As regular readers know, I try to keep things upbeat in this newsletter. So let me tell you what I like about The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House (barely) several hours ago.
I like the fact that it reflects the degree of seriousness with which Americans now govern themselves.
That’s satisfying. In a democracy, representatives are supposed to vote in accordance with the will of the people. If the people demand the policy equivalent of eating out of garbage cans, Congress should deliver. And it has.
The salient fact about this legislation isn’t that it’s “bad,” although it is, for reasons we’ll get into. Bad legislation isn’t noteworthy. We all expect it.
What’s striking about The One Big Beautiful Bill is that it makes no pretense of trying to grapple seriously with America’s problems, even though it’s the centerpiece of the president’s agenda.
It’s big-picture stuff. Unlike a continuing resolution hastily thrown together at the last second to avert a government shutdown, whatever the House and Senate end up sending to Donald Trump’s desk in this case will shape the next decade of American fiscal policy and define his political legacy. It may well be the only major legislation he and his party enact during his second term.
So one might think Republicans would want to seize the opportunity to put the country on the proverbial right track, particularly knowing that Senate Democrats can’t stop them under the simple-majority rules of budget reconciliation. Instead, what they’ve barfed up makes sense only as a sort of formal surrender of America’s status as a serious country.
It reminds me of the New York magazine story that went viral a few weeks ago about rampant cheating among college students using artificial intelligence. Letting a computer generate your work product isn’t something you do if you’re striving to improve yourself by learning the material. It’s something you do when you don’t care about self-improvement and are living only for the moment, hoping to pass the class by whatever means.
House Republicans have given up on trying to improve the country. All they wanted was to pass the class, which they did this morning by a single vote on the House floor. The One Big Beautiful Bill is to legislation what an AI-generated essay is to education.
Meditate on this: When I call it “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” I’m not mocking the president by mimicking his habit of speaking in dopey Trump-ese. I’m using the official name given to the bill by House Republicans. American government has become so self-consciously unserious that it’s now advertising that unseriousness in how it refers to its own policies.
A fiscal and political travesty.
Handed total control of government last fall, the best the GOP could do in the House this week was move a package that will produce another $3.1 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (Other estimates are more pessimistic.) The United States is currently on pace to reach its highest-ever level of national debt as a percentage of GDP by 2032, exceeding the benchmark set 80 years ago when it was borrowing like mad to fund the biggest war in history on two fronts. Incredibly, a House bill written and passed by Republicans will accelerate that timeline.
And this can’t be stressed enough: $3.1 trillion is the best-case scenario.
That number is based on assumptions of steady economic growth and low-ish interest rates in the U.S. over the next decade. Such things can no longer be taken for granted after the president started the dumbest trade war in history, raising the risk of a global recession and spooking bond markets. It is insane that the House would respond to spiking anxiety about America’s fiscal stability by piling on even more debt, knowing how investors were bound to react. But it has.
A few days ago, economist Jessica Riedl noted that if interest rates settled at 4.5 percent over the next 30 years instead of the 3.6 percent assumed by CBO, our country would be on the hook for an additional—deep breath—$40 trillion in interest payments during that period.
Once upon a time, an argument on the right for elevating Trump was that he would throttle the RINOs who were forever promising to balance the national books before wilting when given the chance. Making America great again would require making America solvent again and he was just the man to do it. The reality this week was precisely the opposite: Fiscal conservatives, not RINO spendthrifts, were the ones muscled into compliance by the president.
The bill also amounts to a political betrayal if you take populism seriously, which, of course, you shouldn’t.
Ideologues like Steve Bannon warned Republicans not to slash Medicaid, knowing that millions of lower-income voters who rely on the program have swung right in the Trump era. Trump himself told the House GOP earlier this week not to “f— around” with the program beyond cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the eternal scapegoat for officials who don’t want to reckon seriously with the country’s fiscal predicament.
