Trump’s About to Slash Medicaid. TV News Has Barely Noticed.
The rush job to pass the big beautiful bill has had its intended outcome: not giving the public time to catch on to the consequences.
The fight over USAID is more or less over. Donald Trump and Elon Musk gutted the agency and moved on, cruelly indifferent to the worldwide suffering they were causing, and those who opposed the carnage have found their hands full with dozens of other outrages to attend to as well. Now, headlines like this one in the New York Times this week are just a fact of reality: “Promise of Victory Over H.I.V. Fades as U.S. Withdraws Support.”
“A new drug that gives almost complete protection against the virus was to be administered across Africa this year,” the report reads. “Now, much of the funding for that effort is gone.” Happy Thursday.
A Big Beautiful Rush Job
by Jonathan Cohn
Senate Republican leaders are still working out the final language on their version of Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
And they’re not just dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s, either. They are negotiating major pieces of the legislation and dealing with different factions within their caucus, including those who worry the bill cuts too much from health care as well as those who think it doesn’t cut enough.
They’re also scrambling to deal with new findings from the Senate parliamentarian, who in just the last 24 hours ruled that several of their proposed cuts are not permissible under fast-track reconciliation rules.
And yet, amazingly, they are still trying to get legislation to the floor in the next few days.
The goal is to start the voting process this weekend and get a bill on Trump’s desk by July 4. That’s eight days from now—not nearly enough time for Republican lawmakers, analysts, and advocates to figure out exactly what’s in the bill.
Which, naturally, is the point.
Republican leaders are rushing because they are desperately afraid the public will discover what the bill would do—rip health care away from millions, explode the deficit, and cause what might be the biggest transfer in government resources from poor to rich in American history.
But they’re not acting alone. They’re getting a big assist from cable news.
Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters for America, tracked cable network mentions of Medicaid—the program that Republicans have proposed cutting by more than $800 billion, which would result in estimated 8 million Americans becoming uninsured.
Not shockingly, Fox News was the worst offender. Medicaid got 1,390 mentions on the conservative network between January 20 and June 21, Gertz found, while “Biden” got 13,289 mentions. In other words, Medicaid got a tenth of the mentions on Fox that Biden did. But Medicaid also got less coverage on CNN, with less than half as many mentions. Even on MSNBC, Medicaid came up less than the former president, though it was closer to an even split.
That imbalance feels way off for a bill of this consequence, especially when you think about all the attention Republican health care cuts got in 2017. Back then, the cause was full repeal of the Affordable Care Act and a major restructuring of Medicaid’s financing arrangements. And in the six months or so Republicans spent on their bill, it was frequently the lead story for days on end—sometimes even breaking into pop culture, as when late-night host Jimmy Kimmel gave a passionate monologue about the right to health care after the birth of his baby, who spent weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Today’s legislation may be even less popular than the Obamacare repeal was, based on the available polling. But it’s also a series of smaller, technical-sounding changes that are easier for Republicans to distort. And it’s competing with countless other Trump-generated controversies for space in the news cycle.
The groups that traditionally fight for health care access like FamiliesUSA and Protect Our Care have been making their best effort—staging rallies, holding virtual press conferences, and buying up ad spots. (I heard one on the Joe Rogan show Tuesday.)
Fair Share America, one of the groups that rallied against the ACA repeal in 2017, just launched a cross-country bus tour with stops in key swing districts in places like Michigan and Arizona. The Service Employees International Union plans to hold a protest on the Capitol lawn Thursday, in what they are calling a “Chant for Our Lives.”
There’s even been some celebrity involvement: Actor Noah Wyle, who is most famous for his portrayal of doctors first on the classic NBC show E.R. and recently on the HBO Max series The Pitt, appeared on a podcast this month and mentioned the importance of protecting Medicaid—a cause he has taken up before.
These and other opponents are running out of chances to push the bill in a better direction, let alone stop it altogether. But they still have a few. People forget that John McCain’s thumbs-down vote killing repeal legislation in 2017 was dramatic precisely because it surprised people: Until a few hours before, the legislation seemed on track to pass.
