Americans' Lives Under the Epstein Class

This isn’t a government for the people—it’s a protection racket for the Epstein class.

This past year under †r*mp’s second term has felt unbearable because it has been a year of fear, lawlessness, and open contempt for our rights. In twelve months, the †r*mp regime has turned 'immigration enforcement' into a domestic war zone, gutted basic civil liberties, and used surveillance and racist targeting to make whole communities feel like enemies of the state. It is not just that policies are cruel. It is that the government is behaving like it no longer recognizes any limits on what it can do to us. One of the clearest examples is what happened in Minnesota under Operation Metro Surge. †r*mp sent thousands of IÇE and Børdęr Påtrøl agents into a single state, turning neighborhoods and even airports into militarized zones. Agents set up raids and checkpoints that didn’t just target undocumented people at the border. They went after workers, families, and longtime residents inside the country, including people with legal status. In the chaos of this “surge,” federal officers killed U.S. citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, then tried to smear them as threats while video and eyewitness accounts showed agents escalating and opening fire. When the government is willing to kill its own citizens in the name of 'immigration enforcement', it is telling the rest of us that none of us are safe. (Epstein class, we see you.) These operations are not isolated mistakes; they are part of a broader pattern of attacks on the Constitution. Over the last year, the †r*mp regime has turned “law and order” into a weapon against the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Protesters and legal observers have been pepper sprayed, shoved, arrested, or put on secret lists simply for filming IÇE or speaking out at demonstrations. People are being detained and deported through rushed, assembly-line proceedings that mock the idea of due process. Local officials who try to protect residents, from refusing unconstitutional detainers to blocking abusive raids, face federal retaliation. On paper, our rights still exist. In practice, they are being hollowed out every time the government punishes someone for using them. None of this would be possible at this scale without an expanding surveillance dragnet. Over the last year, †r*mp’s allies have pushed a Prøjeç† 2025 agenda that treats constant monitoring of the public as normal. Under this vision, data systems quietly track who attends protests, who lives in certain buildings or neighborhoods, whose license plates appear near an IÇE raid, and whose phone gets picked up at a demonstration. People who film agents or join a march can find themselves labeled “domestic terrorists” or “extremists” in hidden databases they will never see or have a chance to challenge. This is NOT about safety. It is about building the machinery to crush dissent and to make people too afraid to stand up, because they know the government is watching. Race and power sit at the center of how this year has played out. The heaviest blows are landing on immigrants, Black and brown communities, Muslim communities, and anyone the regime sees as politically disloyal. Operation Me†ro Sůrgę concentrated the worst raids and shootings in Somali, Black, and Latino neighborhoods, sending a clear message about whose lives are treated as disposable. Nationally, mass deportations, detention, and raids have torn apart families and ripped people from workplaces, churches, and schools, while the regime claims it is defending “real Americans.” When a government concentrates violence, surveillance, and constitutional violations on specific racial and political groups, it is practicing authoritarian rule, no matter how often it wraps itself in the flag. That is why this year has felt so terrible: not just because individual tragedies and abuses keep piling up, but because together they show a government acting as if the rules no longer apply to it at all. In just one year, †r*mp’s regime has normalized mass raids and killings by federal officers, shredded civil rights protections, and built out a surveillance state aimed at protesters and targeted communities. We are not watching a slow slide toward something worse in the future. We are already living under a system where the Constitution is treated as optional, where our rights are conditional on our obedience, and where whole groups of people are treated as enemies. The only honest question left is how we respond: whether we accept this as the new normal, or whether we organize, speak, and resist in whatever ways we safely can, before another year passes and even less of our freedom is left. The economy over the past year has been nothing short of brutal for ordinary people. Prices are still sky‑high, wages haven’t caught up, interest rates are punishing, and the †r*mp regime has made every one of those pressures worse for working and poor Americans, all while the wealthy and big corporations sit comfortably on the cushions he laid out for them. †rmp’s Bold Billionaire’s TaxBreak Bill is not some neutral “reform.” It is a love letter to billionaires and corporate shareholders paid for with the lives and futures of the middle and lower classes. The Damning Ugly Billionaire’s Bill shovels roughly $1 trillion in new tax cuts to the richest 1% over ten years, through slashed top income tax rates, deeper corporate tax breaks, and an even fatter estate tax giveaway. It locks in and expands the same †r*mp‑era schemes that already tilted the system toward the rich: permanently lower top brackets, special carve‑outs for pass‑through business owners, and expanded loopholes for capital gains and large estates. (Epstein class, we hear you.) Civil rights and policy groups are clear about what this means: more than $4.5 trillion in tax breaks, overwhelmingly for billionaires and large corporations, paid for with over $1 trillion in cuts to the basics—healthcare, food assistance, education, and student‑loan relief—that ordinary people actually need to stay afloat. In plain language: †r*mp’s “beautiful” bill is upward looting. It funnels wealth to the top and backfills the hole by stripping resources from everyone else.

