By Rob C.
TL;DR: Trump promised so much winning we’d get sick of it. Well, congratulations, America — we’re nauseous, but not for the reason he meant. Beef is at record highs, diesel is up 58% since January, your power bill is subsidizing some guy’s chatbot data center, food stamps got cut for veterans and foster kids, and Head Start is surviving on life support dressed up as a budget win. Meanwhile, the guys who wrote the checks to get him elected are cashing federal contracts by the billion. WTF? If this is winning, I’d hate to see what losing looks like. Oh wait — I’m looking at my grocery receipt right now.
The Pitch
Remember the promise? “There’s going to be so much winning, you’ll be sick of winning.” He said it on the trail so many times it became a bit. And the specifics weren’t vague, either — this wasn’t some fuzzy “trust me” pitch. Standing behind an honest-to-god table of milk, eggs, and flour in August 2024, Trump looked America dead in the eye and said: “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” He was going to “end” inflation. Cut energy costs “in half.” Make healthcare more affordable. Deliver “drastic price reductions” on groceries. Bring manufacturing “roaring back.”
Economists at the time politely pointed out this wasn’t just optimistic, it was economically illiterate — actual across-the-board price declines only happen during a full-blown economic collapse, not because a guy wants them to. But nobody was in the mood for a lecture on monetary policy. They wanted cheaper eggs. So here we are, nineteen months later. Let’s check the scoreboard.
The Scoreboard
Grocery prices haven’t come down — they’ve ticked up nearly every single month since January 2025. Beef hit a record $6.23 a pound, up double digits year-over-year, the worst stretch since USDA started tracking the stuff. Coffee is up 19 to 25%. And diesel — the fuel that moves literally everything you own before it reaches a shelf — rocketed from $3.53 to $5.58 a gallon in eight months flat, right after Trump greenlit the war with Iran. When a reporter asked him about it, he called the price spike “a very small price to pay.” Easy for him to say. He’s not the one filling up a truck.
Your electricity bill isn’t spared either — up 36% since 2020, on track for another 6% climb through 2027, largely because AI data centers are hoovering up the grid and sticking regular households with the infrastructure bill. One Virginia homeowner watched his monthly bill jump from $100 to $281. In one month. And the “manufacturing roaring back” line? The exact opposite happened — the economy has kept losing manufacturing jobs every single month since the tariffs took effect. Roaring back, alright. Roaring in the wrong direction.
The Real Unemployment Story
Here’s the part that needs the kitchen-table translation, because the headline unemployment number is basically a magic trick. Labor force participation — the share of people actually working or looking for work — has fallen from 62.6% in January 2025 to 61.4% by July 2026. That’s the lowest it’s been outside of a literal pandemic since 1976. Some of that’s normal churn. But a chunk of it, especially a sharp one-month plunge among prime-working-age adults in June 2026, has Federal Reserve researchers using the phrase “genuinely concerning” — and Fed researchers do not say that for fun.
Translation: these are the people who gave up looking. They don’t count in the unemployment rate Trump likes to brag about, because the math only counts people still actively hunting for a job. Meanwhile, actual BLS data confirms the economy lost jobs outright in August, October, December 2025, and February 2026. And remember — Trump fired the BLS Commissioner in August 2025 for reporting a weak jobs number he called “rigged.” The numbers got worse after he fired the person delivering the bad news. Turns out the numbers weren’t the problem. The policies were.
Iran, Tariffs, and a Trade War with Canada, Because Why Not
The Iran war alone delivered the largest one-month spike in gas and diesel prices on record, and the fallout is now threatening global fertilizer shipments — meaning higher food prices are coming for the whole planet, not just us. Nice work, Donny.
Then there’s tariffs. The Joint Economic Committee estimates the average American family will eat more than $2,500 in tariff costs this year — a 43% jump from last year’s already-brutal $1,745 — which adds up to roughly $330 billion yanked directly out of household budgets nationwide in 2026. And when the Supreme Court struck down the bulk of his original tariffs as illegal? Trump didn’t take the hint. He rolled out “Plan B” tariffs practically overnight to keep the pain flowing.
And because apparently punishing your own citizens wasn’t enough, he picked a fight with Canada — our closest ally, our next-door neighbor, the country that sends 73% of everything it exports straight to us. Twenty-five percent tariffs on most Canadian goods, met with retaliatory tariffs that escalated to $155 billion. Now Trump is threatening 50% tariffs in a hissy fit. This is an unnecessary fight, with real economic damage on both sides, and no resolution in sight. Just vibes and a bigger grocery bill.
