The GOP’s budget plan betrays the very same voters who put Trump in the White House

This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 26 episode of “Morning Joe.”

What Elon Musk is doing with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency is basically taking a claw hammer to find change in the couch. If DOGE’s real intention is to eliminate wasteful spending, they’re not doing it in an accurate or competent way. They’re not doing it by job classification or using any obvious empirical data — and they’re clearly not taking into account the impact these cuts will have on the American people. It’s just silly and performative.

House Republicans seem to be taking a cue from Musk, proposing some truly baffling budget cuts of their own. On Tuesday, the GOP-controlled House adopted a framework to fund Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, putting his “big, beautiful bill” one step closer to becoming reality. That budget resolution was adopted despite some moderate Republicans raising concerns over the scope of the cuts, particularly a directive for the committee that oversees Medicaid to slash $880 billion over the next decade and a proposal for $230 billion in cuts for the committee that funds food stamps. The budget plan also extends Trump’s 2017 tax breaks, which largely benefit billionaires.

That math is cruel when you consider who helped send Trump to the White House. Trump is the first Republican presidential candidate in decades to receive more support than a Democrat from Americans in the lowest income bracket, according to a Financial Times analysis of voter surveys. A majority of households earning less than $50,000 a year cast their vote for him in November.

So, bearing that in mind, you would expect Trump and his party, who now control both chambers of Congress and the White House, to prioritize some of the president’s campaign promises that would benefit these lower-income voters, like no tax on tips, Social Security and overtime. But that’s not the case. Instead, they’re focused on helping the wealthiest Americans and taking away from the poorest to do it. The billionaire class did not put Trump in office, but that is who he’s serving.

As you can imagine, the American people aren’t happy about that. Across the country, Republican lawmakers have already been greeted back at home with angry town hall crowds. But, I can tell you, things are only going to get worse for these lawmakers.

Once the party’s base starts to understand the impact of the cuts they’re proposing, I predict we’ll see a repeat of what happened when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Back then, a lot of my colleagues chose to hide from the public instead of addressing their concerns. But Republicans can’t hide forever.