Senator Josh Hawley is trying to save Medicaid from the GOP’s Ghoul Caucus. On Monday, the Missouri Republican took to The New York Times to blast proposed cuts to the low-income health programme in the latest GOP budget bill, calling the move “morally wrong.” He’s right, and by bucking his party, Hawley is cementing his status as the congressional GOP’s lone real-deal populist — and its conscience.

Some 70 million people use Medicaid, a federally funded programme administered by the states. Medicaid is the backstop without which these Americans would either forgo healthcare altogether, or rely exclusively on emergency medicine as a last resort, costing the taxpayer a great deal more, even as it threatens individual families with medical debt and bankruptcy.

And here is the thing: the people who are most likely to use Medicaid are also increasingly a core part of the Trumpian GOP’s new constituency — hence Hawley’s warning that, in addition to being ethically questionable, the cuts are also “politically suicidal.”

For a decade now, the Republican Party has touted itself as the new vehicle for the “multiracial working class.” It is no empty boast. Beginning in 2016, America’s two major parties began trading constituencies, with working- and lower-middle-class Americans migrating to the Right, while affluent suburbanites and urban professionals lined up behind the Democrats.

In 2020, people doing tangible toil — farmers, truckers, mechanics, electricians, and the like — were most likely to donate to Trump. Meanwhile, those engaged in upscale symbolic and informatic labour — accountants, editors, lawyers, nonprofit employees, etc. — overwhelmingly donated to Biden.

The 2024 election sealed the realignment. An astonishing 55% of Americans with college degrees and 51% of those earning $100,000 a year or more voted for Kamala Harris, according to exit polls, while 56% of non-college voters pulled for Donald Trump. The quintile of US counties with the highest poverty rate shifted most sharply to the Republican Party, and counties in which residents are most reliant on welfare payments were also more likely to vote for Trump.

This transformation was only made possible because the GOP under Trump repeatedly pledged itself, in words if not in deeds, to protecting entitlements. In 2016, Trump had one of his best primary debate moments against Ted Cruz when the Texas Republican accused Trump of being a stealth “socialist” for supporting a public option in health care, and Trump simply shot back: “I won’t let people die in the streets.” The crowd roared.

Eight years later, protecting entitlements topped nearly all other priorities in the 2024 GOP platform. As recently as March, the White House vowed that “the Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).”

Hawley — the Republican who has also done the most in Congress to build bridges with organised labor — is simply recalling the GOP to its own pledges, and sounding the alarm about the electoral price of betraying voters so openly. For its own sake, Team Trump had better follow his lead and rebuke the cuts. Otherwise, it will lend one more piece of ammunition to progressives who have long warned that the GOP’s working-class act is just that: an act.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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