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At any rate, “Demand a repeal” is strained and supine—it suggests that you’re either not planning on using your power to fight or you somehow still intend to attempt bipartisan collaboration once you gain back power. A clearer and more full-throated campaign message would be, “Not only will we repeal this bill, we will pass bills to undo the damage done to the government, we will fight to get the civil service rehired, and we will crush the corrupt thieves who stole your wealth and health care.” And they shouldn’t stop there. Democrats need to contend with what the One Big Beautiful law will do—and it’s not clear that Carville, at any rate, is prepared to do that. Yes, the law, as Carville suggests, filches wealth from the American people in a thousand different ways, but he fails to connect the all-important dots as to where that money is actually going. Beyond the usual, bog-standard creation of yet another taxpayer-funded slush-fund for oligarchs, Trump’s law is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to fund a domestic deportation army and construct a nationwide network of concentration camps. Phenomenal sums of money are already changing hands. The law allocates $8 billion to ICE to go on a massive hiring spree, for which the agency is offering $50,000 signing bonuses. This week, an eye-popping Bloomberg story reported that the Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics Company was awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build another detention facility in Texas. Prior to winning that contract, the firm had collected a mere $29 million in Defense Department contracts. And the fact that the company “doesn’t appear to have any experience with detention” was no impediment to its receiving this windfall.
