WORKING families, the disabled and the elderly will lose access to healthcare. Food benefits are to be slashed, leaving millions of low-income families struggling to feed their children. A major crackdown on immigration and an escalation of deportations has already begun. Military spending will soar.

If you are confusing this with the latest policies of the Starmer government, that speaks to the heart of Labour’s betrayal of working people. Instead, this eerily similar death knell for a just and equitable society has been rung by President Donald Trump, leading the US ever closer to a dictatorship, a country ruled (not governed) by an autocrat and his cabal of lackeys and oligarchs. That makes Starmer’s cheap imitations all the more alarming.

With the passage last week of Trump’s $4.5 trillion One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a name both infantile and bombastic, at least 17 million Americans will lose access to Medicaid, a state system that provides healthcare to low-income families and the disabled. At least two thirds of seniors in care homes rely on Medicaid to cover their bills. Rural hospitals will close.

An estimated 11.8 million people will lose access to food stamps. Far fewer children will be eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches.

An obscene $150 billion goes to immigration enforcement, $75bn of it to United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), whose agents, masked and armed, are already carrying out a gangster-style snatch-and-grab operation reminiscent of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.

Defence spending gets a $150bn funding boost, on top of what was already budgeted, sending the total tab for the Pentagon above $1 trillion for the first time in its history. Veterans’ benefits will be cut.

The Bill also slashes funding for renewable energy, energy efficiency and incentives to buy electric cars while opening up federal land for oil and gas drilling. Coal will be given a comeback. The elimination of pollution reduction programmes will hit minority communities the hardest in areas that have disproportionately borne the heaviest burdens from industrial pollution.

Meanwhile, the top 1 per cent are looking at a $1trn tax cut.

Vermont Democrat Senator Peter Welch, who has served in the US Congress for 18 years, said it was “the worst piece of legislation that has come across my desk in all the years I’ve served in Congress.” The Bill, Welch said, was “all for the purpose of taking from the many to give to the billionaire few.”

The Act passed both the US Senate and then the House of Representatives after a few Republicans holdouts had their arms twisted behind closed doors by Trump himself. (What did he offer them? Free weekends at Mar-a-Lago?)

Trump duly signed the Bill on July 4 with his characteristic swagger. “America’s winning, winning, winning like never before,” Trump crowed, as celebratory fighter jets roared overhead. “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship, economically.”

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Trump buddy Jeff Bezos, called the Bill-signing Trump’s display of “patriotism,” even though “patria” clearly comes a distant last behind “profit” and “personal gain” in Trump’s playbook.

A few left Democrats, along with Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, have been outspokenly critical of the Bill. Senator Sanders called it “one of the greatest acts of thievery in the history of the United States, and one of the worst pieces of legislation passed in modern American history.”

In a speech in the House before the Bill passed, progressive New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Bill “a deal with the devil. It explodes our national debt. It militarises our entire economy and it strips away healthcare and basic dignity of the American people and for what? To give Elon Musk a tax break and billionaires the greedy taking of our nation. We cannot stand for it and we will not support it.”

After which all but two Republicans duly voted for the Bill. In the Senate, only three Republicans dissented, forcing Vice-President JD Vance to cast the tie-breaking vote in favour of the Bill.

Opposition has been all but silenced. The almost 200 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency who signed a “Declaration of Dissent” under the banner “Stand Up For Science” were immediately placed on administrative leave, effectively barred from the workplace pending an investigation.

The arrest and deportation of “undocumented” immigrants will now accelerate. Trump moved swiftly to set up a detention centre for 3,000 in the Florida Everglades, one of the country’s most expansive and precious ecosystems. Eight people have already been deported to war-torn South Sudan even though none came from the country. Others languish in notorious prisons in El Salvador and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Children have been snatched out of school and deported. Families are being ripped apart.

“Instead of reining in Ice’s abuses, Congress is throwing the agency billions more to terrorise our communities,” said Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

On the day Trump signed the Bill, the radical Massachusetts-based Celtic punk band, Dropkick Murphys, famous for raucous covers of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger songs, released their new single, Who’ll Stand With Us? The lyrics, accompanying a video showing working Americans being hooded and abducted, reminds us that, “Throughout centuries in every country, we faced the wrath and felt the pain of the tyrant’s sword and the henchman’s boot for another rich man’s gain.”

It goes on: “Through crime and crusade our labour it’s been stolen. We’ve been robbed of our freedom, we’ve been held down and beholden, to the bosses and the bankers who never gave their share of any blood, of any sweat of any tears.”

“Who’ll stand with us?” The song asks. “Don’t tell us everything is fine, because this treatment is a crime. The working people fuel the engine while you yank the chain. We fight the wars and build the buildings for someone else’s gain.”

An anthem for our times.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.