What did Donald Trump do today?

He revealed his new healthcare plan: pay for every medical expense out of pocket, like a billionaire.

The federal government has been shut down for 39 days because Trump refuses to fund the Affordable Care Act.  This means that the 24 million Americans who buy private insurance through ACA exchanges are seeing sharp and in some cases massive increases in their premiums.

The ACA, sometimes unofficially referred to as Obamacare, requires insurance companies to offer high-quality plans with yearly and lifetime limits on out-of-pocket costs. It covers preventive medicine like annual checkups, immunizations, mammograms, and other routine diagnostic exams. Crucially, it also prevents insurance companies from dropping a patient because of preexisting conditions. These benefits make health insurance actually useful and affordable for people who are not covered through an employer plan—but they also increase costs for the companies. Federal subsidies, which Trump is refusing to pay, are part of the bargain.

Trump himself belongs to a vanishingly small number of Americans who have never had or relied on private health insurance. Instead, his health care has come from two sources: the unlimited resources of the federal government, and physicians he hires personally. Private-pay arrangements are extremely rare precisely because few Americans can afford to simply pay out of pocket for everything from diagnosing a sprained ankle (which might cost about a thousand dollars without insurance) to performing an organ transplant (which might cost more than a million dollars).

Or to take another example, treatment of the "bone spurs" that Trump got diagnosed by a private physician in 1968, just before his final legitimate Vietnam draft deferment expired, would have cost about $11,000 in today's money—if he'd actually had them.

But that ability to pay for medical care out of pocket may explain Trump's announcement today of his new healthcare "plan." He called for the abolition of "BIG, BAD" health insurance altogether, and to give Americans a one-time payment to use towards a lifetime of medical expenses. At least, that was his plan this morning, according to a post to his private social media network before a day of relaxing at his golf resort:

I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare. Unrelated, we must still terminate the Filibuster!  

Trump has seethed for almost a decade now about his inability to dismantle one of the major domestic policy achievements of the Obama administration. While it's long been clear that Trump doesn't actually know what the program is or how it works—for example, he still seems to think that "ObamaCare" is a single private health insurance company—he's animated by his longstanding hatred for his predecessor.

Why does this matter?

• A healthcare plan that relies on every American being able to afford to spend money like a billionaire is a stupid plan.  

• It's more important that Americans have health insurance than it is that Donald Trump settle a personal grudge.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He pondered the mystery of why beef is suddenly so expensive after he imposed massive import taxes on it.

Continuing his attempts to explain away the sharply increased prices Americans are paying for necessities, Trump posted this to his boutique social media site:

While Cattle Prices have dropped substantially, the price of Boxed Beef has gone up — Therefore, you know that something is “fishy.” We will get to the bottom of it very quickly. If there is criminality, those people responsible will pay a steep price! 

Trump probably meant to refer to the "boxed beef cutout," which is a technical industry term referring to the estimated value of a whole carcass based on the market price of certain cuts. Normally, this price would rise and fall at a similar rate to the price of a live cow. The "fishy" business that Trump is promising to investigate, then, is why the market price of beef is more expensive than the price of live cattle would suggest. The answer he'd like consumers to believe is that it's a beef industry conspiracy.

The actual answer is that the United States imports more than two million metric tons of beef per year, almost all of which is now subject to enormous import taxes as high as 76.4%. This is then passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for beef overall. 

U.S. beef producers have been hurt on both ends by Trump's trade war against the entire world. Their costs for machinery, fertilizer, fuel, and other expenses have been driven up even as their foreign markets have dried up due to reciprocal tariffs. High retail prices for beef have been the one saving grace, but Trump has been desperate to bring down the embarrassingly high cost of supermarket bills, and his solution has been to quadruple the amount of beef imported from Argentina. That country is the one exception to high beef tariffs because of Trump's friendly relationship with its president Javier Milei. 

Trump has also given Argentina a $40 billion bailout while pleading poverty to avoid having to pay emergency food benefits in the United States.

Why does this matter?

• Solving the problem is more important than finding a scapegoat. 
   
