Republicans Always Chicken Out
They try to pretend they’re not going to do whatever Trump says . . . and then they always do it.
The jobs report for June (and revision for May) came out this morning, and the topline was strong: 147,000 new jobs, exceeding expectations, and a slightly lower unemployment rate at 4.1 percent. May’s jobs numbers were also revised higher. While the numbers beat expectations, there are warning signs deeper in. Per Bloomberg:
Note that the average hourly earnings has slowed more than expected, with a 0.2% gain against the 0.3% forecast, and also the average weekly hours worked has dropped, to 34.2 from 34.3. So there are a few elements indicating a continued slowdown here. . . .
Slowing wages will not be good for the economy overall, and given private payrolls were the lowest since last October, it’s hard to see the market’s knee-jerk bear flattening to be maintained for very long.
We won’t really know if we’re in a recession until the advance estimate of Q2 GDP growth comes out at the end of the month. So far, we have mixed signals and are muddling through.
No Morning Shots tomorrow. Happy Independence Day and happy Thursday.
Don’s Way or the Highway
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump has two trusty tactics for getting his way: browbeating people who aren’t doing what he wants, and issuing cloying attaboys to people who are. What he isn’t particularly good at is ordinary human persuasion, convincing people that he sees and understands things from their point of view. Witness him pitching his Big Beautiful Bill to GOP moderate holdouts yesterday. Per NOTUS:
Trump still doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp about what his signature legislative achievement does. According to three sources with direct knowledge of the comments, the president told Republicans at this meeting that there are three things Congress shouldn’t touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member responded to Trump, according to the three sources.
Such argumentative masterstrokes as this, it seems, had their desired effect. Yesterday, a plethora of House Republicans were denouncing the bill they’d gotten back from the Senate, with Freedom Caucus types opposing its deficit-busting price tag and moderates bemoaning its trillion-dollar blow to Medicaid.1 Today, one marathon overnight session and exactly zero changes to the legislative text later, nearly all those members shuffled meekly into line. The bill is likely to pass shortly after this newsletter hits your inbox.
It’s an appropriate way for the whole unseemly saga to end. At every step along this hulking monstrosity’s lumbering journey from conception to congressional passage, plenty of Republicans realized they were going to have huge problems with it—that it would be bad law in many ways, that it would violate many of their own promises to voters. Yet over and over, they found face-saving excuses to guide this monster into the world. Maybe they got a new pet policy included. Maybe House members thought the Senate would solve their problems for them, and vice versa. Maybe they just figured they’d get another swing at fixing the thing up nice later.
That’s how it always goes in today’s GOP. Lawmakers spend huge amounts of time and energy manufacturing fig leaves for their behavior, halfway plausible explanations for why they are taking a given action, promises (to themselves, mainly) that they’ll have more opportunities to fix things down the road.
But, eventually, those opportunities run out. Last night, as the holdouts demanded more time, Trump decided they’d had plenty. He wasn’t going to let the House get away with another round of face-saving amendments, which would trigger yet another round of voting in the Senate, with another possible round of face-saving amendments to follow there, and so on and so on. He had a self-imposed July 4 signing deadline to keep.
With his blessing, House Speaker Mike Johnson held a key procedural vote open all night, then got to work twisting arms. Every fig leaf was stripped away. There was no more opportunity to change the bill, no more opportunity to delay. And in the end, Republican holdouts realized that none of their bleating about bad policy and bad process changed the central reality: They’d get in line and vote for it, or Trump would squash them like bugs in their primaries. That was that.
One other point: If both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are to be believed, no Republican lawmaker was going to escape from this legislation without facing a bruising primary challenge. Like Jack Sprat and his wife, Trump was pledging to primary anyone who opposed the bill, while Musk swore he’d primary anyone who supported it.
There was a time, not so many months ago, when folks like us would speculate that Trump might be biting off more than he could chew in making a political alliance with Musk. Here, after all, was the richest man in the world, a man with an equally rabid (though considerably smaller) personal fanbase and a massive personal megaphone on X. If the relationship went sour, as seemed inevitable, Trump might be facing real damage.
