Here’s How Right-Wing Media Spins Stories About Downtrodden Americans to Mask Trump’s Disastrous Policy Failures

An 81-year-old delivering lost luggage to help pay for his wife’s cancer treatment is not inspiring, it’s a horror story. It’s an indictment of the American political system and social safety net all at once. Yet conservatives insist on framing stories about financial struggle and precarity as examples of grit and perseverance.

You probably saw the viral story about Don Johnson, the Dallas-area resident hauling around other people’s suitcases in the Texas summer’s soul-withering heat because it was, he said, “the only job that will hire me.” Strangers came to his aid to the tune of $700,000 within days.

The story has become slightly more complicated after that, with GoFundMe yanking the fundraiser due to Johnson’s daughter not identifying herself as having started the page. Johnson and his daughter started another and have now raised about half of what the initial campaign brought in.

But you won’t find Johnson’s page at GoFundMe. It’s at an alternate crowdfunding site popular with the MAGA right, GiveSendGo–and that’s where it now belongs, having been drafted into the rightwing ecosystem by conservative talker Glenn Beck. He monologued about the family’s plight on Monday and had the father and daughter on his show Tuesday, full of tearful sentiment about the wondrous generosity of his audience and “thousands of strangers.”

And Beck wrapped Johnson’s experience in a narrative about masculine pluck that shielded it from questions about a system that would put an elderly couple in such financial peril.

“He didn’t complain. You didn’t have bitterness, in fact. The way the men of that generation are.”

No doubt, Johnson is an exemplar of dedication, ingeniousness, and endurance. I do have my doubts about whether this is a particularly masculine approach to desperate money problems, because Johnson is far from alone in being well past retirement and still forced to work in order to cover fundamental needs.

A full quarter of people over 80 are still working. Eighty percent all those over 60 have no financial assets to draw from to withstand a financial shock. Fory-five percent lack the income to cover basic costs.

Stories like his will only get more common. Twenty percent of those over 50 have no retirement savings. The average American has saved less than $1,000.

This precarity has been hastened under the Trump administration, whose “One Big Beautiful Bill” has whittled away at the exact kind of government benefits that would serve Johnson and his family: receiving pay for being a fulltime caregiver, getting help with meal delivery, receiving non-emergency transportation or assistance in daily living.

Johnson’s tale is unusual in that it has a hero, but people keep refusing to identify a villain. Perhaps people have one in their heads: Insurance companies, the hospital, cancer itself.

Beck cannot ask that question, of course. The story has to remain one of triumph over … circumstance, let’s say. Being dealt a bad hand. But Johnson’s predicament is only a slightly more drastic version of the world we’re all living in now. And there are people to blame where Johnson has found himself. It’s Trump, the Republicans, and their supporters — like Beck.

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Listen above via the Glenn Beck Program.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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