As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
Six years on, families remain separated. The Trump administration’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy of splitting families at the border to deter migration is not just a shameful chapter of US history but an ongoing disaster. To this day, the Biden White House is still scrambling to clean up the mess. Some families may never reunite.
It was previously unthinkable: a government program for immigration deterrence predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms.
The cruelty of that policy defined the first Trump term. Images of separated children held in Walmarts converted into shelters sparked comparisons to the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Audio obtained by ProPublica and released in June 2018 underscored the brutality: Guards joked, over the sounds of children wailing and calling for their moms and dads while in custody of Customs and Border Protection, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”
The idea of family separation as an immigration deterrence strategy had floated around before during the Obama administration. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump came into office that hardliner senior adviser Stephen Miller pushed to implement it. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in May 2018 when making the zero-tolerance policy public, months after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had already started tearing families apart. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” (Sessions even invoked the Bible to defend the policy.)
The unspeakable—and previously unthinkable—horror of a systematic government policy predicated on babies and toddlers being ripped from their parents’ arms was such that even Donald Trump seemed chastened. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said in 2018 upon signing an executive order ending the practice.
But it was too late. By then, more than 2,000 children had already been taken from their parents and potentially condemned to a lifetime of trauma and negative health outcomes. Ultimately, around 5,000 children were separated and, as of earlier this year, 1,360 hadn’t been reunited with their parents or legal guardians, according to a progress report by the Family Reunification Task Force launched by the Biden administration.
Lawyers and advocates working on the reunification process have witnessed heartbreaking instances of children who were so young when the separation happened that they no longer recognized their parent. “A lot of children who were separated felt abandoned by their parents and so there was resentment when they reunited,” Nan Schivone, the legal director of the migrant rights group Justice in Motion, told me earlier this year.
Even in face of the irreparable harm done to thousands of children and their parents, the Trump campaign won’t rule out bringing back family separation in a potential second term.
“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” Trump said during a CNN town hall last year. “If a family hears they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.” When pressed further about whether he would reinstate the policy, Trump added: “We have to save our country, all right?”
All these years later, some of the children victimized by family separation are now speaking out. “The worst thing about being [in the shelter] was at night because I always dreamed about my mother and that she was with me,” one unnamed teen says in a video posted on an X account called Same Story, “but when I woke up she wasn’t there.” In another, Billy describes being separated from his father: “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t do nothing at all but just sit back and watch my dad be taken away from me.” Reuniting with his father, he says, “was the best moment in my life because it was the first time that I finally felt like I was secure and I was safe.”
Families belong together and free. In 2018, Billy was separated from his dad when they immigrated to the United States in 2018. Now that he’s reunited with his family, he hopes that no family ever has to experience the same story. Share his story because #FamiliesStillBelong. pic.twitter.com/j9Ban3Uye3
As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
In more than 100 social media posts over the last 12 years, he’s claimed that wind turbines are “ugly” and “disgusting looking,” “inefficient,” “unreliable,” “noisy,” “neighborhood-destroying,” “bird-killing” “monstrosities” that “cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” (It’s true wind turbines kill birds—but not nearly as many as cars, buildings, and cats.) It’s a weirdly specific vendetta: It’s not as if Trump has some sort of personal, financial stake in blocking this one form of renewable energy. (Oh wait, he does.)
But as president, Trump went full wind-spiracy. At a Republican fundraiser in 2019, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”
Following the event, several outlets fact-checked the president. For one, there’s no reason to think wind turbines would cause a decrease in property value anywhere near 75 percent. As FactCheck.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan fact-checking organization, reported at the time, most studies on the issue “indicate small or no changes to property values.”
And, critically, there is no known link between wind turbines and cancer. The American Cancer Society said at the time it was “unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer.” Nor is there any reason to think so, according to FactCheck.org:
Cancer, or what scientists think of as uncontrolled cell growth, is at heart a genetic disease because it starts when a cell has or acquires a mutation in its DNA that allows it to grow unchecked, as the National Cancer Institute explains…
Sound waves, however, aren’t thought to mutate DNA or to cause cancer in any other way. In fact, some sound waves help diagnose cancer, and they might even fight off the disease, researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research outside London have found.
The only plausible way wind turbines might contribute to even a small amount of cancer risk is by increasing stress or disrupting sleep. But it hasn’t yet been demonstrated that those problems do contribute to cancer risk, or that they are caused by turbine noise. Trump’s claim is baseless.
“They are washing up ashore,” he said, adding, “You wouldn’t see that once a year—now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
President Donald Trump was lying profusely about his administration’s most notable achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), even as he sat down to sign the bill into law in 2017, a few days before Christmas.
