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The GOP’s Big Problem in Selling the "Big, Beautiful Bill"

Ever since Ronald Reagan's first term the Republican Party has been pushing a reverse Robin Hood agenda of enacting policies that benefit the very wealthy and large corporations at the expense of poorer and working class Americans. The wealth of the top 1% has increased exponentially even as the federal minimum wage has remained frozen and funding for social programs that benefit the the less fortunate are being cut. Indeed, NBC News has reported that "the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported . . . . that the 10% of poorest Americans will lose roughly $1,200 a year as they experience restrictions on government programs like Medicaid and food assistance, while the richest 10% of Americans will see their income increase by $13,600 from tax cuts (to be in the top 10% one needs to have an annual income of over approximately $150,000 to $235,000).  For the very wealthy, of course, the tax cuts are much, much larger.  Meanwhile, 10 million or more Americans will lose health care coverage and nutrition programs that benefit children are being slashed. Thus, it is little wonder that Republicans are having a hard time selling the falsely named "big, beautiful bill" as something positive when the vast majority of Americans will end up worse off.  To the extent most receive tax cuts, those tax savings will be obliterated by rising consumer costs thanks to the Felon's tariffs and increases in health care costs.  Those losing Medicaid coverage will be far worse off.  Little wonder Republicans are being booed and heckled at town hall and other events (Elise Stefanik was recently booed off the stage in one instance).  A piece in Politico looks at the problem selling something that is awful for most Americans.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans are facing a major obstacle as they try to tout the potential benefits of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill:” They need voters to take their word on it for now.

GOP lawmakers and top administration officials are using August to make a country-wide sales pitch for their crowning legislative achievement — a massive tax, spending and domestic policy package.

The party sees this month as crucial for gaining ground in the messaging war with Democrats over the new law, which pairs an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts with some of his campaign promises like “no tax on tips,” plus more funding for immigration enforcement and the military. The White House is dispatching Vice President JD Vance to Georgia on Thursday, where he’ll talk about the megabill’s “working family tax cuts,” according to his spokesperson.

Republicans want to be the ones to define their megabill with voters ahead of next year’s midterms, where the GOP’s unified control of Congress is at stake. . . . But the GOP megabill is less than two months old, and many of its purported boons — like new and expanded tax cuts and savings accounts for children under 18 — won’t be fully felt by voters until 2026, making it harder for Republicans to reinforce what they see as the law’s advantages.

At the same time, Republicans are going up against Democrats embarking on their own nationwide tour to denigrate what they call the “big, ugly bill” and its dire shortcomings.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) . . . . acknowledged that his own state would “pay a little bit of a price” because of changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which will force the state to cover more of the program’s cost. Yet the GOP’s efforts to preview the megabill’s forthcoming perks come as Democrats are also using August to flood the zone — including visiting red states and typically safe GOP districts — to warn about the law’s impending cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

“House Republicans have betrayed their constituents in passing the Big, Ugly Law which benefits the wealthiest few and leaves everyday families behind,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Suzan DelBene said in a statement Wednesday.

Republicans are well aware that they are facing a tidal wave of Democratic criticism heading into a midterm election cycle, when the party in power typically loses seats. While Republicans still have an edge in the Senate map, Democrats have managed to score major recruiting wins in key races and are cautiously optimistic about their chances of flipping the House in 2026.

The House GOP’s campaign arm circulated a memo late last month with guidance for how to message about the law, calling the congressional August recess a “critical opportunity to continue to define how this legislation will help every voter and push back on Democrat fearmongering.”

Since then, House and Senate Republicans have, indeed, fanned out across the country to tout state-specific benefits from their megabill they pledge will come soon. Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, for instance, visited three Iowa manufacturers as part of a tour to highlight funding for workforce and trade school training.

William Martin, Vance’s communications director, called it an “absolute disgrace” that Ossoff voted against the bill and “that’s something Vice President Vance will be sure to emphasize during his visit to Peachtree City.”

Ossoff is already offering a pre-buttal of his own: “JD promised the new GOP would fight for working families,” he said in a statement. “Instead he’s defunding hospitals, nursing homes, and Medicaid to cut taxes for the wealthy.”

While CBO found that middle-income households will see their resources grow as a result of the megabill, it’s the wealthiest 10 percent that will get the biggest bump.

Another hurdle for Republicans? They are trying to get voters to focus on the yet-to-be-fully-seen wins of the megabill while voters are distracted by other, more tangible issues: the fight over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, recent developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and a move by at least two states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the few Republicans from a district won by former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, said he’s also getting an earful about efforts by the Office of Management and Budget to freeze federal funding for widely-used government programs.

Bacon suggested Trump’s new domestic policy law is taking a backseat at home these days: “I hear more about all the grant money that is frozen by OMB,” he said.

