When 15 million Americans lose their health care and plunge into personal crisis, none of them are going to give a shit about a made-for-clicks twitter fight between two billionaires arguing about who gets the bigger share of the corruption spoils.
— Chris Murphy (@chrismurphyct.bsky.social) 2025-06-06T01:16:24.209Z
So true. Everyone on the internet actively delighting in the meltdown between the richest man in the world and the president of the United States was wrong; instead, they should have been sitting quietly in a dim room, pondering the ongoing destruction of the administrative state, the undermining of herd immunity to infectious diseases, the declining stability of the global trade landscape, and the health consequences of environmental deregulation.
Rather than making a collection of pretty solid jokes about the two most malign influences on American society in the past century, everyone needs to read, line by line, each of the 1,038 pages of the Republican bill that passed the House and now awaits the Senate, to understand fully its potential to gut Medicaid, rescind renewable energy and electric vehicle credits, and grant many billions of dollars to people who do not need it.
Murphy, of course, was not the only person insisting the richest person in the world lamenting his inability to dictate government policy and the president’s suggestion that he might cancel billions in contracts to that rich person’s companies was a “distraction” or some such. Others agreed with the critical idea that, actually, smiling a bit while the country collapses around you is representative of a moral failing. Why should we pay attention to and perhaps chuckle at the apparent collapse of a relationship that is primarily responsible for the mass firings of government employees and the consequent kneecapping of countless critical government functions, when there are potential other bad things that may be on the way?
This is important. Stop laughing.
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