This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
I’m taping this introduction on Tuesday, July 1. The Senate passed Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” just moments ago in a 50-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance as the tiebreaker.
This bill is a bad piece of legislation — trillions of dollars in tax cuts, very much tilted toward the rich, with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and green energy. Even with those cuts, we can expect more than $3 trillion to be added to the national debt over 10 years.
And befitting a policy like that, the bill is hugely unpopular: A poll from late June found nearly two-to-one opposition to the bill. Vulnerable Republicans do not seem excited to run on the wreckage it’s going to create. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina — a state Trump has won over and over again — just announced he’s stepping down at the end of this term, in part over the Medicaid cuts.
But bad policy only matters if people know about it, and a lot of people don’t. Those of us hearing about this bill — even those of us covering it — can’t keep the whole package in mind. The Times has a great list of nearly all the provisions, and a lot of them would be major policy fights on their own.
But in part because of that — and because the Trump administration is flooding the zone with so many other major policy fights — it has been hard to focus attention on what is passing and what can actually be done about it.
So I asked Matt Yglesias back on the show to go through what is in this bill, and why it has been so hard to generate the kind of political force on it that we saw in Trump’s first term, when the Obamacare repeal went down to defeat.
Matt, of course, is the author of the Slow Boring Newsletter. We spoke on Thursday, June 26.
Ezra Klein: Matt Yglesias, welcome back to the show.
Matthew Yglesias: Really glad to be here.
So the “big beautiful bill” — Chuck Schumer calls it the “big ugly bill.” What is your high-level description of how this thing fits together?
You have two different versions. They both contain about $5 trillion worth of tax cuts — of which they’re trying to disguise the cost and say it’s more like $4 trillion. But it’s trillions of tax cuts, mostly tilted toward wealthier people, although some for middle-class, working-class people. And then it’s offset by cuts to nutrition assistance, clean-energy programs and Medicaid.
There’s a lot of disagreement between the House and the Senate about exactly how to do the Medicaid cuts. And that’s a lot of what the wrangling is about. But the broad shape of the bill, which has been the locked-in framework for months, continues to be the parameters they’re dealing with.
So has Donald Trump just always been Paul Ryan in orange makeup?
I don’t know that he’s exactly Paul Ryan in orange makeup, but he has always been in favor of big tax cuts, and there is some pressure to offset the cost of those tax cuts with spending cuts.
The big change is that Trump made Republicans much more cautious about cutting Medicare and Social Security. So that means that the Trump-era Republican cut proposals fall much more heavily on poor people, specifically, rather than on the elderly, which was the Paul Ryan version of this.
And I think it’s a really underplayed aspect because Trump has actually gained a lot more support from low-income voters than Republicans have in the past. He has really changed the image of the party with regard to how it relates to lower-income people. But the policy is incredibly unfavorable to them.
This is a bill where some of the most brutal cuts fall on Medicaid users. How do they cut Medicaid?
This is part of what they’re disagreeing about. One of the big ways is that they’re changing what’s called Medicaid provider taxes. States raise money for Medicaid in part by taxing the hospitals and others who provide Medicaid services. The House and the Senate have different ways of putting even stricter, tighter rules on the use of these provider cuts.
The other thing they do is big work-requirement rules. So you’re going to have to certify that you are working or participating in some kind of work-related activity. And a lot of people are expected to fall through the cracks of that kind of system.
Really reduced spending. They’re also putting higher enrollment barriers for Affordable Care Act subsidies. And different rules around immigration status.
But the biggest ones are those provider cuts and the work requirements.
The way Republicans defend this out on the trail is: Look, all we’re saying is, if you’re on Medicaid, you should either be working, or if you’re an able-bodied adult, you should be trying to find work.
And you said people fall through the cracks. But when I talk to people who do Medicaid work, who know about how these work requirements work, they say they’re not going to fall through the cracks — that this is a very onerous paperwork and reporting requirement.
People often just fail to be able to do it. They check in with the government but then forget to one month — or don’t realize they have to. And they argue that the work requirement is a way of using administrative burden, like all this paperwork, to kick people off the program.
I think you could see there’s a mismatch in the way Mike Johnson characterizes this. He talks about: We’ve got all these able-bodied young men who are sitting on the couch all day playing video games, collecting Medicaid benefits.
But you don’t collect Medicaid benefits. Able-bodied young men are not racking up incredible medical bills, almost by definition. So for the bill to save money, it has to be cutting off care to people who are in fact sick and in need of medical care. That’s how the savings work.
It’s also easy to neglect how hard it is to fulfill certain kinds of requirements. But people who are poor, who are dealing with medical problems, who have a lot of stuff going on in their lives, aren’t always able to get all this check-box stuff done, which is why millions of people are going to lose coverage — and why it’s going to save a meaningful amount of money.
The only way to offset the cost of tax cuts is to deny medical care to people who need treatments.
I really want to underscore this thing you just said because I think you stated it very clearly: You could save money on Social Security by not having Social Security send people checks every month, but you cannot save money on Medicaid that way.
