Trump's 'Project 2025' Sings Woody Guthrie's 'Mean Talking Blues'

Jim Hightower
Tue, 18 Nov 2025 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

Years ago, Woody Guthrie wrote "Mean Talking Blues," a stinging satire of malicious right-wing officials who take perverse pleasure in demonizing, holding down, and punishing poor people:

"I'm a big disaster / Just goin' some place to happen / I'm an organized famine / Studying how I can be a little bit meaner / I laugh my loudest / When other people cry / I hate everybody don't think like me / I'm just mean."

What a perfect theme song for President Donald Trump's "Project 2025" — a MAGA crusade to stomp on millions of America's poorest families, trying to deny them access to the most basic human needs.
Updated: Wed Nov 19, 2025

Years ago, Woody Guthrie wrote "Mean Talking Blues," a stinging satire of malicious right-wing officials who take perverse pleasure in demonizing, holding down, and punishing poor people:

"I'm a big disaster / Just goin' some place to happen / I'm an organized famine / Studying how I can be a little bit meaner / I laugh my loudest / When other people cry / I hate everybody don't think like me / I'm just mean."

What a perfect theme song for President Donald Trump's "Project 2025" — a MAGA crusade to stomp on millions of America's poorest families, trying to deny them access to the most basic human needs.

Needs like ... food. Brooke Rollins, Trump's multi-millionaire agriculture secretary, made crude political jokes about poor people during the GOP's government shutdown, laughing as she schemed to cut off their food stamps. She was an "organized famine," illegally maneuvering to deny food for 42 million hard-hit American citizens.

In addition, Project 2025 operatives want to yank health coverage from the poor — and just for meanness — they propose killing the modest program that helps impoverished families afford to have heat in their homes.

Meanwhile, Trump poses as Gatsby, living in tacky opulence while ignoring the economic mess and rank inequality created by his Roaring 20s plutocratic presidency. Indeed, the inequality is widening as he doles out hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in new giveaways to billionaires (including to his own sons).

Far from "Making America Great Again," Trump's most tangible achievement is to have had the White House's Lincoln bathroom remodeled." And, in a royal touch, Trump even had a chandelier installed above the toilet. Imagine how proud Honest Abe would be.

THE PATH TO WINNING IN 2026 ... AND BEYOND

As one who ekes out a modest living running my mouth on the radio and Substack, I hesitate to critique others who do the same — even though I might disagree entirely and emphatically with them.

But occasionally, I see influential purveyors of conventional wisdom tromping into my area of real-life experience, pushing some political nonsense that is not only wrong but delusive. That's when I intrude.

Like now, a whole posse of pundits is bellowing these days that Democrats have only one path forward to avoid perpetual defeat by MAGA Republicans: "Shift to the right!" For example, The New York Times right-wing sermonizer Ross Douthat recently proclaimed that the wisdom of Democrats "repositioning" their issues and message away from progressivism "ought to be plain to anyone with eyes." To which I say: bovine excrement.

What's plain to most voters (and especially to fed-up nonvoters) is that cynical partisan shiftiness is what's wrong with both parties, creating a plutocratic realpolitik run by and for avaricious moneyed powers. I'm no New York Times pontificator, but my ground-level experience in Texas tells me that what common people really want is not more precisely calculated positioning, but an honest stand on "little-d" democratic principle. Say what you believe ... and do it!

On the very day that the Times ran a Douthat column lecturing Democrats on how to "play politics," Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. He won by running an aggressively progressive campaign against corporate elites, exciting the city's widely ignored working-class and poor voters. Instead of trying to manipulate the electorate, Mamdani expanded and inspired it. That is plainly the Democratic Party's future.