Challenging Power Dynamics

Safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP are in peril after the House Republicans passed a budget resolution this week that proposes massive $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, alongside $2 trillion in spending reductions. The math doesn’t add up: There is no realistic way to achieve the necessary savings without slashing entitlement programs that the most vulnerable Americans depend on.

While the Republicans claim they won’t cut these programs, they are simultaneously setting up eventual changes. House Speaker Mike Johnson characterized Medicaid as "hugely problematic" with "a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse." This rhetoric echoes that of Elon Musk, who labeled those affected by federal program cuts as the "parasite class."

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political messaging expert, and Sunjeev Bery, a foreign policy analyst and Intercept contributor, discuss how Republican messaging is previewing what’s to come and why Trump and his allies have been successful in the court of public opinion.

“One of the most persuasive tools that we have in our arsenal is repetition. Messages that people hear over and over, irrespective of their actual content, are rated to be more credible,” says Shenker-Osorio. “Familiarity gives our brains what we call cognitive ease, they give us what's called the illusory truth effect that if you've heard something over and over, like if you've heard government is wasteful, government is wasteful, government is wasteful … then the next time that you hear it, you're like, oh, yeah, that sort of seems true.”

Bery believes the way to fight back is by first changing our language. “Republicans are very good at trapping our country and our society with their language. You take something like the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, simply to repeat that phrase is to be trapped by its false logic and by the fraudulent claims of its master, the billionaire Elon Musk,” he says. “We need to use different language entirely. This is an attempt to steal from the American people and hand a fat check to Elon Musk and all the billionaires who stood on stage with Donald Trump during his inauguration. That's what this is.”

And while the speed of change and upheaval seems dire, both Shenker-Osorio and Bery remain optimistic. 

Shenker-Osorio thinks Americans who disagree with the Trump administration’s actions should step up in this moment. “The opportunity, if we were to seize it, is a recognition that the only thing that has actually toppled autocracy, I would argue both in the U. S. past and also, most certainly, in other countries, is civil resistance. It is a sustained, unrelenting group of people showing, not telling, being out in the world, demonstrating their resistance, their refusal, and their ridicule,” she says. “The future is still made of the decisions that we take together. That is what makes the whole thing crumble. And the possibility, not the inevitability, but the possibility of a very different kind of governing regime.”

To hear more of the conversation, check out The Intercept Briefing wherever you get your podcasts.

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