“As you know, we had the largest tax cuts in our history just approved,” he remarked at the “rush-job” Oval Office signing ceremony, from which the usual gaggle of fawning Republican legislators was excluded—the souvenir pens were instead offered to the lucky few reporters on hand. “This is bigger than, actually, President Reagan’s.”
Uh, not even close—though it was the biggest corporate cut. Thanks to his tax bill, Trump went on, corporate America was already “making tremendous investments. That means jobs; it means a lot of things. And we’re very happy. So that’s AT&T, Boeing, Sinclair, Wells Fargo, Comcast, and now many other companies.”
The rich are feasting on America’s economic pie. Republican tax cuts have set them on a steep upward wealth trajectory, far and away from the “little people.”
The executives sure were happy. The legislation slashed corporate income taxes dramatically, from 35 percent to 21 percent. Not surprising, given that, according to the nonprofit Public Citizen, more than 7,000 lobbyists—on behalf of a who’s who of Corporate America—helped hammer out the bill’s details. That’s 13 lobbyists per lawmaker.
And what did these joyful companies do with their windfall? Build new factories? Hire more workers? Raise wages? Stimulate economic growth? There was some of that, sure. But the cuts came “nowhere close to paying for themselves,” the New York Times later reported, and have added more than $100 billion a year to the deficit.
Just about every Republican president since Reagan has relied on the same debunked theory to advance tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans. It’s called supply-side (or “trickle-down”) economics. The idea is that if we give rich folks more money, they’ll invest, build companies, and create good jobs. The economic benefits will then trickle down to what the late New York heiress Leona Helmsley—whom the press nicknamed “Queen of Mean”—allegedly called the “little people.” (That fun fact emerged during testimony at her 1989 trial for tax evasion—where she was found guilty. Helmsley died in 2007, famously leaving $12 million to Trouble, her pampered little dog, but nothing to two of her four grandchildren.)
Trump’s corporate cuts, predictably, trickled not down but up. As I wrote in my 2021 book, Jackpot, the first instinct of executives and board members after Congress passed the TCJA was to enrich themselves:
S&P 500 firms spent a record $806 billion in 2018 buying back their own shares on the public markets. The Harvard Business Review notes that senior executives, paid largely in stock and stock options, use buybacks to manipulate share prices “to their own benefit” and the benefit of “investment bankers and hedge-fund managers” who are further enriched “at the expense of employees, as well as continuing shareholders.”
Buybacks are indeed marvelous for executives and Wall Street bankers. By reducing the number of outstanding shares on the market, they drive up the stock price to the benefit of major shareholders. But they’re bad news for workers, who have traditionally benefitted from excess corporate profits and their reinvestment in operations and equipment, which tends to strengthen the business and bring new jobs. Buybacks also can be bad for long-term investors, because they encourage a short-term mindset in the C-suite and can be used to mask a firm’s underperformance.
Notably, every one of the firms Trump praised by name during the signing ceremony notched major buybacks soon afterward: Sinclair’s board greenlit $1 billion in the months to follow. Boeing’s board approved $19 billion, and numerous reports have blamed the company’s aircraft safety fiascos in part on its lust for buybacks. (Late last week, the company announced it would lay off roughly 17,000 people, or 10 percent of its workforce.)
On Trump’s watch, Congress doubled the gift and estate tax exemption. A rich couple can now leave their kids $27.2 million without paying one dime in tax.
AT&T repurchased $692 million worth of its stock in 2018 amid reports that it had been laying off workers and closing call centers—and completed nearly $2.5 billion in buybacks the following year. Wells Fargo was in for almost $41 billion, and Comcast shelled out $8.4 billion for buybacks and dividends (which it juiced by 10 percent).
“We give stock to corporate managers to convince them to create the kind of long-term value that benefits American companies and the workers and communities they serve,” Robert Jackson Jr., who then served on the Securities and Exchange Commission, declared in a June 2018 speech. “Instead, what we are seeing is that executives are using buybacks as a chance to cash out their compensation at investor expense.”
Even when wealthy businesspeople are incentivized to “create value,” results may vary. “A friend of mine, Bob Kraft, called me last night, and he said this tax bill is incredible,” Trump remarked at the signing.
“He owns the New England Patriots,” Trump said, “but he’s in the paper business too. And he said, based on this tax bill, he just wanted to let me know that he’s going to buy a big plant in the great state of North Carolina, and he’s going to build a tremendous paper mill there.”
