Why Sucker Is the Only Honest Word in Politics

## Do Not Call Him a Sucker

On September 3, 2020, The Atlantic reported that Donald Trump, during a 2018 visit to France, declined to attend a ceremony at the Aisne Marne American Cemetery and referred to the Marines buried there as "losers" and "suckers." The quote came from four anonymous sources. Trump denied it. John Kelly, his former chief of staff, later confirmed it on the record in October 2023, telling CNN the account matched what he had heard firsthand. Jeffrey Goldberg, the reporter who published the original story, has been called an "idiot" by Trump and his outlet a "failing political rag." The denials have grown louder as the confirmations have accumulated.

The interesting question is not whether Trump said it. Kelly, a retired four star Marine general who buried his own son in Arlington, has no plausible motive to invent the quote. The interesting question is why the word "sucker" hits the nerve it does.

A sucker, in the American vernacular, is someone who pays and receives nothing. The sucker is the mark at the card table, the customer who bought the extended warranty, the soldier who gave a leg for a war the contractors profited from. To call a dead Marine a sucker is to say the transaction was bad. The Marine paid in blood; the country received the benefit; the ratio did not favor the Marine. That is the logic of the insult, and it is the logic Trump applies, consistently and publicly, to every transaction he observes. NATO allies are suckers or freeloaders depending on which side of the ledger Trump imagines them on. Trade partners are suckers. Charitable donors are suckers. Anyone who pays into a system without extracting more than they put in is, in the Trump taxonomy, a sucker.

This is not a moral framework. It is a bookkeeping framework. And it explains more of American politics than the moral frameworks do.

Consider the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The corporate rate dropped from 35 percent to 21 percent. The Congressional Budget Office scored the bill at a cost of roughly 1.9 trillion dollars over ten years. The promised wage increases, the four thousand dollars per household that Kevin Hassett projected, did not arrive. A 2019 Congressional Research Service report found that the law produced "a relatively small (if any) first year effect on the economy" and that the effect on wages was "smaller than advertised." Share buybacks, by contrast, hit a record 806 billion dollars in 2018. The transfer ratio is visible. For every dollar of foregone federal revenue, a predictable share moved to shareholders, a smaller share moved to capital investment, and a rounding error moved to worker compensation. The people who were told they were the beneficiaries were, in the Trump vernacular, suckers.

Consider the Paycheck Protection Program. Congress authorized roughly 800 billion dollars in forgivable loans during 2020 and 2021. A National Bureau of Economic Research study by David Autor and colleagues, published in 2022, estimated that only 23 to 34 percent of PPP dollars reached workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs. The remainder, something between 510 and 615 billion dollars, flowed to business owners, shareholders, and creditors. Roughly three quarters of the program's benefit accrued to the top 20 percent of the income distribution. The program was sold as worker relief. The receipts describe something else. Taxpayers funded it. Small business owners and their lenders captured most of it. The workers the program was named for received about a third of the nominal amount. Theft by another name does not require a thief in a mask. It requires only a label that describes the opposite of what the transaction does.

Consider the Medicare Advantage program. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a nonpartisan congressional body, estimated in its March 2024 report that Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by 83 billion dollars in 2024 relative to what traditional Medicare would have spent on the same patients. The overpayment comes from two sources. Favorable selection, in which healthier seniors enroll in Advantage plans, and upcoding, in which insurers document more diagnoses than the patient's actual treatment reflects. UnitedHealth, Humana, and CVS Health collect the bulk of the transfer. The patients pay through Medicare Part B premiums, which are set to cover a fixed share of total program costs and therefore rise when the overpayments rise. Every senior on traditional Medicare pays a higher premium so that shareholders of three insurers can book higher earnings. The transfer ratio is not hidden. It is published annually by MedPAC, in tables, with footnotes.

Each of these programs was defended, at the time of its passage and since, as help for ordinary people. Each produced a documented transfer from a diffuse group, taxpayers, premium payers, future retirees, to a concentrated group, shareholders and executives of specific firms. The diffuse group was told the transaction benefited them. The receipts say otherwise.

Which returns the question to Trump and the cemetery.

The rhetorical power of "sucker" is that it names the asymmetry the political class prefers to leave unnamed. When Trump calls a dead Marine a sucker, the moral offense is plain, and the press covers the moral offense. When Trump calls a NATO ally a freeloader, the factual offense is plain, because the United States benefits from NATO in ways that do not appear on a dues paying chart, and the press covers the factual offense. What neither treatment captures is the consistency. Trump is not applying the sucker label randomly. He is applying it to every party in every transaction where, in his view, the visible payment exceeds the visible return. He does not adjust for intangible benefits. He does not adjust for deterrence, alliance, civic obligation, or the posthumous honor of the dead. He reads the ledger as a ledger.

The discomfort this produces is not, primarily, that Trump reads ledgers badly. The discomfort is that his ledger reading exposes how many American political arrangements depend on participants not reading the ledger at all. The Marine who enlists in 2003 and dies in Fallujah in 2004 is honored as a hero. The Halliburton subcontractor who billed the Pentagon three times the market rate for the same period is honored as a job creator. Both transactions settled. Only one of the parties was in a position to assess the ratio before signing.

The press can call Trump an idiot. The quote will survive. It will survive because the word he used is the word the accounting supports, even when the accounting describes the programs his own party passed, the insurers his own donors own, and the wars his own predecessors started. The country has spent eighty years building fiscal and military arrangements that rely on the participants at the bottom of the ledger treating their position as honor rather than arithmetic. Trump, whatever else he is, is a man who looks at the arithmetic first.

That is why the insult lands. That is why it will keep landing. And that is why the response, from the press and the political class, is to demand that he stop saying the word rather than to examine the ratio the word describes.

Rebuttals welcome.