The Republican Party’s Populist Betrayal
The GOP’s budget bill exposes Trump’s ‘working-class party’ rhetoric as phony. It also gives Democrats a massive health care opportunity.
There were lots of last-minute tweaks to the Big, Beautiful Bill the House passed this morning, but here, per the New York Times, is the most openly stupid one:
When Republicans first rolled out a proposal last week to invest $1,000 on behalf of every American baby born over the next four years, they were not exactly subtle about whom the public should credit for the cash.
The original draft called for the funds to be put into new a “money account for growth and advancement,” or, as the bill suggested they be called, a “MAGA account.”
Apparently, though, endowing the accounts with the name of President Trump’s political movement was not clear enough. As part of a series of last-minute changes House Republicans made to their broad fiscal package Wednesday night, they decided to just cut to the chase. The money would now be deposited in a “Trump account.”
Happy Thursday.
Another Win for the Plutocrats
by Andrew Egger
What happened to the modern age of Republican-led economic populism?
In one sense, it’s no surprise that the Big Beautiful Bill, which the House passed this morning by a 215–214 vote, slashes taxes primarily for the wealthy while cutting spending on entitlement programs geared toward the poor. That’s been GOP SOP for ages.
But even as the package was being hammered out, MAGA’s populist wing was clanging a bell asking Donald Trump to intervene. After all, many of the Americans who stand to be harmed by this bill were the very voters who had migrated into the GOP in recent years. Was Donald Trump really going to let GOP lawmakers slip back into their old plutocratic ways?
Answer: You bet he was.
In the end, Trump was content to check the “populist” box with a few flashy proposals (no tax on tips!). When it came to the more radical departures from GOP orthodoxy championed by the likes of Steve Bannon—like raising the top marginal tax rate on the very wealthiest Americans—Trump was lukewarm. Two weeks ago, he posted on Truth Social that “I and all others would graciously accept” a “TINY tax increase for the RICH” in order to “help the lower and middle income workers”—but added that “Republicans should probably not do it, but I’m OK if they do!!!” Unsurprisingly, congressional Republicans declined to take him up on the offer, and no more was said about it.
The absence of such sources of new revenue to help pay for all the other tax cuts meant that leadership had to turn to items like slashing Medicaid and rolling back green-energy tax credits. Trump reportedly told them not to “fuck” with the program. But then they did anyway, expediting the date by which work requirements would kick in. Did the president let them slip back into their old slash-the-safety-net ways?
Answer: You bet he did.
But cutting Medicaid and Inflation Reduction Act subsidies can only get you so far. And that means the Republican package is likely to add trillions more to the federal deficit, on top of the already totally unsustainable fiscal path the country was already on.
The House’s supposed budget hawks were by no means prepared to accept this—until last night, when they suddenly were. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) bemoaned the $3.8 trillion in new deficit spending, but said that “I don’t know what the other option is right now.”
Count Bannon among those who isn’t satisfied with that outcome—not just because of Medicaid cuts soaking the MAGA base, but because of the massive deficit hit as well. “Told folks, bond market’s gonna get a vote here,” he said on his War Room podcast yesterday, “and we don’t want the bond market dictating the terms of what the United States does.”
The decades-long U.S. debt bacchanal is all fun and games until suddenly nobody wants to buy that debt. Good thing the president’s not doing anything to unsettle global confidence in America as a safe place to park their assets . . . right? Right?
It’s the Health Care, Stupid
by William Kristol
“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
We purveyors of Morning Shots, condemned to early rising, certainly hope Ben Franklin is right about its salutary effects. But today I want to focus not on the benefits of dragging oneself out of bed at an ungodly hour, but on the other side of Franklin’s aphorism. In the trilogy of the good things that “early to bed and early to rise” leads to, health comes first.
As it so often does in politics, too.
The two biggest midterm swings in modern times were in 1994 and 2010. In each case, out-of-power Republicans attacked a new Democratic administration and their allied Democratic Congress, over health care legislation that Republicans asserted would damage the quality and availability of Americans’ health care. Similarly, in 2018 the Democrats’ message that led to winning the House focused on the Republican assault on health care—in this case on the Affordable Care Act—the year before.