The regime insists this is “the largest middle‑ and working‑class tax cut in U.S. history.” That is a lie dressed up in slogans. Independent analyses of †r*mp‑style tax schemes show that over time, the gains flow overwhelmingly to the rich. Any middle‑class relief is small, temporary, and quickly erased by higher prices, higher fees, and future cuts to public programs. By the later years, the benefits of these cuts go almost entirely to high‑income households, while the middle class is left with the fallout: bigger deficits used as an excuse to slash services, pressure for new taxes and fees, and the slow erosion of everything from schools to transit to healthcare. Prøjęç† 2025’s tax blueprint, which this bill hugs closely, is built on the same core idea: slash taxes on capital and corporations, simplify the rate structure in a way that sounds neutral, and then quietly shift the burden onto middle‑income people and consumption. Ordinary people spend most of their income on basics; that means they carry more of the load while the rich pay less and less on their hoarded wealth. Whatever tiny tax break some working families see at the start is wiped out over time by reduced services, higher out‑of‑pocket costs, and a rigged system that deepens inequality by design. TRICKLE‑DOWN ECONOMICS DO NOT BENEFIT MOST AMERICANS. They never have. Under this regime, they are just the branding on a pipeline that sucks money and power upward and leaves everyone else scrambling for what’s left. Another horrific outcome of †r*mp’s presidency is his deliberate sabotage of climate and environmental protections, which will damage people’s health and safety for years after he leaves office. His regime has treated fossil fuel profits as more important ($$$) than clean air, safe water, or a livable climate, especially for communities that already carry the heaviest pollution burdens. In his second term, †r*mp’s team has moved to tear down rules that limit greenhouse gas pollution from cars, trucks, power plants, and oil and gas operations, undoing standards that were supposed to cut emissions and protect public health. They have tried to rip out the legal foundation for treating climate pollution as dangerous at all, which would make it much harder for any future administration to set serious limits. At the same time, he has pushed “energy dominance” orders that fast‑track drilling, pipelines, and mining while weakening environmental review, so companies can bulldoze projects through without fully accounting for the damage to air, water, and local communities. (Epstein class, we feel you.) These choices are not abstract. When the government lets more pollution into the air, people breathe it into their lungs. Asthma attacks, heart disease, and heat deaths rise first in poor and working‑class neighborhoods, in Black, brown, and Indigenous communities, and in places already living downwind of highways, refineries, and power plants. Storms get stronger, heat waves get deadlier, and wildfires get worse, but the regime shrugs off the science and calls it a win for business. That is another way this presidency has made the last year so terrible: by gambling with the climate and our futures, all to deliver short‑term gains to the very corporations and billionaires who are already doing just fine. Under this regime, healthcare has become just one more way to sort people into “deserving” and disposable. Prices are climbing, coverage is shrinking, and the very idea of healthcare as a basic human right is being replaced with a cruel test: are you rich enough, employed enough, “American” enough, straight and cis enough to be allowed to see a doctor without going broke. The same “Bold Billionaire’s” agenda that showered the richest 1% with tax cuts is being paid for in part by gutting Medicaid and putting landmines in the path of anyone who dares to need help. Medicaid is no longer treated as a straightforward guarantee for low‑income people; it’s turned into a punishment system. The regime wraps this in buzzwords like “work requirements” and “personal responsibility,” but we already know what that looks like on the ground: people losing coverage because a form was late, because a job schedule changed, because they are caring for a sick parent or a child and can’t hit some arbitrary 80‑hour quota. Those aren’t abstractions. That is insulin gone, chemo gone, mental‑health meds gone, all so Donold †r*mp can call it “reform.” At the same time, they are quietly sabotaging what’s left of the Affordable Care Act and employer coverage while pretending to “fix” it. They undo outreach and enrollment support, let enhanced subsidies die off, and then act shocked when people drop coverage they can no longer afford. Families with employer insurance are pushed into higher deductibles, higher co‑pays, and narrower networks, so that having a card in your wallet doesn’t mean you can actually afford to use it. The choice for millions becomes brutally simple: pay rent or pay premiums, refill your kid’s inhaler or keep the lights on.

And as always with this regime, the cruelty is targeted. Lawfully present immigrants and mixed‑status families are being carved out of Medicaid, CHIP, and marketplace help piece by piece. Programs that kept clinics open and basic care available are relabeled as “benefits” that make you a problem if you dare to use them. The message is clear: if you are an immigrant, if your family has the wrong papers, your health is a negotiable luxury, not something this government feels obligated to protect. The same goes for queer and trans people, especially youth. Gender‑affirming care is being demonized, yanked from coverage, and driven out of reach, not because the science changed, but because it scores points with a base that wants state‑sanctioned cruelty.

Public health itself is under assault. They meddle with vaccine policy, undermine the experts who kept immunization grounded in evidence, and make outbreaks more likely—all while screaming about “freedom” as kids lose access to the basic shots that keep them alive. They cut and hollow out the very systems we need for the next pandemic, the next wildfire smoke season, the next heat wave, and then insist it’s just “waste” trimmed from the budget.

So when we talk about how terrible this year has been, we’re not just talking about premiums going up or one more byzantine rule in the fine print. We are talking about a healthcare system being deliberately reshaped into a loyalty test and a sorting machine: one that rewards the rich and the politically favored, and lets everyone else get sicker, poorer, and more afraid.

This year has been unbearable because every part of life has been pushed closer to the edge at the same time. We’ve watched a regime unleash IÇE and guns on our own neighbors, kill citizens in the name of “enforcement,” and treat the Constitution like a suggestion. We’ve watched the cost of surviving explode while †r*mp shovels money upward through “beautiful” billionaire bills and lies/calls it help for the working class. We’ve watched healthcare stripped down into a loyalty test, where the poor, immigrants, queer and trans people, and anyone who doesn’t fit the regime’s picture of “deserving” are pushed out of care altogether. And hanging over all of it is a burning climate and a poisoned future, because this government decided fossil fuel profits matter more than whether our lungs work or our kids have a livable planet.

This is why it feels so bad: not because of one headline or one scandal, but because every system that was supposed to protect us—law, economy, healthcare, environment—has been turned into a weapon pointed at the people.

Call it what it is: rule by the Epstein class, enforced with guns, debt, and fear.