Only the Poor Will Help: What Trump’s Tariffs, Lotteries, and Layoffs Are Really Hiding

From Ma Joad to MAGA, the burden of government has never been shared, it’s been shifted.

Ma Joad said it best: “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need, go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help.” In The Grapes of Wrath, this wasn’t sentiment, it was survival. John Steinbeck didn’t romanticize poverty; he revealed its moral clarity. He understood that in a country structured to protect wealth and punish hardship, solidarity among the struggling is the only kind that matters. And that truth still burns today, even as the slogans and sales pitches evolve. In Donald Trump’s America, the government isn't so much small as it is selectively cruel, and the burden of that cruelty, once again, is carried by the people Ma Joad would recognize.

Trump's 2025 tariffs are a case in point. Marketed as nationalist bravado, "We're making China pay!" they are, in reality, backdoor taxes on working Americans. Economist Richard Wolff cuts through the noise: tariffs are taxes. And they're paid not by China, but by the very people buying groceries, clothes, and hardware on tight budgets. Retailers pass the cost down the chain, and the person at the end is the one who can least afford to absorb the blow. It's regressive policy wrapped in a flag.