At the time, this seemed perfectly plausible. Today, it’s laughable. Republican lawmakers know whose enmity they fear: They’d risk spiting fifty Elons before crossing Trump. Musk has been cast into outer darkness, nattering fruitlessly online about the need to stand up a new political party; Trump sits in the White House, serenely spitballing about whether he’ll have Musk deported one of these days. “We might have to put DOGE on Elon,” he told reporters this week. “So tempting to escalate this,” Musk replied on Twitter. “So, so tempting. But I will refrain for now.”
And he hasn’t engaged on it since.
‘Let’s Not Kid Ourselves’
by William Kristol
We noted yesterday Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s admonition, “Let’s not kid ourselves,” about the big, bad budget bill the Senate had just passed. Of course, Murkowski had just kidded herself that it was the right thing to do to cast the deciding vote for it. Still, she went so far as to acknowledge that the bill was “not good enough” for the country. She urged House Republicans to tinker with it.
Last night, those House Republicans chose not to tinker. Now that bill is about to become law.
Let’s not kid ourselves that somehow the universe will magically see to it that Republicans will necessarily pay an electoral price for passing this bill. It’s true that if the legislation’s negative effects are clear enough, the party that pushed through the legislation could well suffer politically. But November 3, 2026 is a long way away. A lot will happen in the next 16 months. There will be new reasons or excuses for voters to support one party or the other. Future electoral returns aren’t guaranteed. Political accountability isn’t obvious or automatic.
Furthermore, the Trump administration isn’t going to sit around and accept an unfavorable political fate. The bill’s unpopular now. But who knows how things will look after months of sustained political propaganda. Who knows how effectively the administration will be able to use the agencies and powers of the federal government to reshape perceptions, or even to tilt the electoral playing field. We’ve seen so far only the tip of the authoritarian iceberg that threatens to sink our liberal democracy. The assaults on institutions and opponents who seek to stand in the way of Trump’s authoritarian project have only just begun.
So as we enjoy this July Fourth holiday, we should take a moment to look back and reflect on what our revolution has meant to the world. But we should also use this occasion to reflect on the present—and to renew our determination for the future.
And so perhaps tomorrow, in addition to of course taking a look at the Declaration of Independence, we could take a minute to read these brief impromptu remarks by that greatest champion of the Declaration, Abraham Lincoln. On August 22, 1864, Lincoln spoke in Washington, D.C., to the soldiers of the 166th Ohio Regiment.
Lincoln reminded them that the contest in which they were engaged “is not merely for today, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives.”
Lincoln continued:
It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright… The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.
Our circumstances are surely less dire than those Americans faced a century and a half ago. We’re called upon to do far, far less than our forebears. But today’s threat to our birthright is real, and that inestimable jewel surely remains worth fighting for.
AROUND THE BULWARK
🎉Cheers to 100,000! Yesterday, The Bulwark hit 100,000 paying subscribers. Thanks for helping make all of this possible and riding along with us. If you’re not a subscriber yet yourself, consider becoming one, here:
Some Programming Notes… Tomorrow is July Fourth, so most of our regular programming—including this newsletter!—will be taking a day off to grill, grumble, and contemplate the fate of the republic. That said, if news breaks (or democracy does), we’ll be here for special programming.
Despite It All, I’m Still Patriotic… This country has greatness in its soul, MONA CHAREN reflects. Let’s recover it, she challenges.
One Big Deadly Bill… A groundbreaking study shows how many American lives the Republican megabill is likely to cost, writes JONATHAN COHN.
Could Trump Deport Elon Musk? GEORGE CONWAY explains to JVL why Trump’s billion-dollar settlement with Shari Redstone might be legalized bribery, the disturbing reality behind Trump’s immigration detention camps, and more.
How Jimmy Swaggart Changed American Christianity… The disgraced televangelist built his career on an undeniable talent. His downfall contributed to a major shift in how Americans viewed religious leaders, remembers DANIEL N. GULLOTTA.
