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🏛️ The Big Beautiful Dissonance

By Baron Ursin de Paresse

In a sign of the times, it feels like almost a decade ago that the president and his cult celebrated the passage of the big beautiful bill. The news cycle has largely moved on, turning to the latest click-generating story instead.

But this Frankenstein’s Monster of a bill—all 800-plus pages of it—has lingered in my mind because it embodies the successful fracturing of reality perpetrated by the powers that be.

Let’s focus on just one element of the bill—which apparently only passed because 5 Republican no-votes were swayed by Trump merch and a photo with the orange ghoul—the drastic changes to Medicaid, including additional work requirements for eligibility, which will leave millions without healthcare.

If you listen to the MAGA marketing machine, though, the Medicaid cuts are simply an extension of DOGE, an elimination of fraud, waste, and abuse. House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed “able-bodied” young men were taking advantage of the program at alarming rates.

“They're draining resources from people who actually do [need it]," Johnson added. "So if you clean that up... you save a lot of money and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be at work instead of playing video games all day."

In reality, according to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and others, the most common types of Medicaid fraud are committed by healthcare providers rather than neckbearded nerds turned boogiemen. One of the most common types of provider fraud is a practice called upcoding, where providers bill for a more expensive service than was actually provided to a patient.

There wasn’t a whisper about cracking down on providers in this effort to combat fraud, abuse, and waste. Which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact the healthcare industry contributes tens of millions of dollars to Congress each year.

On top of the fact that Medicaid abuse by patients is virtually non-existent, it has been proven time and time again that work requirements attached to social safety net-type services, such as health care and food stamps, don’t work as intended. All these requirements have proven to do—often in red states that have tried implementing them—is increase government spending and prevent folks who need assistance from receiving it because they’re drowning in bureaucracy.

Another fun, reality warping, talking point of this particular portion of Triple B is the claim that millions of undocumented immigrants will be kicked off of Medicaid as a result of the bill’s passage. The orange man himself even included it in one of his social media screeds:

Not only does it cut Taxes for ALL Americans, but it will kick millions of Illegal Aliens off of Medicaid to PROTECT it for those who are the ones in real need.

That factually inaccurate talking point was echoed quickly by one of the nightmare-fueling press secretaries, shortly after Trump’s message, who told the press that 1.4 million undocumented immigrants would lose Medicaid. The outrage-farming accounts on Twitter and elsewhere were even worse, with some saying 16 million immigrants were getting kicked off Medicaid.

Except, you guessed it, none of it is remotely true, and the mental gymnastics you need to go through to even get it close to reality are enough to put you in the emergency room.

Undocumented individuals do not qualify for comprehensive medical coverage under Medicaid. In limited cases, providers may be reimbursed with federal funds for providing emergency services to undocumented immigrants, but that aspect of the healthcare system wasn’t touched in the bill.

One of the great, foundational lies of America is that those lower than us on the socio-economic ladder are the cause of every issue facing the country.

We, as a society, have been trained to look down and sneer, rather than reach out a hand or raise a fist up toward the entrenched powers truly behind all of this.

That’s why messaging like Johnson’s, or the stereotype of the welfare queen and the undocumented immigrant getting free healthcare, is so effective.

It’s easier to look down at others. It’s easier to log onto Facebook or Twitter or Nextdoor and write angry screeds about how you’re “hard-earned tax dollars” are paying for someone else’s steak and lobster when you can barely afford eggs. 

It’s easier to balk at the concept of healthcare for all as communist propaganda that will take even more of your hard-earned dollars away.

It's easier to kick someone when they’re down on their knees than it is to fight looming giants with armies of lawyers and unlimited funds at their disposal.

That’s how those evildoers keep winning—they spoon-feed the masses an easy-to-understand and made-up version of reality with clear-cut villains. They keep the masses at each other’s throats while reaping the benefits and milking us all dry.

The masses, however, still have a semblance of power. There are still, albeit fleeting, mechanisms for changing things without bringing out the guillotines.

And friends, they’re scared shitless that we will wake up and realize it before they’ve finished sucking the last remaining marrow out of America.

Why else would these work requirements only go into effect on December 31, 2026? After all, one thing this administration and its MAGA cult has never been accused of is patience.

On a surely unrelated note, Congressional Midterm Elections take place on November 3, 2026.

—Baron