The people’s protests against Trump’s failing administration are not getting the coverage of the TEA Party. They are everywhere, nonetheless.
Protests, though lightly covered, are on.
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Summary
The host critiques how former President Donald Trump squandered a relatively strong economic foundation inherited from the Biden administration by attempting to enact policies that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. The video also highlights how progressive voices and grassroots movements are mobilizing across the country despite being largely ignored by mainstream media. It emphasizes the importance of civic engagement and media literacy in resisting political and economic injustice.
Key Bullets:
- Trump inherited a stable economy with potential for equitable growth but is implementing regressive tax policies that worsened wealth inequality.
- Progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actively organize nationwide to fight for working-class interests.
- Mainstream media largely ignores or downplays the scale and significance of progressive protests and grassroots actions.
- Past experiences with movements like the Tea Party illustrate how media coverage distorts public perception and marginalizes authentic activism.
- Americans are urged to stay informed, share progressive messages, and support alternative media to challenge the corporate media narrative.
The transcript underscores a familiar truth for progressives: Corporate media and neoliberal elites fear the power of a mobilized, informed public. While Trump enriched the billionaire class, working Americans are rising in towns, cities, and rural communities—demanding healthcare, justice, and economic dignity. The movement is growing, even if the cameras aren’t watching.
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In the years preceding Donald Trump’s first presidency, America’s economic landscape—while deeply flawed regarding equity and distribution—was grounded in steady fundamentals. The Obama administration had pulled the country out of the 2008 financial crisis through coordinated stimulus efforts, auto industry bailouts, and landmark legislation like the Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to rein in Wall Street excesses. The result was a slowly recovering job market, steady GDP growth, and a plummeting unemployment rate. This was the economy handed to Donald Trump: a vehicle in motion, not perfect, but functional, with ample room to steer toward greater shared prosperity.
Donald Trump handed Biden a destroyed economic system and a poor handling of the pandemic. Once again, the Democratic President, Joe Biden, repaired it and handed Biden an economy the Wall Street Journal praised. To be clear, Biden’s economy still had systemic issues that did not sufficiently tackle wealth and income inequality.
Rather than making course corrections aimed at increasing equity—such as raising taxes on the wealthy, investing in public services, or enforcing regulations on corporate behavior—Trump dismantled the guardrails. His administration is in the process of slashing corporate tax rates, gutting environmental and financial regulations, and has filled his cabinet with billionaires and lobbyists hostile to the very departments they oversaw. Despite his bluster about being a working-class champion, Trump is governing as an oligarchic autocrat, steering wealth and power even more aggressively to the top.
Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was marketed as a boon for the middle class, but it overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest Americans and large corporations. According to the Tax Policy Center, by 2027, over 80% of the tax benefits will accrue to the top 1%. The law did little to stimulate wages or jobs in any lasting way. The promised wage increases never materialized for most workers. Instead, corporations used the windfall to execute stock buybacks, artificially inflating share prices to reward executives and shareholders.
Yet this structural sabotage did not receive the scrutiny it deserved. Mainstream media often parroted Trump’s framing of the economy—pointing to stock market gains and low unemployment rates without probing deeper into wage stagnation, precarious employment, or the erosion of social safety nets. This myopic focus on surface-level indicators masked the underlying rot Trump was injecting into the system.
As the host rightly notes, the American people have not remained passive in the face of these injustices. Progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have crisscrossed the country, organizing and galvanizing a broad, multiracial working-class coalition. These leaders articulate the frustration and the hope that a more just economy is possible—one rooted in Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, student debt cancellation, and a living wage.
Unfortunately, their message is often muted or ignored by corporate media. The same networks that gave wall-to-wall coverage to the Tea Party’s fringe theatrics in 2009 now turn a blind eye to organic, people-powered progressive protests across the country. When hundreds of people recently gathered in the Sugar Land, Texas area, to hear from Tim Walz and Beto O’Rourke, it should be national news. When working Americans demonstrate for Medicare, Social Security, paid leave, and labor rights, their stories should dominate headlines. Instead, the coverage is scarce, sporadic, or relegated to a footnote.
This erasure is not accidental. Corporate media—dominated by a handful of conglomerates like Comcast (MSNBC), Disney (ABC), and Paramount Global (CBS)—have little incentive to amplify messages that threaten the status quo from which they profit. As Robert McChesney and John Nichols have documented, the corporate press often plays the gatekeeper role, defining what is politically acceptable and silencing transformative movements that challenge oligarchic control.
But the people persist. From the labor strikes at Amazon and Starbucks to mutual aid networks formed during the pandemic, Americans organize outside traditional media and political institutions. Independent media outlets, YouTube channels, podcasts, and grassroots newsletters are now critical platforms for spreading the progressive message. These decentralized efforts may lack the polish of corporate TV, but they possess something more valuable: authenticity and democratic accountability.
The progressive movement understands that political engagement is not a one-time event but a daily struggle. The protests may be underreported, but they are real, growing, and winning hearts and minds. The challenge is to break through the noise and reach those who feel alone, powerless, or disillusioned. As the host implores, Americans must educate themselves and each other. They must see that their neighbors are fighting for a better world and join that struggle.
In the end, history will remember that while Trump squandered a stable economy for the benefit of billionaires, ordinary Americans rose—not just to resist but to rebuild. The task is to keep organizing, speaking out, engaging in protests, and demanding a society where prosperity is shared and democracy belongs to the many, not the few.
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