Reflections on Trump’s “Great Bill”
There is a strange stillness that settles over the country when the law becomes an instrument of displacement. It is not the criminal who is afraid, but the poor. Not guilt, but existence itself becomes a crime. And while headlines speak of billions - as if money were a living being - people lose their homes, their future, their right to exist. ihr Recht, zu existieren.
Donald Trump calls it a “great, beautiful bill.” But beauty, as we know, lies in the eye of the one who is not affected.
The architecture of this bill is cold, functional, brutal: 1 million migrants are to be deported each year. 100,000 people placed in detention camps. 20,000 new officers, equipped with uniforms, budgets, and a mandate to remove the unwanted from the nation’s field of vision. And to give this project a visible form, $46.5 billion are set aside for a new wall - 700 miles of concrete and metal that won’t protect the border, but numb the conscience.
Those seeking asylum must pay: $1,000 for an application that may never be read. Those wanting to protect a child must pay $3,500, plus $2,500 more if they miss a court hearing. Humanity comes at a price - and that price must be paid in cash
But this bill is not a one-way street of cruelty. It also rewards: the Pentagon will receive $150 billion - a surge as if humanity were at war with itself. $25 billion will flow into Trump’s “Golden Dome,” a missile defense shield for a world where no one is safe. $34 billion will fund new ships while schools close and drinking water turns to rust.
How absurd that in a world full of hunger, homelessness, and spiritual emptiness, we still believe security is a matter of ships and walls.
Students are also being hit - not with tanks, but with paragraphs. The education system is being restructured, less forgiving, less fair. Repayments will rise, forgiveness will be delayed. The poorest will pay more, and their debt will last longer. Hope will be stretched like a loan - and will die slowly over decades.
Even those who serve the state - its employees, its civil servants - are not spared. Their pensions are being cut. Not out of necessity, but out of principle. Because the new can only be celebrated when it dances on the grave of the old.
And while the bill dismantles the social fabric, it opens the earth: drilling, mining, logging - on public land, in nature reserves, in the Arctic. Nature is liquefied into royalties. The forest is no longer a habitat, but a line item on a balance sheet.
So what is this bill that calls itself “great”? It is not a law in the moral sense, but an instrument of hardening. It speaks the language of money, of exclusion, of concrete walls. It is not a vision - it is a transaction.
And yet - within each paragraph of this monstrous proposal lies a mirror. A mirror that reflects not only Trump, but all of us. Our numbness, our fatigue, our silence. For laws like this do not emerge in a vacuum - they grow in the drought of empathy.
“I am nothing. I will always be nothing. I can’t even want to be something.” But perhaps it is precisely in that poetic surrender that clarity begins. We are not forced to build walls. We can choose to build bridges - not of concrete, but of responsibility.
This bill will pass if we let it. It will happen because it is allowed to happen. And perhaps the most frightening thing about it is not its brutality - but our willingness to go on living as if nothing had happened.
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