The way Medicaid has to save money is that somebody who would have gotten treatment for cancer, for C.O.P.D., for an aching back — whatever it might be — will now either not go get that treatment or somehow this person who was on Medicaid and was poor enough to qualify for Medicaid is going to pay for it some other way.
The federal government is implementing an onerous set of paperwork and reporting requirements where, if people who are already poor, sick or otherwise disorganized cannot or do not abide by them, when they get sick, they will not be able to get chemotherapy — or they will have to go into medical debt to get chemotherapy.
Like — why? So I can get a tax cut?
There’s a profound ideological disagreement. One of the things Gallup asked people: Should it be the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that everybody gets health care? And about 60 percent of the public said yes.
At the highest level of abstraction, the public has a progressive view about this, and Republicans don’t. They were not for the Affordable Care Act. The most conservative states don’t accept Medicaid expansion funds. They have tried to impose work requirements in Arkansas, for example.
So we ran the experiment: Does putting work requirements on Medicaid increase employment? And the answer was no. When they did it, employment didn’t go up. People did lose coverage, but employment didn’t go up.
And Republicans didn’t reverse course after that. They didn’t say to themselves: Oh, our goal here was to get more people working, but we didn’t succeed at that. They said: You know what? This cut the rolls. It cut spending. We’re happy with that.
That’s a free market view: If you want a television, you’ve got to pay for it yourself. If you want chemotherapy, you’ve got to pay for it yourself.
And I think that’s a morally questionable worldview. But I think it’s something that Republicans believe in pretty sincerely. But they also don’t want to articulate it in those terms because it sounds terrible.
In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney famously got caught on tape saying: Look, there’s 47 percent of this country who are just takers. They’re not paying income taxes, they’re just getting things from the federal government.
I’m paraphrasing him here, but he basically says: Look, our job is going to be harder because that’s always going to be a popular politics, and those are not our voters.
But Donald Trump won voters making less than $50,000. It is very plausible that a majority of people on Medicaid now vote for Republicans.
So I think the politics of this used to be that Republicans want to make these cuts for the ideological reasons that you’re describing. But they were cuts to the Democratic Party’s voters.
Now they are very substantially cuts to the Republican Party’s voters. They’re cuts to Republican states. They’re cuts to Republican hospitals — rural hospitals in areas that vote for Republicans and are very dependent on the care that gets financed by Medicaid in order to stay open.
This is the Republicans’ old ideology coming into conflict with their new coalition.
Absolutely. If you look at the share of people who are on Medicaid by state, there are seven states where more than a quarter of the population is on Medicaid.
One of them is New York, and one of them is California. But the other five are New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia.
And then you look at states like Mississippi and Alabama: If they would accept Medicaid expansion funding, there’s a huge, potentially eligible population share in those states.
It’s a big conflict inside the heart of Republican politics. Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky. His political swan song is really just saying what he thinks about everything. He said about this: I know my colleagues are hearing from people who are worried about Medicaid, but we have got to get this done. His literal words were: “They’ll get over it.” — which I think is not something a person running for re-election would say. But it’s very emblematic of what you’re talking about.
There’s just a conflict between the Republican Party electorate and their ideology, which has shifted in some ways but really remains focused on low taxes, on investment income, low corporate taxes and wanting to cut spending on programs for the poor.
Let’s talk about the tax side of this bill. You can cut taxes in a lot of different ways. There’s not just a giant, individual income tax cut.
What are the major things this bill does? And I don’t just mean here how the bill is tilted toward the rich or the poor. But how does it change the incentives for people to do, or not do, things in the economy?
The centerpiece of this bill is taking the temporary provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and making them permanent.
A lot of that is just small reductions in the income tax rate at every particular bracket. Some of that is an expansion of the child tax credit. And a lot of it is corporate tax breaks — different ways to lower the taxes of businesses that have large investments.
Trump then also piled on the campaign these new ideas: No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime. Those weren’t really fleshed out in the campaign in a real way, but Congress has felt the need to put some version of them in here — which is part of why Republicans are having trouble with this. Making the T.C.J.A. permanent is nonnegotiable for them, but delivering on Trump’s promises is also nonnegotiable. And so that has turned this into this very, very expensive sort of thing.
The no tax on Social Security didn’t really make it in, though, right? Because of various budget rules?
The “Byrd Rule” — yes.
I’m just going to give a very quick budget explainer before I go on.
In order to not have this be subject to the filibuster, in which case it would not pass, Republicans are using a legislative vehicle called budget reconciliation. This is now used for almost everything that’s very big. Build Back Better, the Inflation Reduction Act used it.
And it has weird rules, according to something called the “Byrd Rule.” One of those rules is it can’t really do all that much to Social Security. Other rules are that everything has to be explicitly budgetary in nature.
So then the parliamentarian goes through it, and things get challenged, and the parliamentarian decides: Is doing this really a budget thing? Or are you trying to sneak in another change and calling it a spending and tax change?
