lower-income Americans would happily vote for the Republicans out of gratitude for their somewhat bigger tax refund checks this year and tax breaks for overtime and tips (cleverly designed to expire at the end of Trump’s term) and not notice the cuts rushing down the pike on federal programs they relied on.

But the new evictions from the ACA suggest that his brain’s darker side is winning. Indeed, it underscores Trump’s belief that hitting poor people might work for him. Rather than a commitment to sound fiscal policy, a helping hand for American families treading water or an economic platform of any kind, Trump’s latest exercise in “fraud prevention” points to a strategy revolving around punishing people he can define as “bad”. Deep underwater in the polls for his nutty stewardship of the economy, among other things, Trump seems to believe that his one remaining winning card is to do violence against constituencies that his base may not like. Top of the list are immigrants and low-income people. And so it is that ICE is also doubling down, announcing it will hire another 5,000 agents by the end of the year.

The president is on to something. About two-thirds of Republicans believe giving more aid to the poor does more harm than good, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center . Despite the repeated instances of abuse by federal agents, only 19% of Republicans think the Trump administration is doing too much to deport immigrants illegally in the country. The most radical rightwing voters are all in for federal deportations and don’t think the federal government should be responsible for ensuring Americans’ healthcare.

Perhaps Trump’s heart truly lies on the dark side. But doubling down on policies to please the most ardent fanatics in his base ultimately reveals the weakness of Trump’s position. Perhaps even he understands that he has lost the rest of the country . Punishing the poor and the foreign, alongside an unlikely $5,000 Hail Mary pass, is all he has left.