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Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is

While the wild ongoing efforts to find an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine have succeeded in taking over the news cycles and pushing the Epstein scandal somewhat to the sidelines, it's questionable as to what, if anything has been actually accomplished.  We have a malignant narcissist in the White House who may be compromised by "kompromat" held by Vladimir Putin and who seemingly has a delusional belief that he can trust Putin who has so far played the Felon like a fine violin. Anyone sentient and not a part of the MAGA cult - which includes the European leaders who were at the White House on Monday - can see the Felon's blindness to objective reality and the long use history of lies and brutality that has defined Putin.  Indeed, Putin has been indicted for war crimes and would be arrested in many countries rather than treated as an honored guest as occurred in Alaska last week.  At the heart of the Felon's behavior are (i) an admiration of brutal dictators, and (ii) a complete contempt for the western alliance forged after WWII.  If anyone should be embraced as an ally of America it should be Ukraine and the European nations of NATO and the European Union. Instead, we see the constant pandering to Putin, an avoid enemy of western Europe and America.  A column in the New York Times looks at where we now find ourselves.  Here are excerpts:

I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks. I am trying to balance President Trump’s commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine with the utterly personalized, seat-of-the-pants, often farcical way he is going about it — including the energy that everyone involved has to expend feeding his ego and avoiding his wrath, before they even get to the hellish compromises needed to make peace.

For now, the whole thing leaves me deeply uncomfortable.

I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one when where one of the leaders — in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?

Especially when every bone in my body tells me that Trump does not get what this Ukraine war is truly about. Trump is unlike any American president in the past 80 years. He feels no gut solidarity with the trans-Atlantic alliance and its shared commitment to democracy, free markets, human rights and the rule of law — an alliance that has produced the greatest period of prosperity and stability for the most people in the history of the world.

I am convinced that Trump looks at NATO as if it’s a U.S.-owned shopping center whose tenants are never paying enough rent. And he looks at the European Union as a shopping center competing with the United States that he’d like to shut down by hammering it with tariffs.

The notion that NATO is the spear that protects Western values and that the European Union is possibly the West’s best modern political creation — a vast center of free people and free markets, stabilizing a continent that was known for tribal and religious wars for millenniums — is alien to Trump.

Indeed, I agree with Bill Blain, a British-based bond trader and economic analyst, who wrote on Monday: “However much European leaders pile on their flattery of Trump, it’s clear the fundamental bond of trust that underlay the 80-year success of the trans-Atlantic economy, that served the U.S. so favorably for decades, is now ruptured. The end of the trans-Atlantic economy will change the global economy utterly — favoring Asia and new trade relationships.”

So, it is also no wonder to me that Trump doesn’t feel any gut need to bring Ukraine into the West or understand that Putin’s invasion was just his latest march to break up the West as revenge for its breaking up the Soviet Union.

Trump is so deluded as to Putin’s nature that during his summit with European leaders on Monday he was overheard on an open microphone telling President Emmanuel Macron of France about Putin: “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”

Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”

Sorry, if Putin really prayed for Trump’s life, it is because he knows that no other American president could possibly be manipulated as easily as Trump has been. Putin is not and never has been looking for “peace” with Ukraine.

Leon Aron, a Russia scholar and the author of “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” said to me. “Putin must have Ukraine for all sorts of ideological and domestic political reasons. And he will not stop seeking it and sacrificing for it — unless the West makes the cost of the war prohibitive, militarily and economically.”

So, I end where I began: Trump and Witkoff are not wrong to want to stop the war and all the killing. And it is not wrong to be in regular communication with Putin to do that. I am all for both. But to stop this war in a sustainable way, you have to understand who Putin is and what he is up to. Putin is a bad guy, a coldblooded murderer. He is not the friend of the president. That is a fantasy that Trump chooses to believe is real.

Once you understand those things, they lead you to only one conclusion: The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart. The United States also must provide the security guarantees that would deter Russia from ever trying this again and encourage our European allies to promise that Ukraine will one day be in the E.U. — forever anchored in the West.

Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency and his deputy on the advice of a conspiracy buffoon, Laura Loomer, and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?

And the longer Trump ignores those truths, the more he builds his peace strategy — not on expertise but on his hugely inflated self-regard and his un-American anti-Westernism — the more this will become his war. And if Putin wins it and Ukraine loses it, Trump and his reputation will suffer irreparable damage — now and forever.

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Trump Buys More Time for Putin

With the ghosts of Munich in 1938 and Yalta in 1945 where dictators were coddled and nations and peoples were given away in "land for peace" deals in the minds of many, yesterday the Felon - who remains desperate to keep news cycles away from Jeffrey Epstein - met with Volodymyr Zelensky and the leaders of five NATO nations at the White House.  While no real progress was made to end Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, at the least the Felon was prevented from outright betraying Ukraine and touting a settlement straight from Vladimir Putin's lips. It is unclear where things go from this point, but one certainty is that for now the presence of the NATO nation leaders should be a part of future meetings to prevent the Felon from making a sacrifice of Ukraine to Putin. In the meantime, Putin has bought more time for targeting and killing Ukrainian civilians - in short committing more war crimes - as the Felon tries to spin matters in an effort to not lose face or seem utterly weak after his groveling to Putin in Alaska last Friday.  Tellingly, French president Emmanuel Macron has stated that he doesn't see Putin with any desire to make peace.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the current situation and the uncertainty of if and how a cease fire and settlement can be achieved.  Here are column excerpts:

The fallout from Donald Trump’s summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week continues to grow. On Friday, Trump flew to an apparently impromptu meeting with Putin, shaming America by greeting like an honored guest the man who’d ignited the largest war in Europe since Hitler. The whole misbegotten summit was likely driven more by Trump’s desire to change the news cycle (especially after weeks of anger from his own base about the Jeffrey Epstein files) than by any real chance of securing an agreement.

