Donald Trump was already in the classroom when Brown v. Board of Education desegregated schools in 1954. He was about 30 years old before women could get their own credit cards, his 40s before a black man ran a Fortune 500 company , and in his 60s before the election of President Obama.
Trump is one of the oldest baby boomers, born in 1946.
By 2030, every person of their generation will officially be a senior citizen. That’s more than 70 million Americans who lived through the civil rights movement and women’s liberation and saw the last vestiges of Jim Crow disappear. This also represents more than 70 million people eligible for Medicare and Social Security.
These two data points may seem unrelated, but in their own way they influence Trump supporters: many dislike the changes America has seen during Trump’s lifetime and would like to go back to 1946. A handful of its wealthiest supporters, at the same time, are more interested in ensuring that the needs of 70 million baby boomers do not get in the way of tax cuts.
During Trump’s presidency, a bloc of conservatives worked to “make America great again” by attacking diversity and vilifying drag queens. While his base was distracted by his constant chaos and scapegoating, Trump was busy trying to cut benefits such as Social Security every year he was in the White House.
Now he’s at it again: Asylum seekers and migrants are Trump’s favorite bogeyman this election cycle, and his supporters are in the throes of a diversity frenzy. While he focuses MAGA on Haitians and Puerto Ricans, his the objective is to cut THE very programs that baby boomers need. Make no mistake: Under Trump, the working and middle class would suffer again as they did under his first administration.
One of the former president’s most prominent supporters, Elon Musk, would reportedly head a “government efficiency commission” if Trump were elected — and you can be sure he’d see “inefficiency” everywhere government uses tax dollars for the benefit of average Americans. Acknowledging that Trumponomics would harm most people, Musk used the phrase “temporary hardship” to describe what Americans can expect if Trump returns to the White House. And he gave the former president more than $70 million to do it.
Like Trump, Musk grew up in a segregated society – in his case, apartheid South Africa. The world’s richest man spent his formative years in a country in which white men received preferential treatment and in which white people were largely shielded from seeing how black people were treated by the government. Like Trump, Musk is dismissive of diversity efforts. Both are prone to promoting misinformation, conspiracy theories and racism.
Oh, and they’re both pay a much lower tax rate that average American – people, Musk warns, should prepare for “temporary difficulties.”
During the election campaign, Trump promised to eliminate overtime taxes. What it doesn’t tell you is that Project 2025, the next Republican administration’s plan to reshape the federal government, eliminate overtime pay. He and Musk are both anti-union and speak lovingly about finding ways to pay employees less. Trump has a reputation to not pay contractors at all.
What exactly is it about this candidate shouting “compassionate conservative”?
For nearly five decades, that phrase, along with “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” and “Reagan Democrats,” has provided cover for white voters who want all the tax cuts promised on the campaign trail and none of the racism in which these reductions are enveloped. Charismatic boomers like Trump have long touted their policies in the United States under the pretense that such a dynamic was possible – but it’s a thin veil when they use rhetoric like “welfare queens” and “They eat cats, they eat dogs. This is no different from when white Southerners tried to defend the display of the Confederate flag as “heritage, not hatred” while electing officials who wanted to ban books that realistically portrayed the Confederate flag. legacy. Inventing “welfare queens” was never just about saving taxpayer money, and the Confederate flag was never just a symbol of something noble.
Millennials have supplanted Baby Boomers as the largest adult generation, and yet the needs of Baby Boomers are sure to be among the nation’s top priorities for years to come as they strain the safety net social.
We need to find a way to have conversations about the future of Medicare, Social Security, and other programs without charlatans like Trump and Musk spoiling political discussions with the racism of yesteryear. It’s tedious and counterproductive, and the stakes are too high: 70 million Americans are depending on the rest of us to pull ourselves together.
The nation is not just diversifying; it gets old too. Solutions will not come in the form of prejudice disguised as politics. This is the world Trump and Musk grew up in, and this is what they are offering more of.
