As you might have heard, the Big Ugly Contemptible Bill has passed the Big Ugly Contemptible Senate. It now goes back to the House, where the so-called budget hawks there will surely fail to show, because budget hawks always seem to migrate south during Republican presidencies.
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And then Donald Trump, even as he betrays his working-class, populist MAGA base, will sign the Big Repulsive Grotesque Bill, which doesn’t just take from the poor to give to the rich, it actually devastates poor/middle class Americans so that the next oligarch’s Italian wedding bill can maybe top $100 million.
Why is Trump betraying his base? There’s a simple answer. Because he can. And because he actually — I hope this doesn’t shock you — cares more about his rich buddies than he does about the people who elected him.
From years of experience, Trump knows the base is unlikely to ever desert him. MAGA is a cult. Trump will tell comforting lies about the Big Mendacious Lying-Liars Bill, and the base will go along. This goes back to Trump’s prescient view of his followers — that he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters.
We knew this for sure after January 6. And it was confirmed, as if anyone still doubted it, after he pardoned all the January 6 rioters, even those who viciously assaulted the Capitol police.
And now that the Congressional Budget Office is predicting that nearly 12 million people will lose their health insurance because of Medicaid cuts and that millions more will lose theirs because of Obamacare cuts, we get another chance to see if that insight holds. (My prediction: It will.)
Taking the bill in its entirety, the CBO predicts that 17 million people — and maybe up to 20 million — will lose their health insurance. That basically puts us back into the pre-Obamacare days before we made a significant first step toward universal health care, which nearly all our peer nations already provide.
This Big Bad Shockingly Bad Bill is far worse than we know.
And Republicans in Congress go along because they’re scared not to. Let’s give props to Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, who stood up to Trump, but at the cost of his job. When Tillis dared tell the truth about the Big Mendacious Lying-Liars bill, Trump threatened to back a GOP primary candidate against him. And so Tillis, in turn, said he wouldn’t run again next year, and then once again denounced the bill while voting against it.
Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, the contrarian libertarian, also voted against, as he promised to do. So did the not-always-reliably-moderate Susan Collins, R-Maine, who, if she doesn’t retire, will face a tough bid for re-election in 2026. That left the vote at 50-50 and for JD Vance, also a repulsively lying liar, to cast the tiebreaker.
Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, could have done a John McCain and thumbed the Big Hurtful Poor-Bashing Bill down. Instead, she voted for it while saying it was an “agonizing” decision and that she “struggled mightily.” Yeah, I feel bad for her, too. And I believe she thinks it’s a bad bill. But Senate leaders got her vote by carving out exceptions to cuts in Medicaid and food-assistance programs for Alaskans.
That’s nice, I guess, but there are 740,000 or so people in Alaska, as opposed to 330 million in the entire country. If my calculations are right — and I’m not guaranteeing it — Alaska has about .2% of the population, and then there’s the 99.8% of the rest of us.
Murkowski conceded that it wasn’t a good bill, adding, with a straight face, that she hopes the House will improve it. I was tempted to laugh out loud when I heard that, if only to keep from crying.
But we can’t just blame Murkowski. Where was Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who says that Republicans “can’t be cutting healthcare for working people and for poor people in order to constantly give special tax treatment to corporations”? And then he voted for the Big Bad Give-Millions-to-the Rich Bill. And where was Mitch McConnell, the born-again never Trumper, who is actually just as bad as we always thought he was?
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
Most people have no idea what is in the Big Bad Worse-Than-You-Think-It-Is Bill, and still it is wildly unpopular. A Fox News poll taken after the House passed its version showed 59% of people opposed it. A Washington Post poll showed more than a third of Americans had little to no idea what was in the bill.
Imagine how they’d feel if they did know. It is a cruel bill, in which the cruelty is loudly denied by Trump and his many enablers. Don’t believe them. In Colorado alone, more than 100,000 people will lose their health insurance. Jared Polis calls it “shameful,” which is a start in describing how harmful the bill is. All four Colorado Republicans in the House, by the way, voted for the House version of the bill.
So, let’s do a quick rundown of just how bad the Big Costly Budget-Busting Bill, which will add more than $3 trillion to the nation’s debt, actually is.
Yes, that’s adding more than $3 trillion as in $3,000,000,000,000 — with all 12 zeroes — which the Senate budget hawks pretend is not what the bill does. Who are you going to believe — Trump’s GOP enablers or your lyin’ eyes?
You see, if they were going to give a $296,000 annual tax break to the top .1%, and another $78,650 to the rest of the top 1%, they had to cut somewhere. And Medicaid — about which Trump claims he is cutting only waste, fraud and abuse — was the easiest target. And if that weren’t enough, they also made it so that the bottom fifth of earners would have to settle for a $160 tax cut.
That’s where the real fraud is, in lying about how regressive the Big Bad Backward Bill is. As conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnaru writes, it’s all one big shell game.
Taxes on tips? Read the fine print.
Help for seniors? According to a projection from the Center for American Progress, an older couple earning $21,000 a year could see their insurance bills and out-of-pocket costs rise by as much as $8,000.
Migrants? Are you serious? Who cares about migrants? Take away benefits, and you’ll need fewer ICE snatchers and grabbers to go after them. They’ll just leave, won’t they?
Clean energy? You want a bunch of windmills in your backyard?
Real costs? According to Yale and University of Pennsylvania researchers, The Big Bad Deadly Fatal bill would cause 51,000 preventable deaths a year.
We could go on and on, but what’s the point? You think Elon Musk’s promise to take down every Republican who votes for the bill — “if it’s the last thing I do on this Earth,” he said — will matter?
Maybe a few House Republican moderates, who could face a tough re-election in 2026, will actually vote against the Big Bad Immoderate Bill. Maybe a few GOP House hawks will vote against it. The House bill, after all, passed by only one vote.
But even if the House votes against the Senate version of the Big Bad Rushed-For-No-Reason Bill, with its make-believe July Fourth deadline, the bills will then go to reconciliation and the negotiators will likely come up with something … nearly as bad.
Without a Big Beautiful Miracle — which no one should expect — the Big Bad Shameful Bill is upon us.
And it’s an abomination by any name.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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