Talking with a Republican about the bill
Guest post from a friend
I invited a friend to join me, through Moveon, in making calls to Medicaid recipients in Republican districts to ask them to call their Senators (and now their Representatives) to ask them to vote no on this terrible, cruel bill.
My friend ended up talking to a Trump supporter for thirty minutes and sends this report:
Jonna invited me to phone bank on Monday to encourage people to ask their senators to vote no on the One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) because of its devastating cuts to Medicaid. I expected plenty of hangups before getting a full sentence out. What I did not expect was a 30-minute, wide-ranging conversation with a Trump supporter.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had one of these conversations. My next-door neighbor (let’s call him John) during Trump 1.0 was the sweetest old man. He gave me a spare key to his house. He invited me over to look at forwards of forwards of emails with cute animal photos. And he asserted that Obama was the worst president in the history of the country. I couldn’t believe John could be so tender personally and so deluded politically. Nevertheless, I enjoyed talking with him, and I often said that he was the only Trump supporter I could ever be friendly with.
Returning to this past Monday, I found myself voice-to-voice with a 62-year-old retired nurse from Alabama that I’ll call Jane. After introducing myself and the point of my call, Jane firmly said, “Well, whatever’s in that bill about Medicaid, I’m good with because you can’t believe anything the Democrats say.” I prepared to hear her hang up right then and there, but for some reason she stuck around long enough for me to ask, “But you know that this bill will throw millions off insurance, don’t you?”
“Have you read the bill? Do you know what’s in it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a long bill. 940 pages. But I’ve read portions of the bill and read what news outlets and other organizations have written about it.”
“That’s the problem – you don’t know what all is in it, then.” She then proceeded to tell me about how Democrats and the media spin things. That you can’t believe a word Democrats say. They just try to twist Trump’s words to serve their own interests. They’d vote against anything Trump would be for.
Fair enough, I granted her. But I indicated that the Congressional Budget Office is a nonpartisan organization that is supplying the devastating projection of 11.8 million people being thrown off Medicaid.
She can’t believe them either. “Trump wouldn’t do something [like the BBB] to hurt America. He loves America, and he’s proven that through all the things he’s done.” I didn’t ask her to name any of those America-loving things Trump has done. Maybe she was thinking about his penchant for hugging Old Glory.
“Trump’s never lied to us.”
Wikipedia would like a word. Of all the lies he’s told, strangely the first one that came to mind was his claim that Trump University would actually offer degrees that were worth a damn. When confronted with this, the conversation veered into complaints of the high cost of a college education, a point on which we agreed.
Eventually, Jane shared that she’s a recently retired nurse who’s happily collecting her Social Security. When she worked as a nurse, she saw lots of young girls (her word) who were too young to be having kids. She thought they were using the available medical services, such as abortions, as their contraception. Four, five, six abortions some of these girls were having, instead of using other methods. Jane felt badly for these girls and wanted them to make different choices.
Sensing an opportunity to get back to the BBB, I informed her that 40% of births are financed through Medicaid and that this bill, if passed, would jeopardize that funding. That failed to land, possibly because Jane felt cutting Medicaid funds would make it harder for her former patients to get abortions. It’s unclear to me whether she knows anything about the Hyde Amendment, and how it specifically prevents Alabamans from using federal money to subsidize abortions (with some exceptions).
Jane has a heart for these girls. She wants them to have a chance to be what they want to be and get a job they want to have. But she lamented that achieving those things is hard when college is so expensive and pay is so low. I sympathized with her concerns, pointing out that her state’s minimum wage is equal to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
At this point, the conversation strayed from connections to Medicaid towards other things. They included:
· The border: “The millions and millions of people coming across the border is a real problem. Biden let all those people in, and now Trump is stopping all that.”
· The positive message of the red-hat slogan: “MAGA isn’t racist. ‘Make America Great Again’ means making America great. For real Americans. What’s so wrong with that?” I didn’t think that a mini-history on Ronald Reagan, specifically his use of the phrase and his legacy of racist policies, was going to make an impact on Jane, so I bit my tongue.
· Her faith: “I’m a Christian.” I’ll never understand how someone can claim this identity and yet align themselves with a documented racist, misogynist, pathological liar, and 34-time convicted felon.
I tried one last time to steer the conversation back to the bill. While she heard what I had to say, Jane felt that “Congress should pass the bill, whatever is in it, and take a wait-and-see approach for the next couple years. If all the bad things the Democrats are saying come true, we can deal with that then.” It’s wild to think that she’d be willing to run an economic experiment on millions of people to see if the effects were bad, and if they were, consider how to undo the damage. As if being dead is something you can undo.
After 30 minutes, it was time to wrap things up. “I want to leave you with two things. First, I want to thank you for taking time to speak with me. We clearly don’t agree on much, but you took time out of your day for this call and I appreciate it. Second, do me a favor. Find some neutral source and read a brief explainer on the bill. It won’t be the whole bill, but it’ll break down the main things the bill aims to do. And once you read it, do one of two things: either call Senator Britt and ask her to vote yes because it does all the things you’d like to see, or ask her to vote no on it because there are one or two things that give you pause.”
Jane replied, “I tell you what. I wasn’t going to do it, but you’ve convinced me to read up on that. I’ll do that tonight.” I thanked her for that and wished her a good night.
Heaven help me, but I believe she did. I want to believe Jane thought, “This guy let me sound off on what I believe to be true and didn’t stomp all over me. He was respectful. And after all that, he still wants me to take a look at this bill because there’s still room for changing my mind. Maybe there’s something there.”
I hope I’m right. It may be too late given the Senate passage of the BBB Tuesday, but I’m rooting for Jane to see the light and call her House representative.