Sen. Ron Johnson via official Facebook page

Back during President Donald Trump’s first administration, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was known as Trump’s most reliable ally in the U.S. Senate. He led investigations into Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton and alleged irregularities in the 2020 election that Trump lost. A proponent of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines and climate science, Johnson is not one of those Republicans who had to overcome principle to get in line behind Trump. 

He is completely at ease with the new administration — including the pardons of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, battered police officers and sought to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence. The blanket pardon for the rioters, including those convicted of violent crimes, was “maybe a little more sweeping than I wanted to see,” he averred during a Politico breakfast this week. But, overall, Johnson said, the Jan. 6 defendants were victims of a “grotesque miscarriage of justice.” So Trump was right to pardon them.

If ever Johnson struggles to go along with Trump’s more out-there ideas, like slapping huge tariffs on imports that could devastate Wisconsin businesses and farms, he just figures he must not truly, deeply understand their wisdom. 

“When I don’t necessarily agree with him, I always ask myself, what am I not seeing here?” he told Politico’s Zach Warmbrodt. Like any good enabler, Johnson figures Trump must have some extra-tricky reason for doing harm that actually makes what he’s doing good. 

That kind of thinking will come in handy during the next four years. It could prove particularly useful to Trump as he tries to hold together supporters drawn to his promises to lift up the working class — the “forgotten men and women of America” — and tech billionaires including Elon Musk who want to liquidate the safety net, drive down wages and establish a permanent American oligarchy.

Johnson embraces white grievance and the racist, right-wing populist “replacement theory”— suggesting Democrats want more immigrants to cross the southern border and come to the U.S. to “change the makeup of the electorate” — but he is also fully, cheerfully on board with oligarchy. 

Nothing suits Johnson better than the Trump administration’s plan to cut taxes for the very rich and slash entitlements to pay for it.

This was the gist of his appearance at the Politico breakfast this week, where he was introduced as someone who will have “a big role” in tax battle, having played “a very important role” in Trump’s 2017 tax cut. 

Johnson basked in the glow, recalling how he held up the whole 2017 law until he managed to shoehorn in a big tax cut for “pass-through corporations” Johnson confirmed that he personally benefited from the change in the tax code that he pushed through in 2017. He cast the deciding vote for Trump’s tax code rewrite giving corporations tax cuts worth $1.4 billion — but only after he arm-twisted Trump and Congress into including special benefits for so-called “pass-through” corporations — companies like his own PACUR plastics firm — whose profits are distributed to their owners. A few months later, Johnson began the process of selling his company, reaping the benefits of the tax law change, which increased the value of pass-through companies and made him more money on the sale.

According to Politifact, “Analyses from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the National Bureau of Economic Research have found that ultra-wealthy Americans have received billions in tax savings stemming from that deduction, while those earning less have gotten less of a break.”  The news organization cites one study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found the top 1% of Americans received nearly 60% of the tax savings created by the provision, with most of that amount going to the top 0.1%.

“I made sure all the passthroughs got a tax cut, that was my contribution,” Johnson said. 

“Whatever we do, we need to make it permanent,” Johnson said of the individual income and estate tax provisions of the 2017 Trump tax law. That law was heavily skewed to the rich. Households with incomes in the top 1% will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60%, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Thanks to the law, revenue as a share of GDP has fallen from about 19.5% in the Bush years to just 16.3% in the years immediately following the Trump tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That leaves commitments to Social Security and health care benefits for retirees in jeopardy, the Center concludes.

Nor did the tax cut yield the big benefits Trump projected. ​​New research shows that workers who earned less than about $114,000 on average in 2016 saw “no change in earnings” from the corporate tax rate cut, while top executive salaries increased sharply, the Center reports. “Similarly, rigorous research concluded that the tax law’s 20% pass-through deduction, which was skewed in favor of wealthy business owners, has largely failed to trickle down to workers in those companies who aren’t owners.”

Yet making those tax cuts permanent is among the “top priorities” for Congress and the new administration, Johnson said. His biggest contribution to the next tax debate will be his push to rewrite the tax code and “keep it simple,” and cut spending to pay for more cuts. 

“We have to return spending levels to some reasonable pre-pandemic levels,” he told the audience at the Politico breakfast. Building Trump’s border wall and keeping low taxes that benefit the very rich are the top two priorities for government, Johnson said.

Everyone would be able to see the wisdom of that program, as long you “keep it simple,” he added. The formula he laid out was “eliminate expenditures” and then you can dramatically cut rates. 

He wants to “free corporations from all this complexity in the tax code,” he said, adding he favors “a corporate tax rate of zero.”

Health care and Social Security, though? Not so much.“Stop trying to socially and economically engineer through the tax system,” Johnson advised. 

Let the rich keep their money. Slash the safety net. It’s simple. 

A sign in Madison, Wisconsin touting a municipal well project funding by President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

In the last days of the Biden administration, just before Trump’s triumphant return and swearing-in on the site of the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, I happened across a sign touting federal investment in an infrastructure project on Madison’s east side. 

Next to a strip mall, set back from the road and barely visible from busy East Washington Avenue, the sign touted PFAS treatment and upgrades to a municipal well. In large type it declared: “Project Funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

Too little, too late, I thought. The sign, practically hidden on a scruffy corner where few eyes can see it, seemed like a metaphor for the Biden administration’s failed effort to take credit for all the good it did. Through federal investments it paved roads, repaired bridges, shored up the economy and set us on a path to recovery from a global pandemic. By the end of 2024, wages, job growth, employment, even consumer prices that had spiked worldwide after COVID hit, apparently driving voters in this country to elect Trump, are all in good shape. In the third quarter, real GDP hit its highest level of 2024 at 3.1%. Consumer spending was up. Unemployment was 4% nationally and 2.9% in Wisconsin. And everywhere across Wisconsin, federal investments have boosted the economy and improved lives.