What happened after the handshakes, as the two men went behind closed doors in Anchorage, remains a secret, but it couldn’t have been pleasant for the American president. When the two leaders emerged, Putin spoke first and said very little of substance except to reiterate his insistence on solving the “root” causes of the conflict. Trump mumbled his way through a few minutes and took no questions. Then both presidents got on their planes and went home. Later, a haggard Trump tried to put a happy face on the failure in Alaska. on Friday night, he quietly told Sean Hannity that Volodymyr Zelensky has “got to take” Putin’s deal, implying that the United States was endorsing Putin’s demand to freeze the front lines and partition Ukraine. Such an arrangement would give Russia some breathing space while leaving it free to attack again in the future.

Trump’s attempt to spin the Anchorage meeting, however, did not sway Zelensky or several European leaders, who in an extraordinary show of diplomatic concern all rushed to Washington two days after Trump’s return. In contrast to Zelensky’s previous visit to the White House, when he arrived alone to be ambushed and insulted to his face by Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance, this time the Ukrainian president came to town accompanied by the leaders of five NATO nations, along with the NATO secretary general and the president of the European Commission. The Alaska summit was never a good idea, especially without some signal from Putin that he was actually ready to stop the killing, but the response from European leaders is the clearest evidence yet that Trump was on a path to selling out Ukraine to the Kremlin.

Fortunately, someone at today’s meeting appears to have talked Trump out of the idea of trading land for a temporary peace, an especially encouraging change because the White House already had a map of Ukraine in the room that seemed to be color coded almost perfectly in line with Putin’s wishes.

The plan—such as it is at the moment—to put Zelensky and his team in a room with Putin makes little sense. Trump believes that he can arrange a one-on-one meeting, with no mediators, between Putin and the man Putin is trying to kill every day, to be followed by a trilateral meeting among Putin, Zelensky, and Trump. The American president has backed away from his calls for a cease-fire, saying instead that he’s solved several wars without a cease-fire. . . . . Without the pressure of further U.S. sanctions or more arms to Ukraine, Putin is likely to meet Zelensky only to renew his demands that Kyiv surrender and certify Putin’s gains, an ultimatum to which Zelensky cannot agree.

Putin can easily afford to say that he’s thinking it over, and he loses nothing by humoring Trump while Russian forces continue to pulverize Ukrainian cities.

Still, it could have been worse. The Europeans, for now, seem to have moved Trump away from a land-for-peace deal, in which a grim handover of Ukrainian territories and the people who live in them would have been followed by haggling with Putin over what a “security guarantee” means. At the least, the mini NATO delegation achieved the minimum goal of stopping Trump from announcing some screwball plan to give Putin chunks of someone else’s country, and if kicking the can down the road while promising more talks averts an American-imposed partition of Ukraine, that’s good news for Kyiv.

Trump did, however, buy time for Putin, who has never been in as much of a hurry for a peace deal as Trump. Setting up a bilateral meeting with Zelensky and Putin while the fighting goes on will take a lot of planning—especially because the only thing Putin appears to want is to destroy the Ukrainian government and take over the country. Such a meeting could happen, but without a cease-fire or a basic agreement on Ukraine’s existence, it would yield little more than Putin reiterating his demands, declaring Zelensky the obstacle to peace, and then continuing the war.

Perhaps the Europeans did the best they could, stiffening Trump’s spine a bit after whatever browbeating he took in Alaska. But in the end, all of Trump’s showmanship has resulted in no substantive progress. Putin’s war continues. That said, Alaska is still part of the United States, America is still in NATO, and Kyiv remains free—and in this second Trump presidency, perhaps that counts as a good-enough day.

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Anchorage: Trump Had No Cards to Play

Other than temporarily taking the Epstein scandal out of the headlines and providing Vladimir Putin with an opportunity to remind the Felon of the kompromat that Putin likely has on the Felon, the Russia-U.S. Summit in Anchorage accomplished nothing other than putting American weakness on display. Perhaps the only thing that relieved many was that the Felon did not channel Neville Chamberlain and hand Ukraine over on a silver platter. Sadly, that attempt may happen on Monday when the Felon meets with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and leaders from Europe - something I and others hope Ukraine and the Europeans reject completely.  That the Felon has no cards to play against Putin is in large part do to the Felon's own doing as he has (i) gutted military and intelligence agency of competent officials and replaced them with incompetent ideologues and boot licking sycophants, and (ii) failed to continue to arm Ukraine. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's position of weakness and how Putin, an indicted war criminal, turned the disgraceful summit into a triumph while making the Felon appear hapless and weak.  Here are column highlights:

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians.

Anchorage will probably not be remembered as one of history’s crime scenes, a new Munich Conference, or a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that’s a very low bar to reach.

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.

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