Trump Got Everything He Wanted— And The Rest Of Us Are Getting Screwed

Will The GOP’s Big Ugly Gamble  Blow Up In Their Big Ugly Faces?

Trump and his lackeys are claiming the Big Ugly Bill is a huge and popular success. On Monday Charlie Sykes helped his readers understand why it’s neither- and why the GOP, “having passed a bloated grotesquerie in haste, their repentance will come at leisure as they (and their constituents) find out what is in it… Let’s start with the obvious: Trump got almost everything he wanted— including a lot of stuff he has no clue about— in this bill. He will aggressively sell all the goodies in it— along with massive dollops of disinformation. But it is and will likely remain deeply unpopular.”

“The list of losers,” he wrote, “is long, including (but not limited to) low income Americans; Medicaid recipients; the renewable energy industry, migrants, and all of the future generations who will get stuck with the tab for the massive deficits. Among the likely losers: the GOP itself, especially the alleged ‘normies’ in swing districts, who mortgaged their electoral future to the MAGA fever dreams in the BBB.”

He singled out some of the failures that allowed this. For example, 

• “Fiscal Conservatives.” The collapse of any meaningful opposition to the tumefied debts and deficits in this bill was an extinction-level event for what was once known as “fiscal conservativism.” Despite an occasional bleat and dead-cat bounce, it is dead as a political movement. To be sure the GOP record is decidedly uneven (and rank with hypocrisy), but last week’s vote showed that GOP fiscal conservativism is a figment that can no longer muster even a handful of votes in the GOP.

• “GOP moderates.” Mythical creatures. Prone to flight. When cornered will roll over and wet selves. If they actually existed, they would be an Endangered Species.

• Republicans for Ukraine. This was the moment when they had maximum leverage. This is when they could have taken a stand. Days earlier, Trump had abruptly cut off promised aid to Ukraine, even as Vladimir Putin was ramping up his daily missile/drone attacks. Allegedly, there is still a strong contingent of Republicans who do not want to switch sides in the Cold War. They could have demanded that America keep its promise before passing the spending bill. But on the final roll call, they were invisible.

• Elon Musk. How much clout does the world’s richest man have in Trump’s party? None. Nada. Zip. The former DOGE master railed against the bill as a travesty and a disaster. He threatened to fund primary challengers; he promised support for dissidents. In the end, only two members of the house GOP voted against it. In other words: Elon’s new political launch had a rapid unscheduled disassembly.

• Lisa Murkowski. Just pathetic. After she cast the decisive vote to pass the MegaMagaBill, she offered this bit of disingenuous naivete: “We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” Murkowski told reporters. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.” But she did not even get a mess of pottage for her surrender. As I wrote the other day:

  
  

  “And so ends Murkowski’s brief stint cosplaying as a Woman of Principle. And I would argue that makes her even worse than other collaborators and toadies.

  
  

  “She pretended to be better; and might have been. But it was all bullshit. She could have been a John McCain. Instead, she chose to be a low-rent Lindsey Graham.”

  
  

• Never Trump. (And, yes, I do own a mirror. Thanks for asking). Nine years ago it was possible to identify a viable, principled remnant in the Trumpified GOP. But, at least among elected Republicans, it is like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch: passed on; ceased to be; expired; gone to meet its maker; stiff, and bereft of life. There are no Mitt Romneys, Jeff Flakes, or John McCains around anymore. No Liz Cheneys or Adam Kinzingers left. In 2025, despite its constituency in the media, the Democratic donor class and independents, Never Trump cannot muster a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. (And, no, I did not enjoy writing this any more than you enjoyed reading it.)

• The Democrats. This is why you have to win elections. But even in a closely divided Congress, it’s worth asking why the Democrats were unable to peel off more votes from a bill that is so manifestly unpopular.

Speaking of which, Jason Furman is the epitome of an establishment Democrat. He was chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers for the entire second term. Monday the NY Times ran an opinion piece about how the Democrats can start to undo the damage Trump is causing with his Big Ugly Bill once they are back in power, presumably 2029. “The consequences,” he wrote, “for health insurance, poverty, climate change and macroeconomic stability, in roughly that order of importance, will be horrendous. The Medicaid and other health care changes would undo about three-quarters of the coverage expansion from President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion [largely designed by Furman thus avoiding Medicare for All]. The law repeals much of what Joe Biden did for climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act. The tax provisions sustain most of the cuts from Trump’s first term and add in several others for good measure.”

He suggests that the bill’s “unpopularity alone does not mean that Republicans made a mistake by passing it. Legislating requires hard choices and leadership. Obama overrode political advisers to pass the Affordable Care Act despite warnings that it might hurt his party in the midterm election (which it did). Nothing gets done if we live by short-term polling. Democrats and even some Republicans are already thinking about how to fix the problems this law is creating. It will not be easy. Unlike the Bush and Trump I tax cuts, the major provisions here are permanent, so there is no expiration date to provide leverage for opponents. Even worse, the few tax cuts that will expire— like no taxes on tips— seem to be just as popular with Democrats as with Republicans.

After Bush passed reckless tax cuts, and again when Trump did so in his first term, the opposition’s goal was to simply repeal them, restoring revenue that could then be used to fund new initiatives or close the deficit. This time around, things could be more difficult. Fixing the damage that the Trump bill will inflict on health care, poverty programs and clean energy will cost a lot of money: trillions of dollars that will have to be achieved through savings lest they add even more to the swelling debt.

That’s going to make the political hurdles even higher— and the lessons of this last round all that much more crucial. Don’t get bogged down in details; focus on the idea behind the details. Don’t be overly timid; not everyone is going to be a winner, and getting past this is going to require raising taxes on more than just the top 1 percent. And as much as I hate to say it, don’t be too beholden to the wonks, though some of us are really pretty nice.

This is what it looks like when a movement has no soul. The Republican Party passed the Big Ugly Bill not in spite of its cruelty, but because of it. It was a declaration of values— if you can call them that— written in tax cuts for billionaires, slashed benefits for the poor, and giveaways to polluters. They didn’t just fail to read the bill. They didn’t care. For Trump, it’s a branding exercise; for his enablers, it’s a final betrayal of everything they once pretended to stand for. And if you're waiting for a redemptive moment when so-called moderates reclaim their party, don’t hold your breath. They're not coming. They're long gone. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Don Bacon (good riddance), Juan Ciscomani, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Tom Kean, David Valadao, Young Kim, Ann Wagner, Tony Gonzales… were never— and will never be—on the side of working families.

Democrats need to start leading with clarity— not with GOP-lite candidates like Rebecca Goode (WI-03), Stephanie Murphy (FL-Sen), Christina Bohanan (IA-01), Ryan Crosswell (PA-07), Jasmeet Bains (CA-22), Janelle Stelson (PA-10)— and with guts and a willingness to make the case that reversing this grotesque law will require taxing the rich, spending big, and fighting harder than ever for the people left bleeding by this bill. The next governing majority has to not just clean up Trump’s mess but expose the rot that made it possible. Otherwise, the Big Ugly won’t be a one-time disaster— it’ll be a permanent reality.