Why MAGA's Congress is Voting Against MAGA's Interests
When retribution is a policy, we all pay.
The Republican budget package is shaping up to be one of the most politically and socially reckless pieces of legislation ever pushed through Congress.
It’s hard to imagine how President Trump doesn’t pay a price for this assault on the social safety net that millions of his own supporters rely upon. The legislation, which the media has allowed Trump to falsely brand as “One Big Beautiful Bill,” is a massive moving target that the New York Times nicely summarizes here. It would:
Extend tax cuts passed in 2017 that overwhelmingly favor the rich
Enact campaign promises such as no tax on tips
Spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the White House’s mass deportation drive and national defense priorities
Break a campaign promise to leave Medicaid untouched. Mostly through onerous new paperwork requirements, the bill would throw tens of millions of low-income and disabled people off the federal health insurance program
Slash funding to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps. Using paperwork as a cudgel here, too, Republicans would take food off the tables of tens of millions of Americans
Add roughly $3.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years
A Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted this month found that Americans oppose the bill by an almost 2-to-1 margin and that 63 percent said the measure’s debt impact was “unacceptable.”
If the GOP-controlled Congress passes anything close to the current Senate bill and Trump does not pay a political price, he will have defied conventional wisdom once again. It would be a testament to:
His talents for deception and branding
His voters’ blind faith in their leader (more on this below).
GOP lawmakers’ fealty to their leader
The Democratic Party’s utter failure as an opposition force.
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Defying his president to defend his constituents, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina stood on the Senate floor this weekend and accused fellow Republicans of rushing to pass a destructive budget bill. He accused White House advisers of not telling Trump that the bill would break his pledge not to cut Medicaid benefits. As if Trump doesn’t know.
“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore?” Tillis said while voting against the measure.
For telling the truth, Tillis was attacked by Trump, who threatened to make sure he lost the GOP primary in 2026. Tillis said fine; I won’t run for re-election.
And now the GOP is further scrubbed of independent thinking.
Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has a friend who worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her friend was fired by Elon Musk. Then reinstated. Then fired again. All while being diagnosed with breast cancer and beginning her fight with the disease.
In a piece titled, “A Real Cancer in Washington: The Quiet Heroism of My Friend in Government,” Annie reminds us that public servants are human beings, not the soulless bureaucrats demonized by Trump and his allies. Her friend is — like most federal workers I know — dedicated to her work.
Let this paragraph deep in her essay wash over you:
When I visited Anne (Romatowski) in Virginia in late April, she told me that she worried about scammers stealing grandparents’ retirement savings, thieves hacking people’s bank accounts, sports-betting apps bleeding young men dry, and ‘buy now, pay later’ companies targeting poor consumers. I worried about her. She had dyed her hair pink, but little of it remained. She moved slowly. I kept asking how she was doing. Losing your job, getting cancer, and moving back in with your parents—it was a heck of a punch line, she told me, as well as a gut punch. The thing that really upset her was the way (CFPB’s acting director) talked about his own colleagues in government. In a leaked video, he’d said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” He wanted them “to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” He wanted to “put them in trauma.”
The MAGA movement’s thirst for trauma is what connects all three stories in today’s newsletter. Slashing the social safety net; firing federal workers; deporting immigrants; defying judicial orders; punishing political rivals; curbing rights to speech, protests, and academic freedom; rolling back hard-won rights for Blacks, women and other marginalized Americans; celebrating Confederate traitors who defended slavery — these and other own-the-libs policies are retribution for decades of grievances (many real, some imagined) harbored by a plurality of voters drawn to Trump’s hate-fueled populism.
It’s less about making America great than making fellow Americans pay.
Which is why Trump may get away with all this.
Oh well at least Bezos had a well attended wedding. That is what is important in America, not health care or nutrition for children or kidnapping of brown and black people. Meanwhile the planet just keeps getting hotter and hotter, Gaza is being ethnically cleansed and Ukraine is suffering great losses.
Trump is using the typical gangland tactic of intimidation, openly warning any wandering Republican senators that they will be primaried if they don't vote for his obscene bill. The slimy VP stands by in case he is required for his tie-breaking vote as July 4 nears.