• It is very unlikely that the person "responsible will pay a steep price."

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said virtually every price was going down, which is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Tuesday's election was a humiliating rebuke of Trump, and not just in "blue states" like New Jersey, but in swing states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, and conservative strongholds like Mississippi. Even his usual base of support is furious about the fallout from his trade war, attacks on basic freedoms, and increasingly erratic behavior. Not even ten months into his second term, Trump is profoundly unpopular: he had a 37%-63% approval/disapproval rating in a recent poll.

Trump's reaction has been a social media campaign focused on the problem of inflation, declaring that he has already solved it—no matter what Americans are seeing with their own eyes when they pay for gas and groceries. For example, he posted this to his boutique microblogging site today:

2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under Biden, according to Walmart. My cost are lower than the Democrats on everything, especially oil and gas! So the Democrats “affordability” issue is DEAD! STOP LYING!!!

Actually, Trump is the one "LYING!!!" here. As many people immediately pointed out, Walmart's 2025 Thanksgiving shopping list had six more items on it than its 2024 list, and the 2025 list had more store-brand products. 

In other words, Trump's claim that Thanksgiving dinner will be cheaper this year than it was under President Biden is true, as long as you eat less food of lower quality.

He repeated that claim to reporters today, then added that gasoline prices were just over $2, or as he put it: "I don't want to hear about the affordability, because right now we're much less [sic]. If you look at energy, we're getting close to $2 a gallon gasoline." But the average price at American pumps today was $3.08 per gallon.

In reality, prices overall are up well above the nominal inflation target of 2%, particularly for things like groceries and electricity that Americans cannot avoid buying.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents shouldn't lie about the prices of food, gas, and electricity to people who actually have to pay for their own food, gas, and electricity. 

• Reality doesn't change just because Donald Trump wants people to like him.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He let a lie about voter fraud get so far away from him that he started talking about needing photo ID to buy groceries.

Yesterday, in what was unmistakably a backlash against Trump, Democratic candidates were elected across the map in a rout. Barely nine months into his second term, Trump is testing new lows in unpopularity, and voting populations he'd made inroads with in 2024 put up eye-popping numbers for Democrats.

Trump, who still claims to believe that the 2020 election was "rigged" against him, obviously had the elections on his mind today. He wrenched his answer to a question about the ongoing government shutdown from a discussion of the filibuster to the (non-existent) issue of voter fraud, but ended up in a place that is bizarre even by his standards:

…We should start tonight with 'the country's open, congratulations,' then we should pass, uh, voter ID, we should pass no mail-in voting, we should pass all the things that we wanted to pass—make our elections secure and safe, because California's a disaster, uh, many of the states are disasters, but can you imagine when they vote almost unanimously against voter ID, all we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID. But for voting, they want no voter ID, it's only for one reason, because they cheat. We would pass that in fifteen minutes. …Mail-in ballots make it automatically corrupt.

You do not need to show photo identification to purchase groceries or gas in the United States, or anywhere else. It's not clear why Trump thought anyone would believe that—but then, it's not clear Trump has ever in his life had to buy his own gas or groceries.

Trump, to the horror of Republican party officials who know how disastrous it would be for them, has long called for an abolition of mail-in or absentee voting (except when he does it). Earlier this year, he renewed his (empty) threats to ban it, saying that he'd gotten the idea from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. That appears to be what he is talking about when he mentions votes "unanimously against voter ID." 

But, of course, even in the eight states (plus DC) where all voting is conducted by mail, voters still have to register, and there are actually more safeguards against fraudulent voting by mail than in person. There are a handful of states where in-person voting is allowed without a photo ID, but even in those states the "affidavit ballots" have other requirements that allow poll workers to verify an address match to the voter file records, and special requirements for first time voters or registering voters that do include photo ID.

Outside of Trump's conspiracy-theory attempts to explain away his 2020 election loss, people intentionally casting fraudulent ballots is almost completely unheard of. For example, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation conducted a study of reported voter fraud in past elections. In just one of the states they examined, Pennsylvania, they found 39 individual reports of voter fraud out of more than 100 million votes cast, meaning that 0.0000388% of ballots cast over the course of three decades might have been illegally cast.

