The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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So I'm taping this introduction on Tuesday, July first. The Senate passed Donald Trump's big beautiful bill just moments ago. Fifty fifty vote, Vice President JD Vance, the tiebreaker. This bill, it is a bad piece of legislation. Trillions of dollars in tax cuts, very much tilted towards the rich, savage cuts to Medicaid, to nutrition assistance, to green energy. And even with those cuts, we can expect more than $3 trillion to be added to the national debt over 10 years. And I think befitting policy like that, the bill is hugely unpopular. A poll from late June found nearly two to one opposition to the bill. Vulnerable Republicans do not seem excited to run on the wreckage it's going to create. Tom Tillis, the Republican senator of North Carolina, a state Trump has won over and over again, just announced he's stepping down at the end of this term, in part over the Medicaid cuts.
But bad policy. Policy only matters if people know about it. And a lot of people don't. And hearing about this bill, even those of us covering it can't keep the whole package in mind. The Times has a great list to nearly all the provisions. I'll link it in the show description. A lot of them would be major policy fights on their own. But in part because of that, and because the Trump administration is flooding the zone with so many other major policy fights, it has been hard to focus attention on what is passing and what can actually be done about it. And so I asked Matt Iglesias back on the show to go through what is in this bill and why it has been so hard to generate the kind of political force on it that we saw in Trump's first term when Obamacare appeal went down to defeat.
Matt, of course, is the author of the Soulborne Newsletter. We spoke, I should say, on Thursday, June twenty-sixth. As always, my email is recleined show at nytimes.com.
Matt Glacius, welcome back to the show. Really glad to be here. The big beautiful, Chuck Schumer calls it big, ugly, Bill, what is your high-level description? Of how this thing fits together.
Well, you have two different versions. They both contain about five trillion dollars worth of tax cuts, of which they're trying to sort of disguise the cost and say it's more like four trillion, but it's trillions, trillions of tax cuts, mostly tilted toward wealthier people, although some for middle class, working class people. And then it's offset by cuts to nutrition assistance, cuts to clean energy programs. And cuts to Medicaid. And so there's a a lot of disagreement between the House and the Senate about exactly how to do the Medicaid cuts. And that's sort of a lot of what the wrangling's about. But that kind of broad shape of the bill, that's been the sort of locked-in framework for months.
So has Donald Trump just always been Paul Ryan in orange makeup?
I don't know. That he's exactly Paul Ryan in orange makeup, but he has always been in favor of big tax cuts. And there is some pressure to offset the cost of those tax cuts with spending cuts. The big change is that Trump made Republicans be much more cautious about cutting Medicare and Social Security. And so that means that the Trump-era Republican cut proposals fall much more heavily. On poor people specifically, rather than on the elderly, which was sort of the Paul Ryan version of this. And I think it's a really underplayed aspect because Trump has actually gained a lot more support from low-income voters than Republicans had in the past. He's changed really the image of the party with regard to how it relates to lower-income people, but the policy is incredibly unfavorable to them.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:18
2
What is the high‑level description of the “big, beautiful” Senate bill?
5:18–23:08
3
How do the proposed Medicaid cuts work and why are they controversial?
23:08–1:02:24
4
What are the main tax provisions in the bill and who benefits from them?
1:02:24–1:13:23