Unfortunately for Republicans, there was nothing else in the budget they could realistically cut that would produce big savings without triggering a political backlash. Medicare, Social Security, and defense are off limits for now (but not for long!) and interest payments on America’s debt are non-negotiable. So in the end, they had no choice but to f— around with Medicaid: The new work requirements and paperwork standard for the program set forth in the House bill are projected to push 7.6 million blue-collar enrollees out.
A populist failure.
That would be defensible in populist terms, perhaps, if most of the other economic benefits under the bill were set to accrue to the working class. They aren’t.
Per CBO, the reforms to Medicaid and food stamps in the legislation mean that the poorest 10 percent of Americans will see their overall household resources decline as a percentage of income over the next decade, while the richest 10 percent will see their resources rise. The tax cuts under the bill will save a family that earns under $50,000 annually less than $300 in 2027, not quite a dollar a day.
The closest thing to a real populist victory in the legislation is the new “no tax on tips” provision, keeping a promise that Trump made as a candidate last year. But that’s a gimmick, 99 parts pandering to one part serious policymaking. No one can explain logically why the restaurant staffer who brings your food to the table should get to deduct part of his earnings while the person who prepared it shouldn’t. It’s simply a legislative bribe to hospitality workers, most notably the ones who wield outsized electoral influence in the important swing state of Nevada.
My guess is that the president hasn’t given a moment’s thought to the policy implications of “no tax on tips,” any more than he knew precisely what he meant when he told Republicans not to “f— around with Medicaid.” (For the record, they didn’t know either.) Last year at a rally in New York, he promised locals that he would lift the existing cap on federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes; this week, desperate to win over recalcitrant fiscal conservatives in the House, he decided he was against lifting the cap after all. None of this means anything to him in policy terms.
As with the students using AI to cheat, it’s all about earning a “win.” The details are irrelevant.
Even the process by which the bill passed was a travesty. “If something is beautiful, you don’t do it after midnight,” Rep. Thomas Massie, one of two Republicans to oppose the bill, said of the wee-hours floor vote this morning. The Rules Committee that advanced the legislation earlier this week also met overnight, before the final bill was drafted or negotiations between the various factions were complete. Longtime Republican legislative aide Brendan Buck said he’d never seen such a thing, and no wonder: Traditionally, conservatives have demanded at least 72 hours to consider legislation before it’s voted on so that they’re not left rubber-stamping bills on the speaker’s say-so.
The most one can say in defense of all of this is that everyone involved understood that the House bill won’t pass as-is in the Senate. A fiscal hawk like Rep. Chip Roy could justify voting for it simply in order to trigger negotiations with the upper chamber, reserving the right to oppose a final compromise if it doesn’t pass muster.
But if you believe there’s a chance of that final bill going down, I wonder if you’ve paid any attention to politics since 2015. Members of the president’s party are not going to snuff his signature legislation at the finish line on the grounds that it’s garbage from tip to tail. To do that, they’d need the support of their constituents, and their constituents emphatically do not care about the long-term solvency of their country. What they care about is Donald Trump getting what Donald Trump wants, whatever that might mean for America’s trajectory.
They’ve given up on self-government, so their representatives have given up on it too.
No tomorrow.
A party that treats “American greatness” as its north star is a party that should be especially attuned to the long-term consequences of policy.
Greatness isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t achieved in a day, as the president has recently discovered. If you want to maintain the decadent and ultimately unsustainable status quo, you elect Democrats. If you want to do the hard stuff that brings about an American renaissance, you elect Trump. The left doesn’t care what the country that our children will inherit looks like. The right does, supposedly.
Trump often rationalizes his policies in terms that are forward-looking. When he asks kids to make do for now with two dolls instead of 30, he’s asking their parents for patience with his trade policies. It will take time, you see, for businesses to suffer enough financially that they’re forced to begin manufacturing their products in the United States to avoid tariffs. The same goes for immigration. Ridding America of parasitic foreigners won’t happen overnight; the country must prepare itself for a long and “bloody” story.