As Erik Gunn reports, the Biden administration touted  $9.2 billion in federal infrastructure investments in our state, including $1 billion for desperately needed repairs to the Blatnik Bridge connecting Superior to Duluth, Minnesota. There were also hundreds of smaller projects like PFAS remediation in that municipal well on Madison’s east side, which was shut down in 2019 and will be operational again by the summer. 

Because of the Biden administration’s efforts, about 300,000 Wisconsin Medicare recipients are saving an average of $475 per year in prescription drug costs, which were capped under the Inflation Reduction Act. And the Department of Education projects that 62,000 Wisconsinites have had over $2.4 billion in student debt canceled thanks to Biden’s student debt relief efforts.

These are just a few of the highlights in a long list of Biden administration accomplishments put out by the Democratic National Committee as the former president bade farewell. 

Wisconsin lost 83,500 jobs during Trump’s first term. During Biden’s four years in office, it added 186,800 jobs, as we bounced back from the pandemic. Federal pandemic relief funds allowed Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers to shore up schools, infrastructure, child care and health care in our state, even as Republican legislative leaders tenaciously blocked every effort to use the state’s historic multibillion-dollar surplus to fund any of those priorities. 

Now Biden is gone and Trump’s MAGA Republican party has taken over every branch of the federal government. Here in Wisconsin, as across the country, MAGA loyalists are repeating Trump’s counterfactual talking points about how terrible Biden was for the economy and how government must be cut back in order to unleash a new era of American prosperity.

The battle between those who want to harness the power of government to help people and those who would rather drown it in the bathtub has been going on for decades. But the contrast between those ideologies has grown sharper. It’s more important now than ever to recognize what’s at stake.

At the start of the new legislative session, Wisconsin Republicans pledged to ignore Evers’ budget requests and focus exclusively on giving away the state surplus in the form of tax cuts.

“The money that we set aside for that tax cut will not be spent by this Legislature on other wants,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared, “no matter how many special interests or tax-and-spend politicians apply pressure to get it out of the treasury’s hands.” 

“More than $4 billion of taxpayer money is sitting in a bank account here in Madison, while rising prices impact the families who sent us here to serve them,” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu concurred. “[Evers] wants to use that money to grow the size of government and send Wisconsin backwards.” 

Even a state effort to curb school shootings, through Evers’ office of violence prevention, which he announced after the Abundant Life school shooting in Madison, came in for scathing cynicism from Republican legislative leaders. 

“It takes a bureaucrat to think that another government agency is actually going to be effective,” Vos spat, summing up the effort as “a whole bunch of touchy-feely bureaucrats that are going to go around wasting time, wasting money.”

At the federal level, Republicans are singing the same discordant tune.

Scott Bessent, the hedge fund manager Trump nominated to lead the U.S Treasury Department, said during his confirmation hearing that extending Trump’s 2017 tax cut which disproportionately benefited the very wealthy is “the single most important economic issue of the day.”

“If we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity,” Bessent said. When Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock pressed Bessent on whether people who make more than $10 million per year really need a tax cut, Bessent replied, “There is no income level that I don’t think we should continue the [tax cut] as it was.” On the flip side, he endorsed deep cuts to federal spending that benefits less fortunate Americans. “We do not have a revenue problem in the United States of America; we have a spending problem,” Bessent said. 

The real economic calamity is shaping up as the incoming Trump administration eyes deep cuts to Medicaid and other cuts that will fall most heavily on poor families. For good measure, Bessent also said he opposes raising the federal minimum wage above $7.25 an hour.

Ever since Ronald Reagan championed trickle-down economics in the 1980s, Republicans have promised that cutting taxes on the wealthy and reducing the size of government will benefit most Americans. But it hasn’t worked out that way. “Cutting taxes for the rich over the past 40-plus years has had a huge impact, leaving less money for public programs that benefit millions of Americans while enriching a tiny percentage of the population,” the Center for Public Integrity reports. Income inequality skyrocketed: “As more money flowed upward, the gap in accumulated wealth widened,” the Center reports. “In 2019, the top 10% of Americans had three times the wealth of everyone else in the country combined.”

It comes down to this: Do you believe it’s better for rich people to get tax cuts and for all of us to pay more to meet basic needs — getting only the health care, education, infrastructure – even firefighting — we can afford to pay for out of pocket? Or do you think we can, as a society, create a world where there is a baseline level of wellbeing, decent education, food, shelter and security for all? 

Republicans have been arguing for a long time that government is broken, should be “drowned in the bathtub” — that no one should be required to chip in to support things like public schools or provide decent housing and health care and education to all, including children born into families that can’t afford all these things on their own.

Now we face an aggressive push by the incoming Trump administration and the Wisconsin Leislature’s majority to destroy programs that benefit poor kids, poor families and society as a whole

After years and years of underfunding Wisconsin’s public schools and our once-great university system, Republican  legislators now say there’s no point throwing good money after bad, using the struggles of an underfunded system as an excuse for further cuts.

If we can’t remember what it’s like to have a functional society, it’s easy to become cynical and give up on the idea of a healthy public sphere. 

Now, as we enter the era of Trump 2.0, it’s important to remember what we had, what we lost, and what we need to fight like hell to hang on to.