Pity the populists who are still wallowing in the world of ordinary MAGA.
“Ultra-MAGA” was the real counterculture, the scourge President Biden warned about for the better part of this midterm season. But that wasn’t deviant enough to get out the vote, if this week’s polls are reliable. On Friday, Biden traded ultra for one size bigger:
Biden describes the Republican economic agenda as "Mega MAGA trickle down." pic.twitter.com/TaF8v6EmlW
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 21, 2022
“If Republicans get their way, the deficit is going to soar. The tax burden is going to fall on the middle class. . . . They have three — not one, not two — three plans to cut Social Security benefits,” he told reporters. “It’s Mega-MAGA trickle-down.”
By recycling Hillary Clinton’s “Trumped-up trickle-down,” Biden has polished his green bona fides. The problem with Biden’s MAGA branding, of course, is that his party has used the term to describe just about any policy they don’t like, including those they’ve accused Republicans of pushing for years; it goes beyond border walls and tariffs.
Dan McLaughlin recently pointed out that the “Ultra-MAGA” agenda in Biden’s framing consists of cuts to entitlements and tax breaks for the wealthy — which is exactly what he warned the Romney–Ryan ticket would pursue in 2012. Dan noted: “That suggests that he and his team know perfectly well that they’re just making the same old partisan election-year arguments and slapping a red hat on it.”
Biden all but admitted as much on Friday. After describing “Mega-MAGA” as the new, new threat, the president described its agenda as the same old, same old: “the kind of policies that have failed the country before, and they’ll fail it again.”
But Mega-Romney doesn’t have the same ring.