“No Obamacare?” an attendee at the Pennsylvania event asked Johnson.
“No Obamacare,” Johnson replied.
Johnson claimed Republicans have “a lot of ideas” for reform. But if a plan exists now that didn’t when Trump tried to repeal the ACA the first time—failing only because the late John McCain gave it the thumbs-down—they’re keeping it a secret. All Johnson would say Tuesday, to assuage anyone concerned that they’d lose their healthcare under a second Trump administration, is that the GOP would “take government bureaucrats out of the healthcare equation.”
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said.
The “regulatory state,” as it were, is also a preoccupation of Musk—unsurprising, given the antagonistic relationship between his companies and the federal agencies that conduct oversight over them. Musk has called for the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE, a reference to a meme (and cryptocurrency) the 53-year-old finds irresistibly funny—and Trump has indicated he would tap him to run it. “We need to do it,” Trump said at the Economic Club of New York in September.
This wholesale gutting of the federal government is, of course, a major tenet of Project 2025, the blueprint of a second Trump administration. “The larger government gets, the less individual freedom you have,” Musk said at a recent rally. But Trump’s plan to dismantle the administrative state wouldn’t just target the D.C. bureaucrats he casts as the “deep state”—it could hurt a federal workforce that spans the nation, and that includes not just pencil-pushing regulators but Americans in all sorts of jobs, about 30 percent of which are held by veterans. Trump frames such an overhaul as “draining the swamp.” But the cuts would be felt by workers—and communities—far from Washington.
Republicans have long found success in getting their blue-collar supporters to vote against their own interests, branding themselves “working class” heroes while hollowing out the systems and institutions that once allowed the middle and working classes to thrive. But that dynamic has grown even more stark in the Trump era, as he and his MAGA allies tap into the resulting disillusionment to push culture-war grievance.
“For those who have been wrong and betrayed,” he said at the onset of his 2024 campaign, “I am your retribution.”
But Trump isn’t fighting for anyone but himself, and the division he sows along the way will only “help those at the very top and hurt everyone else,” as Kamala Harris put it in her compelling closing campaign message Tuesday.
Trump is “asking you to give him another four years in the Oval Office—not to focus on your problems, but to focus on his,” Harris said in her address Tuesday at the Ellipse, where this “petty tyrant” instigated a violent attack on democracy in 2021. “I offer a different path.”