Republicans are convinced they can beat the clock this time, and maybe they will. But they wouldn’t be pushing for votes so quickly and so intensely if they didn’t think their effort could still fall apart.
Mini-Trumps Squirming Under Every Rock
by Andrew Egger
What does an executive branch run by Donald Trump’s biggest personal enablers look like in practice? More and more, it looks like one where his personal pathologies govern the behavior of that branch at every level. Consider the behavior of a few of Trump’s cabinet secretaries over the last 24 hours.
As the world grapples with the aftermath of America’s attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Trump and several of his secretaries have gone down a bizarre mental cul-de-sac on the subject: the supposed treason of a number of U.S. news outlets reporting on a preliminary Defense Department intelligence report suggesting the damage to Iran’s nuclear program had been less extensive than hoped for.
The preliminary report was real and newsworthy, but it was also preliminary—one small pebble in a mosaic that’s still far from complete. Rather than make this point and move on, though, the administration went on the warpath (as it were).
Speaking to reporters after yesterday’s NATO summit, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ludicrously argued that reporters were only reporting on a genuine government report to hurt America, or perhaps to embarrass the pilots who dropped the bombs on Iran. “The instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country,” he said. “They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t care what the world thinks.”
Meanwhile, the heads of other intelligence agencies rushed to support the president’s narrative. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard denounced the supposed attempt of the “propaganda media” to “try to undermine President Trump’s decisive leadership and the brave servicemen and women who flawlessly executed a truly historic mission to keep the American people safe and secure.”
And in a statement that he said “contradicts illegally sourced public reporting,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said that “a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes.”
Not only does this assessment not contradict the reporting of the outlets in question—obviously multiple intelligence agencies can come to different conclusions about the attack—it doesn’t even contradict the intelligence report those outlets described. Everyone agrees Iran’s nuclear program has been damaged; what we don’t know with certainty yet is the extent of that damage. But Ratcliffe and Gabbard’s obvious aim wasn’t to advance anyone’s understanding about that question; it was to back up the president’s vendetta against the outlets that reported an inconvenient fact.
Beyond the matter of damage assessments in Iran, other top Trump officials spent yesterday covering themselves in glory as well.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing yesterday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) asked Attorney General Pam Bondi whether she was bothered by any of the president’s grifts and conflicts of interest, including the United Arab Emirates’s investment of $2 billion in a Trump-family crypto venture and Trump’s dinner last month with top investors in his personal meme coin.
Bondi reached for her smelling salts. “It is wildly offensive that you would accuse President Trump of not protecting American interests in our country when he is the president that has shut down our borders,” she blustered. “You’re trying to play a gotcha question at a budget hearing when you have murders left and right in your state, violent crimes, and we are doing everything we can to help your liberal state.”
It shouldn’t surprise anyone to see this sort of behavior from the nation’s top law enforcement, intelligence, and defense officials. After all, Trump went well out of his way in assembling his team to prevent anyone who would behave like an adult from slipping in by mistake. But we shouldn’t look away from the obscene consequences of those decisions. Apparently, the Justice Department, the Defense Department, and our entire intelligence apparatus have no higher mission today than to pursue the grievances and flatter the ego of the man in charge.
AROUND THE BULWARK
McConnell’s Threat, Mamdani’s Big Win, AOC Vibes and more… The Next Level gang went live last night to talk about *gestures broadly* all this news.
Ukraine, Still Fighting for the Free World… In his fourth documentary, Bernard-Henri Lévy chronicles the everyday heroism of Ukrainians—and holds out hope that Americans will recognize it, writes CATHY YOUNG.
What Zohran Can Teach the Centrists… In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN writes: Moderate Democrats were left panicky over Tuesday’s New York City mayoral primary. But some saw clear lessons for modern campaigning.
The One Dictator Trump Doesn’t Love… A special BENJAMIN PARKER Triad, where he asks: What’s different about Khamenei for the bad orange man?
