US tax law | Trump disempowers his voters

The new tax law is a victory for Donald Trump , almost every headline claims. But where there are winners, there are also losers, and these are primarily the lower-income households in the USA, whose tiny tax breaks will soon be eaten up many times over by cuts to social programs and health insurance. More and more of these people recently voted for Trump and the Republicans because they were promised they would be lifted out of poverty. But the Republicans have now voted for a law that will harm their own constituents.

Even if the social cuts don't go into effect until after the midterm elections next year, conservatives will eventually have to pay for them at the ballot box. Those citizens who had already informed themselves about the law in advance ultimately voted against it in countless polls. This also applies to Republican budgets. In a democracy, that's usually enough to stop a bill in parliament or at least weaken it, because the representatives fear being punished in the next election. It's the essence of democracy.

However, Republicans in the U.S. Congress show less fear of their own voters, whom they apparently consider uninformed and susceptible to manipulation, than of the president's revenge if they don't follow his lead. For weeks, dozens of them publicly vowed to vote against the new record national debt or against cuts to Medicaid, only to ultimately vote almost unanimously for them—without any change to the law.

Even if Trump's greatest leverage against these representatives may be supporting a rival candidate in what are still free elections, this shift in power from the will of the voters to the will of the head of state underscores the shift from democracy to autocracy . Trump didn't invent this; personality cults are a well-known strategy, mostly of right-wing dictators, that begins with controlling the media and messages and securing an absolutely loyal voting bloc.

Of course, under these circumstances, it's difficult for the opposition to get their warnings across. But when half the US population hasn't even heard of the law, and only eight percent know that it will cost millions of people their health insurance, that's a disgrace for the US Democrats. The US democracy was once considered the most liberal in the world. But it doesn't seem immune to its destruction. All those who want to defend this democracy have failed here.