So: Three newly elected administrations, with their party controlling Congress. Three major pieces of legislation focused on health care. Three midterm defeats. It turns out it’s risky to mess with health care. Because for all that Americans would like to see improvements in our health care system, they are aware of its achievements and are nervous about changing it.
And the opposition party’s victorious message in these cases wasn’t particularly complicated. They stipulated that the system needed reforms, and said that they were committed to pursuing them. But the overwhelming thrust of their message was an attack on the destructive effects of the effort being undertaken by the party in power.
Which leads us to the current Republican Congress’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” This budget reconciliation bill, as Andrew notes above, imposes large and consequential cuts on health care, particularly Medicaid. (For some deep dives on that please read the fine work of our Bulwark colleague Jonathan Cohn here and here.)
A new poll out this morning from the progressive firm Navigator Research shows that Americans’ views are mixed on the tax cuts in the budget bill, though Americans oppose them when it’s explained they mostly benefit the rich. But if the issue is just “tax cuts, yes or no?” Trump and the Republicans have a fighting chance.
If the issue is Medicaid cuts, however, you don’t need to get to the second step of explanation. Medicaid is popular: 75 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Medicaid; only 15 percent have an unfavorable view. Americans want to protect Medicaid because they understand it provides health care coverage to people who can’t afford it, including lower-income kids and many nursing home residents. Surely Americans can easily be alarmed about the $700 billion of Medicaid cuts in the bill.
But Americans can only be alarmed about these cuts if they hear about them. And therein lies the task for the Democrats. The Navigator poll shows that just 27 percent of Americans have heard “a lot” about Congress proposing cuts to Medicaid.
Democrats need to focus even more than they have so far on the Medicaid part of this bill. They can correctly describe the Medicaid cuts as large and radical. They can also point out that the bill will lead to increased costs of private health insurance on the health care exchanges, and to knock-on effects that would lead to cuts in Medicare. They can remind Americans that the Trump administration slashed funds for NIH and medical research more broadly.
Democrats would be well within their rights to describe this administration and Congress as carrying out the biggest assault ever on American health care. They can call the budget bill an anti-health care bill; a Big Destructive Attack on American Health Care Bill.
Of course Democrats will need a fresh, positive agenda on the economy and on health care. But that’s mostly for 2028. For now, Democrats and their allies can explain to voters that we have to stop the attacks and destruction. This “conservative” message for 2026 can be followed up with a more reformist message in 2028.
So when Democrats go to their home districts next week, don’t talk about the Republican budget or tax cuts. Talk about the Republican anti-health care agenda. Have doctors and nurses and technicians and researchers—and yes, patients and those benefiting from various health care programs—front and center at their town halls. Defend our health care. Defend our health.
Early to bed and early to rise, focus on health care and win the prize.
AROUND THE BULWARK
‘I Started to Die.’ Trump Talks to South African President About ‘White Genocide’... On Bulwark+ Takes, BEN PARKER is joined by Bulwark Super Friend and contributor HOLLY BERKLEY FLETCHER to discuss Wednesday’s crazy Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Democrats Consider Tearing Up the Playbook… Officials are eyeing everything from new health disclosures for candidates to revamping the primary calendar, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
If Only It Were Opposite Day… On The Next Level, TIM, SARAH, and JVL discuss the incompetence of Kristi Noem on constitutional matters, Bernie Sanders’s views on the Democratic party, Joe Biden’s campaign mismanagement, the Republican tax bill, and Tesla’s business struggles.
Quick Hits
ANOTHER ORDER FLOUTED: First it was El Salvador. Now it’s South Sudan. The White House this week ignored a federal judge’s ruling to not put a handful of violent offenders on a deportation flight to the east African nation, although where the flight actually landed is unclear.
