How Much Does Trump Still Even Give A Hoot About His Own Reconciliation Agenda?

It’s hard to imagine the GOP congressional majorities not passing Trump’s “big beautiful” tax and spend bill through reconciliation. However looking at the sausage factory now, it’s also hard to imagine it getting passed, particularly in a timely fashion. Members of the House, particularly, are already at each other’s throats, threatening to tank the bill over their own pet projects— and midterm election vulnerabilities. As weird as it is to contemplate, Trump himself is already seeing it more in terms of the midterms than in terms of an agenda!

Rachel Bade reported that “Trump’s midterm obsession is also hovering over Capitol Hill as GOP lawmakers try to write his sprawling domestic policy agenda into law. On issue after issue, Trump appears to sympathize with swing-district moderates— the “majority makers” whose races will decide the majority. Trump and his aides have pushed back on steep cuts to Medicaid in part because the politics stink. They’ve given a wide berth to blue-state Republicans who are pushing to raise the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes— a policy Trump signed in 2017 that helped sink him in suburban districts a year later… Part of Trump’s midterm infatuation is his love of the game— reading polls, making endorsements, playing kingmaker and otherwise moving pieces around on the political chess board. He ticks off his won-loss record in congressional races and loves to go deep on the details of his own campaigns. But Trump is also deeply motivated by his desire to avoid suffering through dozens of new investigations and a third potential impeachment: ‘He knows what happens if we lose the House,’ added the adviser, noting that there’s already several impeachment resolutions filed in the chamber.”

Regardless, congressional Republicans are going for the deep, unpalatable Medicaid cuts that Trump claims to oppose and that the 2026 most vulnerable swing district Members claim they will vote against when push comes to shove. The cuts as they stand now will cause nearly 9 million Americans to lose health care coverage.

Writing for the Washington Post yesterday, Catherine Rampell termed the GOP’s problems with the bill unsolvable. “Republicans,” she wrote, “have given themselves a set of mutually exclusive constraints for their upcoming tax-and-budget bill. They want to cut taxes, especially for the rich and corporations. But they also want to reduce deficits, which is at odds with those tax cuts. Tax cuts cost money, after all. Perhaps the tax breaks could be offset by huge cuts to major safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps. But Republicans claim they also want to help regular Americans, who would definitely be hurt if their health care and food assistance are taken away. There’s no way to achieve all these things in one bill.”

Some Republican lawmakers have endorsed bogus arithmetic to help move things along. That is, they want to pretend the tax cuts will be free, which would mean (conveniently) that lawmakers don’t need to pass draconian safety-net cuts to offset their cost.

Maybe that could solve their problem. But alas, the laws of mathematics can’t be suspended forever.

Regardless of what Republicans say, the tax cuts will indeed cost money. If they’re not offset with either additional revenue or reduced spending, the government will have to borrow a lot more to deal with the loss. Borrowing more, in turn, will require Congress to significantly increase the debt limit. 

Here is where things get really tricky. Republicans also don’t want to vote for a huge debt-limit increase in this bill, even though Trump has ordered them to do so.

You can see how this is getting complicated, especially given the razor-thin GOP majority in which every defection matters. If you thought the goals of the president’s trade policy were incongruous and convoluted, now imagine complex budget negotiations with contradictory goals— where the goals that are ultimately sacrificed might be determined by, say, Rep. Marjorie Traitor Greene.

Never one to feel overly burdened by reality, Trump insists his tax-and-budget package is destined for great success. He has urged lawmakers to hurry up and pass his “big, beautiful bill,” apparently unaware of the curse of unwieldy “BBB”-nicknamed legislation that nearly felled his predecessor. (Remember “Build Back Better”?)

Over the past few days, Republican congressional leaders have attempted to pare back the president’s ambitions, at least a little.

For example, Speaker Mike Johnson (LA) recently said that his GOP colleagues should now target “only” $4 trillion in tax cuts, instead of the originally planned $4.5 trillion. A $4 trillion tax cut would still release an enormous flood of red ink, but it would likely preclude delivering on many of Trump’s campaign promises— such as making the 2017 tax cuts permanent. Trump has made his displeasure known.

Then there are the Medicaid cuts.

The House committee that oversees Medicaid has been instructed to scrounge up $880 billion in “savings.” As you might expect, this will be impossible to do without kicking a lot of people off of the popular public health insurance program, which covers about 1 in 5 American.

Medicaid cuts at this scale are understandably making swing-district Republicans queasy. Some GOP lawmakers narrowly won their elections last year by fewer votes than the number of people in their district now enrolled in Medicaid.

In a bid to calm these members, Johnson has taken some forms of Medicaid cuts off the table (such as limits on spending per Medicaid enrollee or reducing the share of costs shouldered by the federal government rather than the states). But the options that are left— or at least, the ones that could still produce enough cost savings to get the math to work out— would still result in millions more Americans becoming newly uninsured, a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office found.

The most likely of those options, involving a change to taxes on health-care providers, would disproportionately hurt red states (particularly poorer, Southern states).

Who's getting the shittiest end of the stick from Trump?