Trump claims to believe that millions of undocumented immigrants all cast illegal ballots, all for his opponents. But in spite of the fact that all states keep meticulous records of who is eligible to vote and who has cast a ballot, he's never been able to find even one such illegal voter.

Why does this matter?

• It shouldn't be possible for anyone to be so far out of touch with everyday reality that you think grocery stores are checking ID before they'll sell to you. 

What did Donald Trump do today?

He decided to use Americans going without food as a political bargaining chip.

Today, the current government shutdown became the longest ever, beating Trump's previous record in his first term. One of the most urgent needs not currently being met by the federal government is food assistance programs. Trump is legally required to use a special contingency fund to keep sending out SNAP payments, and at the start of this week had grudgingly agreed to partially comply with a judge's ruling enforcing that obligation. 

 

Today, though, he decided that families going without food—many of whom are struggling precisely because of the shutdown—would be more useful as leverage.

 

(Trump is lying about food assistance eligibility: it remains capped at 130% of the federal poverty level. For example, a family of four with an income of $42,000 per year would be too "wealthy" to qualify.)

Trump's announcement that he would openly defy a court order to continue helping hungry Americans buy food caught his own staff off guard. Press secretary Karolina Leavitt flatly contradicted him, insisting that "the administration is fully complying with the court order." This is a common tactic used by Trump's staff to box him out of sudden swerves in policy—simply insisting that they never happened and "defending" him from people who'd noticed what he'd said.

The main point of contention that has led to the shutdown is that Trump—whose party controls both houses of Congress—refuses to fund the Affordable Care Act. That means that Trump is now holding Americans living near or below the poverty line hostage until Democrats agree to provide him with political cover for taking away health insurance from those same Americans (and millions of others).
 

Why does this matter?

• Every American is entitled to enough food to eat and health care, whether or not it's politically convenient for Donald Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He threatened New York City voters.

 

Election Day in New York City is tomorrow, featuring a three-way race for mayor between Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, and disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo running as an independent after losing in a huge upset to Mamdani in the Democratic primary. Mamdani is generally regarded as the favorite, but both he and Cuomo are campaigning hard in the closing days, and the result is far from certain.

 

Trump has tried several times to interject himself into the race, mostly by calling Mamdani a "communist" (which is a lie) and with threats to blockade New York City from government services if the Democratic nominee won. He's also threatened to arrest Mamdani and strip him of his citizenship. He repeated those charges again today, in the form of an endorsement of Cuomo.

 

There are two aspects that bear mention here: one legal, and one political.

Legally, this is an empty threat from Trump—as long as Trump bothers to obey the law. Relatively little in the way of federal funds earmarked for NYC or the surrounding region are discretionary. Of course, Trump could—and has—illegally impounded funds for much of his second term, but even then it's not clear how he could really do more to hurt New Yorkers for voting in a mayor he doesn't like than he already is. Just recently, he declared that he was ending a massive $16 billion tunnel project linking the city with New Jersey, something he has no legal authority to do, and apparently for no real reason other than that NY Sen. Chuck Schumer had backed it. (For that matter, it's not even clear within the Trump White House that it even has been shut down: there are already conflicting reports.) 

Politically, Trump endorsing Cuomo is bizarre at best: they loathe one another. Trump was furious when Cuomo rejected his offer of a corrupt quid pro quo where New York would drop its various criminal investigations into Trump and his businesses in exchange for Trump targeting bureaucratic punishments against New York specifically. Even though Cuomo didn't have much direct authority over what state and local prosecutors do, Trump blamed him for the successful prosecution of the Trump Organization for tax fraud and the successful seizure and shutdown of Trump's phony charity. Cuomo was one of several state governors Trump tried to extort praise from in exchange for emergency aid in the early weeks of the COVID-19 shutdown.