Big Tech’s Multibillion-Dollar Pay-to-Play
Here’s where the con reveals itself. Big Tech has spent at least $653 million cultivating favor with Trump and Republicans since the 2024 race. Elon Musk alone dropped $270 million to get him elected — the single largest political donation in American history — and walked away with his own government job. Since Trump took office, more than three dozen people connected to Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey have taken jobs inside the very federal agencies now steering billions in contracts back to their own companies. Companies tied to that circle have already scooped up roughly $6 billion in federal contracts, and they’re chasing more — including a joint Anduril/Palantir/SpaceX bid on the multibillion-dollar “Golden Dome” missile defense program. (A massive waste of taxpayer money). Sam Altman wrote a personal $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural fund the same month he announced Trump would “lead our country into the age of AI.”
This is pay-to-play in broad daylight, verifiable, on the record. While you’re paying record beef prices, record diesel prices, with a paycheck that isn’t stretching, the exact people who funded this presidency are the ones collecting the contracts, the deregulation, and the access.
Healthcare: The Promise That Broke the Hardest
On healthcare, Trump promised affordability. Instead, the country is experiencing the largest coverage collapse since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The enhanced subsidies that had cut average marketplace premiums by more than half — the ones that drove record enrollment — expired December 31, 2025. Democrats forced a 43-day government shutdown trying to save them. Trump floated a fix, then folded under pressure from his own party. Nothing passed.
So the “subsidy cliff” is back. Earn above 400% of the federal poverty line — about $62,600 for an individual, $128,600 for a family of four — and you lose all federal help, full stop, no matter what the plan costs. One single mother told CBS her premium is “effectively tripling,” from $900 to $2,500. Estimates say somewhere between 4 and 7.3 million people will lose marketplace coverage this year alone, with 4.8 million becoming fully uninsured. And that’s before you even get to the Medicaid cuts buried in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — over $1 trillion in healthcare spending cuts over the decade, with the CBO projecting up to 17 million Americans losing coverage entirely by 2034. And this isn’t hitting the fictional “welfare queens” — it’s disproportionately self-employed workers, small business owners, farmers, and ranchers. You know. The actual working people Trump claimed to be fighting for.
Cruelty as Economic Policy
Food assistance got hit next, and hard — the largest cut to SNAP in the program’s history, roughly $186–187 billion over ten years, mostly through new work requirements that now reach much further than before: veterans, homeless individuals, people aging out of foster care, and parents of teenagers who used to be exempt. The damage was immediate. SNAP participation dropped 6% between July and December 2025 alone — 2.5 million fewer people in five months — and by mid-2026, more than 4 million had lost benefits, roughly a quarter of them children. Arizona’s participation cratered 51%. And the real time bomb is still coming: starting in 2027, states have to start covering SNAP’s administrative costs themselves, and starting in 2028, they’ll be on the hook for potentially over $9 billion nationally. Many states genuinely might not have the budget to keep SNAP running at all. Not trimmed. Gone. These are our neighbors going hungry.
Then there’s Head Start, which got the full scare-then-retreat treatment this administration loves. In spring 2025, a leaked budget draft proposed eliminating it entirely — a 60-year-old program serving over half a million of the country’s neediest kids — arguing the federal government “should not be in the business of” funding it. Public backlash forced a walk-back to flat funding, which they’re calling a win. It isn’t — three straight years of flat funding is a real cut once you account for inflation, and it comes after the program already lost half its regional support offices, about 100 central office staff, and suffered payment delays that locked providers out of their own federal accounts. During the fall 2025 shutdown, 6,525 kids were already losing access in real time, with another 58,000-plus in 134 programs across 41 states staring down the same cliff within days.
So, Are We Tired Yet?
This is where “so much winning” stops being incompetence and starts being cruelty. Handing tax cuts and federal contracts to Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen is one kind of betrayal. Taking food out of a homeless veteran’s hands, tripling a single mother’s insurance bill, and threatening to shut down preschool for the poorest four-year-olds in the country is just plain evil. None of this is chaos or collateral damage. Every single piece — SNAP, Head Start, Medicaid, the ACA subsidies — was a specific, itemized line item in the very same bill that funded tax cuts for the wealthy and a record-breaking military budget. The money didn’t vanish. It just moved — from your kitchen table to their boardroom.
Don’t worry, though. Our Con-mander-in-Thief is making billions selling off our future — and he’d like to remind you it’s the best future anybody’s ever seen.
F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!
If your grocery bill made you angrier than this article did, you already know what to do. Like, Share, and Subscribe — misery loves company.
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— Rob Cain is the author of “Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet”, and writes “Our Broken Systems” at democracy4sale.com