Yesterday, Judge Brian Murphy denounced the action as having “unquestionably” violated a court order and raised the possibility of holding administration officials in contempt. Politico reports:
At a court hearing Wednesday, Murphy accused immigration officials of defying his earlier directives to provide “meaningful” due process to people whom the administration is trying to deport to countries where they have no ties and could face violence.. . .
Last month, Murphy barred the Trump administration from deporting people to so-called “third-party countries,” rather than their countries of origin, without first giving them a meaningful chance to challenge their deportation on the basis that they might be killed or tortured there. Despite that ruling, the administration on Tuesday morning gathered detainees who were being held in immigration custody in Texas and put them on a plane to be deported. The men were told they were being sent to South Sudan, one of the most dangerous and war-torn nations on Earth. They were given only about 12 hours notice of the deportations and no ability to consult with their lawyers.
The episode illustrates how rapidly the White House’s court-flouting immigration strategy is starting to bog down: Enduring who knows how many contempt charges for the sake of eight removals is no way to run a mass-deportation regime.
EEL TURN: We have to acknowledge that the following sentence is pure Bulwark bait: Vice President JD Vance sat for an interview with the New York Times’s Ross Douthat in Rome yesterday, and Douthat questioned him extensively about how he reconciles his Catholic faith with the White House’s immigration regime. Vance is a slippery speaker, and his answers contained lots of soothing flourishes about the importance of balancing the need to enforce a nation’s borders with respect for the humanity of migrants. Here’s part of one response:
On the migration question in particular, you have to think about what [the church] has said, and when the church says yes, we respect the right of a country to enforce its borders, you also have to respect the rights of migrants, the dignity of migrants, when you think about questions like deportation and so forth. You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at the same time.
And I’m not saying I’m always perfect at it, but I at least try to think about, OK, there are obligations that we have to people who in some ways are fleeing violence, or at least fleeing poverty. I also have a very sacred obligation, I think, to enforce the laws and to promote the common good of my own country, defined as the people with the legal right to be here.
It is possible, we suppose, to imagine a deportation regime for which this is a worthy defense. But it’s an absurdity of the highest order to suggest it applies to what the White House is carrying out. As judge after judge has found, the apparatus Vance is defending routinely violates the rights of migrants: A Cato Institute analysis this week found that more than fifty of the Venezuelan migrants now locked up in El Salvador came to the United States legally. And “dignity”? The White House relishes the opportunity to strip migrants of their dignity. They routinely play it for laughs in the most grotesque terms—remember the ASMR deportation flight?
TRAGEDY IN D.C.: Some devastating news overnight in the nation’s capital where two members of the Israeli embassy staff were shot and killed outside at an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. The two victims were a young couple, about to get engaged. The alleged shooter, who is in custody, reportedly shouted “free, free Palestine” following the shooting.
The shock of it all was still being absorbed Thursday morning. Undoubtedly, it will soon be thrown into our collective debate over the war in Gaza. But for the Jewish community, it was abject horror. Ted Deutsch, who heads the American Jewish Committee—which hosted the event—called it the “realization of the Jewish community’s worst fears,” during an appearance on Morning Joe.
“How can this be the reality we are living in?” he asked. “How is the Jewish community supposed to feel now?”
How we are supposed to feel is difficult to properly answer at this moment. How we do feel is easier. Fear and pain. Fear because of how unremarkable the event where the shooting took place was. Every week, there are these types of gatherings of Jewish officials and activists. Indeed, there was another, unrelated one that took place just last night. Pain because of the senselessness of the loss. Two young people were slaughtered last night. It did nothing to advance peace. They died simply because they were Jewish.
—Sam Stein
Cheap Shots
I want to make a snarky gun rights comment, but it just doesn't seem funny. We're the only nation in the world that just accepts these senseless deaths so gun manufacturers can make money. It really is heartbreaking.
My departed father was a staunch Reagan Republican conservative who became a Trumpist MAGA adherent. He used to say, "We're really in trouble if the Poor figure out they can just vote themselves money." As I got older, I would respond, much to my mother's consternation, "It's the rich you really have to worry about." Dad would, predictably, get angry and we would eventually change the subject. Man how I wish I was wrong.