The two men do have one thing in common: an extremely long list of credible allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Until recently Trump, a convicted felon, could have put his vote where his mouth is: New York allows felons to vote after they've served any prison sentence, and Trump couldn't be sentenced to incarceration at all because of his re-election. But his official residency for voting purposes, and the place where he spends nearly as much time as the White House proper, is at his resort in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Why does this matter?

• Donald Trump doesn't get to tell people how to vote in any election.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He rushed to help exactly one American, a wealthy political supporter, get the health care they needed.

Scott Adams, the conservative culture warrior and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, announced earlier this year that he has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and is not expected to live long. Adams, who recently said that Black Americans were a "hate group" and that whites should "get the hell away" from them, has been a vocal Trump supporter since 2015. 

That relationship may be why Adams publicly begged Trump to intervene in what he described as the botched administration of a last-chance drug that might extend his life. It is also probably why Trump immediately responded, via HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who told Adams that Trump "wants to help" and would be contacting him.

Where less well-connected Americans are concerned, Trump and Kennedy have slashed funding for cancer research, and medical research in general. Adams, whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, probably isn't having financial issues related to his treatment, but 45 million Americans are facing sharp increases in health care premiums due to Trump's refusal to fund ACA subsidies.

Adams described his problem as a logistical issue, not a question of money or access. But this wouldn't be the first time Trump has pulled strings to get someone access to medicines other people can't have: he did it for himself when he nearly died of COVID-19 in 2020. Clinical trials often make exceptions for patients who are truly without hope, but in the case of the brand-new experimental monoclonal antibody therapy Trump helped himself to, it did mean he took a dose that would have gone to someone else. About 60,000 Americans died of COVID before that therapy became available to the general public.

Pluvicto, the drug Adams is seeking access to, was developed at Purdue University from research funded by the National Cancer Institute. Trump's budget, passed this summer, cut the NCI's budget by almost 40%.

Why does this matter?

• Americans have a right to health care whether or not they're wealthy campaign surrogates for the current president. 

• There's cronyism, and then there's picking one person out of tens of millions to have the government help.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He once again said it was a crime to make fun of him.

For years now, Trump has occasionally launched into spontaneous discussions of what, for him, is the fascinating subject of the catapults that help planes launch from aircraft carriers. (Returning to familiar, well-worn pieces of "patter" is a common coping strategy for people, like Trump, who struggle to articulate their thoughts or control their emotions.) In particular, he feels strongly, to the point of obsession, about the need to return to steam-driven systems rather than use the modern EMALS system—or as Trump calls it, "magnets."

There have been presidents who were naval engineers, but Trump is not one of them, which may explain why he appears to genuinely believe that the "magnets" will not work if they get wet, among other falsehoods. For actual experts, the matter is settled and the benefits of faster launches, less aircraft maintenance, and the ability to launch a wider variety of aircraft are decisive. So when Trump once again promised, seemingly off the cuff, to issue an executive order requiring that aircraft carriers "go back to steam," it was no surprise that the Navy refused to comment.

On Thursday, Seth Meyers did a few jokes about Trump's supposed engineering brilliance on his late-night show—

—which prompted Trump, who seems to comment on Meyers a lot for someone who never watches him, to say that it was "PROBABLY ILLEGAL!!!" for Meyers to make fun of him.

In reality, because of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment,  it is not illegal in the United States of America to be "ANTI TRUMP" or anti- any American politician, or to say that you are, or to make fun of them.

This isn't even the first time this week that Trump has ranted on social media about how it should be illegal to mock him, and ironically, the second part of Meyers' monologue was about how Trump said it was "almost treasonous" to point out how little he'd accomplished on his recent trip to Asia. Meyers almost seemed to anticipate Trump's rant, saying, "The point is, Trump thinks if you say something mean about him, that's treason. Which is why on this show, I only do constructive criticism. Which I'm being told is also treason."

Why does this matter?

• No matter how many times he says otherwise, it's not illegal to make fun of Donald Trump. 

• One way presidents can avoid people making fun of them for stupid opinions is not to share opinions on subjects they don't know anything about.