He has a clear vision for America, and the other party very much does not. When he makes a move on policy, it’s because he’s thinking several moves ahead with an eye on the “greatness” that’s waiting just over the horizon.
Except he isn’t. That’s the opposite of how Trump governs in practice.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is a vintage example. The last thing America should be considering in an age of rising interest rates and shaky economic growth is piling on more debt. That’s the sort of thing you do if you don’t care what the next moves on the chessboard are relative to your own ephemeral popularity. Some House conservatives reportedly agitated for seizing the chance to crack down on spending in the new legislation in the belief that they’re destined to lose their majority next year anyway, but it seems that argument ultimately went nowhere. For the party of “American greatness,” tomorrow never takes precedence over the political needs of today.
Look back over Trump’s first four months and you’ll find other examples of that across the policy spectrum. A movement that’s thinking seriously about how to make sure that its people thrive long-term would never discourage vaccination by putting cranks in charge of health policy. It wouldn’t instigate a brain drain among government workers and research scientists by cutting off their funding for the sake of savings that haven’t actually occurred. It wouldn’t chase the best and brightest international students away from coming to America in the name of waging culture war. And it wouldn’t foolishly incentivize its adversaries to drive a hard bargain in negotiations by capitulating quickly in some cases and continuing to pressure those who’ve cooperated in others.
Even Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, his most forward-looking policy, fit the pattern. The goal there was to fundamentally and permanently restructure trade between our country and the rest of the world; he lasted all of a week before throwing in the towel, alarmed by the entirely predictable effect that enormous new taxes on foreign goods had on markets.
There’s no long-term thought to any of this. I’ve used this metaphor before, but it’s so apt that I feel obliged to return to it: Trump and his movement govern not like chess players but like Jacobins who’ve overrun a royal palace and are mid-frenzy in smashing the place up. They’re not executing an intricate 12-step plan to national greatness, they’re looting whatever they can tear from the structure. They’re lost in the moment.
Tomorrow doesn’t matter, any more than it does to the kids using AI to take their tests for them. All that matters is today.
A laughingstock.
Last week, economist Noah Smith ticked through a few of the ways in which the world’s greatest country has, shockingly quickly, become an international laughingstock.
Not all of it is Trump’s fault. America’s struggle to keep its planes from crashing into each other didn’t begin on the day he took office, for instance. But it’s remarkable how much damage he’s done to the country’s reputation in just four months, from staffing up with reckless, unqualified clowns to ruining valuable alliances for no discernible reason to indulging in corruption so blatant that visiting dignitaries can’t help but mock him for it.
If the ultimate policy endgame of making America great again is securing our country’s global preeminence over China, Trump 2.0 has backfired as spectacularly as it could have. The Chinese appear to have taken the White House’s hasty retreat on trade as evidence of the president’s weakness. Nations that once would have followed America’s lead have been forced to reconsider, not wanting to ride shotgun in a vehicle driven by a drunk. An enormous international survey published earlier this month found perceptions of the United States more negative on balance than those of China.
It will be a while before ours is a truly weak country, especially militarily (although we’re getting there), but we’ve already become an unserious country, and increasingly everyone in the world understands it.
That’s the proper frame for understanding the absurdly named One Big Beautiful Bill, the latest proof of Smith’s thesis. Compare the reaction of the grassroots right today to their reaction in December when House Republicans moved to pass another ho-hum continuing resolution that would prevent a government shutdown. In the latter case, egged on by Elon Musk, they threw a collective tantrum that temporarily derailed the bill; today, faced with legislation that would do much more fiscal damage long-term and might plausibly trigger an eventual debt crisis, they’re pleased as punch. Nothing matters except the politics: In December, the House GOP cooperated with Joe Biden to pass their bill, and today they’re cooperating with Donald Trump.
Not serious people, not a serious country. And not a country that should, or will, lead others in the future.
