Big Beautiful Bill Passes Congress

and there it is. Trump's big bill is through Congress and ready to be signed into law tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/bbBcrUShm5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 3, 2025

Lawler: This is a big win for Americans across the country. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime

FOX: Those will expire in 2028 correct?

Lawler: Sure, but that’s normal pic.twitter.com/LP3yOC0KYX

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 3, 2025

Video of the IDF raping Palestinians to death.pic.twitter.com/zK9Fq1JRY2

— Syrian Girl (@Partisangirl) July 3, 2025

My soulless DC rep @NMalliotakis says “nobody loses benefits” and then goes on to say seniors on Medicaid should get up off their couch and go work 20 hours a week to keep their insurance. Then she runs away.

NY's 11th Congressional District has 300,000+ people on Medicaid. pic.twitter.com/HFXzjDHhtj

— Justin Brannan (@JustinBrannan) July 3, 2025

Ogles: "The people that are getting off Medicaid are people that shouldn't be on Medicaid to begin with … it's the loser in his mama's basement playing video games instead of going out and getting a job." pic.twitter.com/hr2Ltfhfwl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 3, 2025

Hinson on Medicaid benefits: "They shouldn't be going to a 29-year-old guy who's living in his mom's basement choosing not to work." pic.twitter.com/Sj0LvuICTI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 3, 2025

Scalise: "The 35-year-old who's sitting in his mom's basement playing video games is gonna have to go get a job again." pic.twitter.com/Bin5giWID0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2025

Mariannette Miller-Meeks: "If you choose not work, then that is your choice. You need to take some responsibility for yourself instead of asking your 55-year-old neighbor to keep working so you can get free stuff." pic.twitter.com/qK6xQeQMxx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 3, 2025

COMER: There are people on Medicaid in America who are here illegally. There are people on Medicaid who look like me. They're able-bodied. They’re not working. We got to get people especially in states like Kentucky who are able-bodied off Medicaid pic.twitter.com/xowqalXrI8

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 3, 2025

I should be happier about this moment.

Six months ago, I predicted a lot of this would happen when I was a still an enthusiastic Trump supporter and a MAGA Republican. I said there would not be a war with Iran and that any potential conflict with Iran would stop short of regime change. I said that budget reconciliation would be used to extend the Trump tax cuts and to pass a major border security bill which would fund the border wall. I said that whatever legislation that emerged from the Senate would have to be approved by the Senate parliamentarian who indeed struck down multiple sections of the Big Beautiful Bill. I said that Trump would succeed in bending Congress to his will. I said that mass deportations would happen. I’ve said for months this would happen after Congress passed the Big Beautiful Bill which would create a beefed up ICE.

Looking ahead, I said that “trans rights” would take a major L at the Supreme Court, which indeed happened two weeks ago. The Supreme Court has gone further than I expected and curbed anti-White discrimination, struck down universal injunctions by district court judges and cleared the path for Trump to deport illegal aliens to third party countries. The Supreme Court also ruled in favor of Texas and against the pornography industry and in favor of parents who want their children to opt out of school lessons with LGBTQ books. This was a great term for the Supreme Court which is usually blighted by at least one bad decision like the one in 2023 on Alabama violating the Voting Rights Act.

Over the course of May and June, I have soured on MAGA because of a number of things which have irritated me and have caused me to grow more suspicious of Trump:

• The first red flag was the executive order he signed which resumed collections on student loans. He threw in his lot with scumbag debt collectors. Is this populism?
• The second red flag was bombing Iran for Israel, deferring to Netanyahu who started the war on his own initiative which he had planned for months and then lying about our involvement in what was always a joint U.S.-Israel military strike. He used negotiations to deceive his own base
• The third gigantic red flag was the tsunami of hysterical war propaganda which was used to sell the strike to the public. I personally don’t care about Iran’s nuclear program and Operation Midnight Boomer and Iran’s response were coordinated. Both sides notified each other in advance of the impending attack. No one was harmed. It could have been waved away as the meaningless Syria strike in 2017 were it not for the ludicrous claims that Iran was “two weeks away” from nuking New York City and we had to stop a “mushroom cloud” in the homeland.
• The fourth red flag was endorsing people like Lindsey Graham while working with AIPAC to purge Thomas Massie from Congress
• The fifth red flag was the collapse of Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk which made him more dependent on Rupert Murdoch and Miriam Adelson
• The sixth red flag was all the qualifications to “mass deportations” of illegal aliens … only violent criminals, amnesty for farm workers, hotel workers and restaurant workers, focusing ICE on phantom threats like Iranian and Hezbollah super cells, theatrical raids in Blue cities, etc.
• The seventh red flag was the Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill which qualified all of Trump’s tax promises like No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Social Security, No Tax on Overtime as campaign gimmicks that are capped, limited and expire in 2028 while pushing through deep permanent tax cuts for donors and paying for it by cutting SNAP and Medicaid for poor people

You can add to this list a bunch of other concerns.

There is Israel’s genocide in Gaza which is an ongoing moral atrocity and my concern that the plan is to push the Palestinians into the sea and create a new refugee crisis in Europe. There is the peacefire with Iran which has barely contained the conflict and which Israel will probably violate this summer and which could suck us back in at any moment. It only took a week for Israel to drag us into its conflict with Iran. Yes, we escaped having a “war with Iran,” but we demonstrated how easy it was to get entangled in one. This is hardly reassuring given that Trump will be a lame duck president after the midterms.

The biggest black cloud that I currently see hanging over Trump’s parade, a moment which I thought that I would be celebrating, is that I get the sense that the GOP has barely changed. It is true that the base of the party has changed. It is true that we have moved the Overton Window. It is true that all kinds of things have been done to advance our agenda which I spoke about at our recent conference. And yet, the same Republican politicians have been reelected over and over again in wave after wave of backlash politics and THEY are as unchanged as Ted Cruz. THEY are the ones who will be on the ballot.

Just look at how the GOP has come across over the past month. They moved with lightning speed to force a deeper tax cut for their donors than Reagan achieved and sold it to the public with a bunch of gimmicks that expire in three years. They rushed to bomb Iran with war propaganda about “mushroom clouds” straight out of the George W. Bush era. They are all over television attacking gamers who probably voted for Trump as welfare queens and losers who are on Medicaid. These are the same young men who are the low propensity voters who provided Trump’s margin in the 2024 election. The latest news is Trump was in Iowa boasting about how he is going to do an amnesty for farm workers.

If these people cannot hold together Trump’s coalition when Trump himself is no longer on the ballot in 2026 and 2028, then all of these ICE agents who are going to be hired by the Big Beautiful Bill will just as easily be laid off with the Democrats retake control of Congress. The next Democrat president can reopen the border and let in another 10 million illegal aliens. Trump’s deportation camps will end up like his border wall in his first term rusting away in piles of debris under Joe Biden who cancelled construction. The next Democratic Congress will defund ICE, empty and close the deportation camps, but the large tax cut that Trump did for his donors will be permanent and will survive him.

I can already hear the fools lining up to dismiss anyone who raises these concerns as a “Panican.” You’re a Panican if you don’t think the GOP can win elections when the salient issues are huge tax cuts and Medicaid cuts. They’re totally going to win the next two elections without Trump on the ballot. Trump voters are actually GOP voters like we saw in the Red Waves in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. There is no reason to believe this. These are losing issues for the GOP and the 2018 midterms which were a referendum on healthcare and the same tax cuts suggests otherwise.