First Reports Are Always Wrong. The Iran Strike Is No Exception... Before we—or our political leaders—jump to conclusions about the state of Iran’s nuclear program, GEN. MARK HERTLING observes, we should let the professionals do their work.
Quick Hits
THERE GO THE VACCINES: It’s starting to feel like a terrible joke, the way we need to keep checking back in to dutifully report each of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s steps toward the anti-vaccine reality he’s obviously been moving toward all along.
Just two weeks ago, Kennedy gutted a key CDC vaccine advisory board and staffed it with contrarians and anti-vax kooks. Yesterday, that shiny new board announced it planned to examine “the cumulative effects” of the current childhood vaccine schedule and reevaluate shots like the current hepatitis B vaccine. Golly, you wonder what they’ll turn up!
As they have been all along, experts are clanging every alarm bell they can reach. “In the first 30 minutes of the recent meeting, it became clear that there is an intent to dismantle our country’s vaccine program—one that other countries have looked to replicate because of its success,” Sean O’Leary, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ infectious-disease committee, told the Washington Post.
The AAP yesterday announced it would not lend its name to the CDC’s work while it continued to publish its own immunization schedule. Its president, Dr. Susan J. Kressly, called the creation of the federal immunization policy “no longer a credible process.”
DONALD ❤️’S NATO: Yesterday, Andrew wrote about the caps-heavy encomium that NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte texted to Trump after last weekend’s Iran strikes, which the president immediately screenshotted and reposted on Truth Social. Rutte followed that up with some more eyebrow-raising comments, saying of Trump that “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.” A transatlantic spanking! Okay!
Still, the shameless charm offensive seems to have paid quick dividends: “I came here because it was something I’m supposed to be doing, but I left here a little bit differently,” Trump told reporters as he left the alliance’s summit this week in the Hague. “I left here saying that these people really love their countries. It’s not a ripoff. And we’re here to help them protect their country.”
Trump had other reasons to be cheerful, of course: He was walking out with a policy win. Other NATO nations (minus Spain) had agreed to increase their domestic defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, a longtime hobby-horse of Trump’s, who has argued (like several previous presidents) that the United States shoulders too much of the cost of the alliance. In the past, we might have winced at the diplomatic downsides of badgering rivals into such changes; in our grim present, we’re just happy to hear the president is currently vibing with NATO rather than with Vladimir Putin.
IT’S ONLY SOCIALISM WHEN THEY DO IT: A bizarre split-screen in politics this week: At exactly the same moment everyone is pulling out their hair over Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly bloodchillingly socialist policy proposals like opening a few city-run grocery stores in the Big Apple, Donald Trump’s personal corporate takeover of steel giant U.S. Steel is going virtually unnoticed.
Last week, we got the news that the U.S. government had approved the acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, with a few remarkable stipulations: the Trump administration would have the authority to name a board member and veto power over a heap of corporate decisions.
Yesterday, writer Robinson Meyer pointed out something remarkable in U.S. Steel’s new revised corporate charter: Those authorities would only belong to the Treasury and Commerce Departments after Trump’s exit from office. In the meantime, Trump would have the ability to exercise that veto power personally. We eagerly await the Fox News segments explaining that it’s not reallllly socialism if the head of state (and a brilliant businessman at that), and not the state itself, controls the business.
Cheap Shots
The MAGA doves are taking things well:
This entire Morning Shots is a must read.
Where to even begin?
Gutting Medicaid will have far reaching consequences that people have not even begun to realize, and I don’t just mean for “the poors” so enjoy that everyone who has ever had to access healthcare.
Pam Bondi is a special kind of evil, and I find myself saying words like “I might have preferred Matt Gaetz, honestly”, so once again this current timeline is garbage.
The amount of subservience across every department of our federal government is truly just sickening to witness.
In the words of JVL, good luck America.
"“A new drug that gives almost complete protection against the virus was to be administered across Africa this year,” the report reads. “Now, much of the funding for that effort is gone.”"
And that's because this administration wants people with the virus to die, especially if those people are black.