I looked up that “tremendous” paper mill. Trump, as usual, botched the details. The plant is in Catawba,South Carolina. Kraft’s company, New-Indy, took it over in September 2018, after which it became a total nightmare for the community—generating more than 47,000 complaints of noxious odors “similar to rotten eggs, dirty diapers or other foul smells,” including from people in North Carolina.
The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s new tax proposals would benefit. Guess what: It probably isn’t you!
Another big deal, Trump said, were the estate tax changes in the tax bill: “Something very important to me,” he said (if you can imagine anyone not named Trump being important to Trump), were “the family farmers and small-business owners who lost their business because of the estate tax. Most of them won’t have any estate tax to pay. It will be a great thing for their families. You can leave your farm to your family. You could leave your business, your small business to your family—not even so small, because the numbers are pretty big here.”
They are big! The TCJA doubled the gift and estate tax exemption and pegged it to inflation, which means, as of 2024, a well-heeled couple can leave $27.2 million to their heirs without paying one dime in tax.
But that won’t save any “family farms.” That’s a well-worn Republican talking point that amounts, fittingly enough, to a heap of cow manure. Back in 2017, a researcher with the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out that only 50 small farms or businesses would be on the hook for federal estate tax that year (a “small” business can have up to $40 million in annual revenues and 1,500 employees), and most would likely have other assets, such as stock, that could be liquidated if need be to cover the tax. Existing law, she also pointed out, allows estates “to spread their payments over a 15-year period at low interest rates.” America’s farmers were never in danger.
The Reagan tax cuts enacted in 1981 and 1986 added up to biggest break for wealthy Americans since 1920. The top marginalrate owed in 1981 on the uppermost income tierof the nation’s highest earners—anything exceeding $215,400 for a couple (about $760,000 in today’s dollars)—was slashed dramatically, from 70 percent when Reagan took office to 28 percent the year he left. Congress also reduced the gift/estate tax, more than tripled the lifetime exemption—the amount parents can leave their offspring tax-free—and trimmed taxes on capital gains and corporate profits.
And what was the outcome of all this largesse? Another snippet from Jackpot:
In 2012, a researcher at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service sought to determine whether the Reagan cuts and other reductions in marginal income tax rates over the prior sixty-five years had benefited the overall economy. He came up short. The tax cuts did not appear to be correlated with more robust saving, investment, or productivity growth. They did, however, appear to be associated with rich people making a lot more money than before. There was no evidence that the cuts expanded America’s economic pie, the report noted, “but there may be a relationship to how the economic pie is sliced.”
You might even say the very rich pigged out on the pie. The Reagan cuts set America’s most affluent citizens on a steep upward wealth trajectory, soaring them far and away from the “little people.”
This chart from Jackpot shows average household wealth over time for the richest 1 percent, richest 10 percent, and all Americans, in 2018 dollars.Carolyn Perot
Supply-side economic arguments would later enable George W. Bush to slash taxes further. Among other provisions, the 2001 and 2003 bills he signed reduced the top income tax rate, then 39.7 percent, to 35 percent—lower even than today—and began phasing out the estate tax, which Congress briefly repealed in 2010, only to reinstate it the following year.
“High-income taxpayers benefitted most from these tax cuts, with the top 1 percent of households receiving an average tax cut of over $570,000 between 2004-2012,” explains a CBPP analysis. By 2010, the report notes, the Bush cuts resulted in a 1 percent bump in annual after-tax income for the poorest fifth of US families, whereas the top-earning 1 percent enjoyed a 6.7 percent increase.
Unfair? Sure. But did the Bush cuts ever deliver the economic results supply-siders promised? Nope. “Evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality,” notes the CBPP.
Fast forward to 2024, when Trump told a crowd of “rich as hell” donors he’ll give them more tax cuts if elected to a second term. They cheered! Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders made a Facebook video.
Trump has said he wants to cut the corporate income tax further, too—to 15 percent. (Kamala Harris proposes raising it to 28 percent, still well below the pre-Trump rate of 35 percent.) And he keeps introducing new, ill-conceived, tax proposals on the campaign trail—mostly regressive—adding to a haphazard plan that the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects will cost the federal government, depending on economic conditions, anywhere from $1.5 trillion to $15.2 trillion over a decade. (The Harris plan, the group projects, would cost between zero and $8.1 trillion.)
On October 7, the nonpartisan Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released an analysis of whom Trump’s tax proposals would benefit.
It’s probably not you.
ITEP
Love it or hate it, at least now you better understand the Republicans’ dirty little secret: Supply side economics, cutting taxes on the wealthy, doesn’t work. It has never worked. It’s complete bullshit. But alas, it’s the sort of bullshit that refuses to be composted.
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