Trump's big 'accomplishment' is ugly for everyone but the rich | Opinion

Donald Trump's second term as president, like his first term and his business career before that, is all about branding.

Trump loves to tell people he named the signature legislation of his second term, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a sweeping federal budget that swapped short-term, small-dollar tax cuts for working people for far more expensive and extravagant permanent tax cuts for America's wealthiest people.

And now, with the midterm elections looming, the political bill due for Trump's "accomplishment" looks likely to be paid by the Republicans in the House and Senate who backed his budget legislation.

Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill was always unpopular in public polling. And, not long after the midterms, the many ugly results of that federal budget will only get worse.

Those impacts will hit the working poor hardest, and soon. By contrast, Trump's legislative victory will heap benefits on the wealthiest Americans that never expire.

Trump turned his back on rural Americans

Trump's budget cuts nearly $1 trillion in funding across a decade for Medicaid, "a joint federal and state program that helps cover medical costs for some people with limited income and resources." People who use Medicaid have to work 80 hours a month or qualify for an exemption, like being a student or having a disability.

Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research and polling organization, told me there are about 20 million people who have to prove that they meet those requirements every year.

But the One Big Beautiful Bill will now double the bureaucracy, making Medicaid users prove their eligibility every six months, starting on Jan. 1. Tolbert said some of those people will likely lose coverage if they fail to navigate the federal system, have trouble obtaining documentation to show they qualify, or miss notices to qualify.

How does she know? Because Nebraska provided a test case, implementing the new Medicaid bureaucratic measures on May 1 instead of waiting until Jan. 1.

Trump easily won Nebraska in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections – which is to be expected for a once reliably red state. But Trump had to make a midterm campaign stop in Nebraska on Oct. 5 to bolster a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate being dragged down by the president's slumping approval rating.

Tolbert said 7% of the people in Nebraska in the program were disenrolled and 14% of new applicants were rejected between May and August. And she expects that to increase now because Nebraska initially accepted "self-attestation" from Medicaid users that they qualified for the program but will soon shift to the twice-per-year requirement for documentation.

This squeeze is going to be felt in rural areas, which tend to have a higher rate of Medicaid users by population. The One Big Beautiful Bill cuts back on the abilities of states to tax health care providers, a source of income states used to help keep rural health care facilities afloat, Tolbert told me.

Voters in rural areas in America consistently backed Trump in his three campaigns for president, but The Brookings Institution in June found that his approval rating was falling there, and his economic policies were driving that drop.

Low-income Americans don't see One Big Beautiful Bill Act as a success

The One Big Beautiful Bill is also pushing Americans off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP and sometimes called food stamps because it helps low-income Americans afford groceries.

More than 40 million Americans use the program to feed their families, but an estimated 5 million have lost access to the program because of budget cuts and a shifting of costs to the states included in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The budget bill also included the kinds of bureaucratic hurdles for a work requirement for SNAP recipients – increasing who must report, limiting states from issuing exemptions – and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that more Americans will be forced from the program in 2027.

So low-income Americans are being hit each day by the One Big Beautiful Bill, with more pain on the way, and Trump is still out on the midterm campaign trail bragging about what he sees as a branding success.

Republicans' bill does actually help somebody: The wealthy

Trump appears to have no choice. He branded the thing. Now he owns every ugly inch of it.

Remember, Trump last year sent Vice President JD Vance out on tour to try to rebrand the legislation as "the working families tax cut," in a clumsy and ineffective effort that did not change the minds of many voters who disapprove of the legislation.

That presents two problems for the Republican Party, which looks likely to lose control of the U.S. House and maybe also the U.S. Senate in the Nov. 3 midterms.

First: The One Big Beautiful Bill as a brand is still politically toxic. A July analysis in The Washington Post found that Democrats were far more likely to cite that budget legislation in attacks on Republicans than Republicans are to cite it in defense of their control of Congress.

Second: Trump keeps touting it as a win anyway. In an Oct. 5 midterm campaign rally in Nebraska, Trump declared, "We actually put four years worth of goodies into one bill."

Trump spoke in Nebraska as people in that state were facing serious cutbacks impacting rural hospitals, Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

But what about Trump's "goodies"? What do they look like?

Workers employed in jobs where tips are part of their income, like restaurant servers and bartenders, can deduct up to $25,000 in tips from their annual taxes. And workers who can earn overtime can deduct up to $12,500 in that type of pay from their taxes. Plus, Americans who are 65 or older get an annual $6,000 deduction for their taxes, which Trump pitches as "no tax on Social Security."

But those tax breaks, which Trump loves to tout, will vanish in two years, expiring at the end of 2028. Trump speaks far less about the massive tax breaks for rich Americans that are here forever in his budget.

That's the swap Trump wants to sell, while only telling part of the story. He skips right past the financial burden his One Big Beautiful Bill puts on Americans, because that's the part of the story where he hangs that debt on each and every one of us.

Who ultimately pays for the One Big Beautiful Bill? All of us. And who reaps the most benefits? The wealthiest Americans.

And who voted to pass that into law? All but three Republicans in the U.S. Senate and all but two Republicans in the U.S. House. No Democrats in the Senate or House backed the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Voters have noticed, but will that matter on Election Day?

The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit, in a March analysis, said that the One Big Beautiful Bill will increase the federal deficit by "between $3.7 and $5.1 trillion over the next decade," and that the permanent tax cuts "direct the largest benefits to high-income households, while many of the spending cuts fall on low-income and immigrant families."

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in an analysis before the legislation became law in July 2025, predicted that "the $121 billion in net tax cuts going to the richest 1 percent next year would exceed the amount going to the entire bottom 60 percent of taxpayers."

And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in August 2025 reported that the wealthiest 10% of Americans will benefit by about $13,600 per year thanks to the permanent tax cuts, while households with the lowest 10% in incomes will see a decline of about $1,200 per year.

All that projects the true Trump brand – hoodwinking hardworking Americans into buying that he wants what is best for them, when really he's trying to protect the billionaire class and protect his place among the wealthiest Americans.

That brand has worn thin. CNN noted in May that the once unshakable base of Trump's MAGA movement, White voters who did not attend college, was starting to falter, with his approval rating among that cohort dropping below 50%.

Polls from The Associated Press/NORC in June and Economist/YouGov in July found similar disillusionment among non-college voters.

And an AP/NORC poll released Oct. 13 found that a majority of Americans, including Republicans, said Trump prioritizes his business interests more than the country overall.

The real Trump brand has been revealed, just in time for the Republican Party to pay for it in the midterm elections.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's big 'accomplishment' is ugly for everyone but the rich | Opinion

Reporting by Chris Brennan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published November 2, 2026 at 1:01 AM.