Suddenly, Green Shoots of Dem Optimism About the Senate… Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has given the opposition party some modest, new hope about the upper chamber, observes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
Chaos, Cowards, and Alligator Alcatraz… the gang goes live on this edition of The Next Level, chatting about the House vote on Trump’s fugly bill, ICE expansion, and the cowards at Paramount.
Quick Hits
ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES: After a hard day’s work crushing foreign aid programs, annihilating due process for migrants, or bullying private companies into doing his bidding, Donald Trump likes to unwind by settling old scores. Earlier this year, he tasked CIA Director John Ratcliffe with squashing one of the oldest irritations of his political career: the U.S. intelligence community assessment that Vladimir Putin tried to help his campaign by meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Yesterday, Ratcliffe released the fruits of his labors, declassifying an internal CIA review of the procedures leading to that assessment.2
The document, prepared by career CIA professionals, is an interesting read. It suggests that John Brennan, CIA director under Barack Obama, may have been influenced by political concerns in seeking the assessment,3 and that analysts’ timetable for putting the assessment together was unusually rushed. But when it comes to the report’s actual work and conclusions, the reviewers have to admit it was analytically sound. They argue that while the intelligence analysts were correct to assess with “high confidence” that Russia was trying to undermine the U.S. democratic process and to hurt Hillary Clinton in particular, they should not have said with “high confidence” that Putin specifically wanted to help Trump. Why? Because they only had a single high-quality intelligence source to attest to this.
Even the reviewers note this is pretty weak tea. “Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump; they reasoned that in a two-person race the tradeoff was zero-sum,” they wrote. “This logic train was plausible and sensible, but was an inference rather than fact sourced to multiple reporting streams.” Still, they write, it would have been better to spend more time exploring “alternative scenarios” for why Putin might have wanted to hurt U.S. elections and Clinton’s candidacy.
That, of course, wasn’t really the narrative Trump was hoping to find. To get to that, Team MAGA had to rely on a game of Messaging Telephone, with the “bombshell” news getting more explosive with each telling. In announcing the report, Ratcliffe went far beyond his own analysts’ assessment: “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump.”
TWO YEARS: Last week, the White House insisted Iran’s nuclear program had been totally “obliterated” and went to war against a low-confidence preliminary intelligence assessment that the program had only been set back a couple months. Now, the Pentagon has refined its timetable: Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters yesterday the strikes had set Iran back by up to two years.
Years beats months, of course. But the new estimate is an official acknowledgment that Trump—despite his asserting that “I don’t see them being back involved in the nuclear business anymore” and his other claims about the success of the bombing—will likely have tough choices ahead. Will he commit to a long-term strategy of bombing Iran again any time they seem to be getting too close to a nuke—an essential holding pattern of low-grade war that Israeli officials have termed “mowing the grass”? Or does he think he’ll have more success at the negotiating table now than he had during his first term?
Cheap Shots
Liberty-loving people also objected to such provisions in the bill as its expansion of ICE’s budget to be larger than many nation’s militaries, but this group is not heavily represented among today’s Republican lawmakers.
Working independently and in a bipartisan fashion, the Senate Intelligence Committee also reached the conclusion that the Russians wanted to help Trump, and they laid out their findings in a massive, five-volume report.
As opposed, naturally, to Ratcliffe’s undoubtedly nonpartisan motives in pursuing this one.
This legislation is all for show. Trump wants a signing party tomorrow. That’s it. Yesterday he made it clear that he has no clue what is in the bill with regard to Medicaid. And last night he apparently told representatives to vote ‘yes’, and he will make corrections to the parts of the bill they don’t like through executive orders. And they agreed to that.
That is insane. And it is further evidence that Congress no longer exists and Trump is making the laws now. I said it yesterday and I say it again today—it is pretty clear to me that we are living in a dictatorship. It has taken less than six months to get here.
In the industrialized world, there is not a single conservative party except Republicans with such a psychotic view of healthcare. The AFD is a bunch of commies compared to the GOP.
Since 1980, the one guiding light of Republicans has been tax cuts for the wealthy. Everything else is just cosplay.