So one thing about this bill that’s a little strange, I guess, is that if you talk to conservative tax wonks, the thing that they are most excited about is the business provisions — a 100 percent bonus depreciation for equipment and domestic R&E expensing.
So these are corporate tax breaks that conservatives believe will encourage more investment and make the economy more prosperous. That totals to about $700 billion to $800 billion worth of costs. I don’t want to say that’s not a lot of money, but it’s a relatively minor share of a $5 trillion tax bill.
So the bulk of the dollar cost of the bill is repealing the alternative minimum tax, expanding the standard deduction and rate cuts in individual income taxes, and this 1099 pass-through deduction thing. Which is basically: If you own certain kinds of closely held businesses, you get to claim a huge tax cut. So for example, if you are a real estate developer or you own golf clubs, you just arbitrarily pay a lower tax rate. And then there’s a $200 billion estate tax cut.
Again, on the merits, the conservative view is that these kinds of tax cuts encourage higher levels of savings than investment in the economy. Because the people who save and invest are disproportionately very rich, it has a very skewed distributional tilt.
So they’ve also thrown in all kinds of other stuff that doesn’t have that same kind of impact. There’s a bonus standard deduction for senior citizens that’s supposed to be something that you can go to a town hall and say to, you know, grandma: This is what I did for you.
But the cost of that is $90 billion versus $212 billion from the estate tax cut.
It’s amazing the way a bill this big begins to warp one’s ability to talk about big numbers. Like: That’s only $90 billion. That’s pocket change.
Those of us who have to read a lot of Congressional Budget Office reports know there is a long-running fight over whether they’ll use something called dynamic scoring or static scoring when a bill like this has its cost estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation and — sort of but not exactly by the C.B.O.
Static scoring just totals up how much things cost. And then dynamic scoring, in theory, runs a model saying: Will this help grow the economy or not? And if it does help grow the economy, then in theory that should offset some of its cost — because a faster-growing economy creates more tax revenues that then can be put in.
The Republican argument is always that these things are overestimated in their cost because they’re using static scoring, not dynamic scoring. And we need to use dynamic scoring.
So they got, in this case, dynamic scoring.
But what happened when they got the dynamic scoring, Matt?
So the dynamic score actually raised the cost of the bill by about $400 billion.
Why did it do that?
Because it expands the deficit by trillions of dollars — which they think, in the current climate, will raise interest rates.
Importantly, this would raise interest rates throughout the economy. But it means that the federal government’s interest rate costs will go up, and that swamps the growth impact that this bill is supposed to have.
One reason for that also is that the dynamic modelers see a very muted growth impact because the big pro-growth measures are temporary. Bonus depreciation, interest rate limits, domestic research expensing — those are all extended through 2029.
So if you’re talking about changing the long-term trajectory of business investment, a temporary extension doesn’t necessarily move the needle that much. If you’re adding trillions of dollars to the debt in what’s already a somewhat inflationary environment with some upward pressure on interest rates, you create bigger costs for the federal government — but also bigger costs for if you want to get a mortgage, if you want to get a car loan, if you want to build a house, any kind of project like that.
And that’s a big difference from 2017. When Trump was president before, interest rates were superlow. So the professional deficit hawks were saying: Oh, this is bad. But the modeling was like: It’s probably fine.
But now it’s not fine. The deficit is a serious issue. And this makes it much worse.
I have genuinely not seen a big tax cut bill fail a dynamic score like this.
I know this question has a sort of naive, begging quality to it, but: There is some world in which you would have expected the cost estimate to get Republicans who are running the policy process here to stop for a minute and wonder if this bill is well designed for the moment in which they are trying to drive it. In theory, they care about the debt. In theory, they’re trying to grow the economy.
The fact that this gave them so little pause — aside from listening to Donald Trump and paying off big donors, what they’re even trying to achieve here becomes a little bit opaque. They’re not going to get more people working.
What is all this for?
Donald Trump, I think even his fans would acknowledge, is not a super-detail-oriented policy wonk. He is a person with a certain kind of feel for the vibes in the electorate.
The idea that there should be no taxes on car loan interest rate payments — I think that’s a terrible idea on the merits, but I also acknowledge that it probably sounds good to most people. So he kind of hit on some of this stuff over the course of the campaign trail, and they’re putting it in the bill. And it really raises the cost, even though it doesn’t relate to the core objectives of Republican Party tax policy designers.
And one of the things I have often lamented about the Democratic Party in recent years is that it has lacked the kind of strong leadership that can make choices and put its stamp on things.
Republicans have very strong leadership in the form of Donald Trump, and that means that nobody wants to tell him: This overtime thing, we can’t do it. It’s undermining our goals here. It’s going to backfire, even though it sounds good to people.
They don’t really want to pick and choose between these provisions. So they’ve come up with something that’s just too big to pull off unless you want to make the spending cuts even bigger and even harsher. So already they’re facing a lot of pushback and some dissension inside the caucus about what they are going to do.
If you took trillions of dollars more out of spending, you could make this work. Once upon a time, Elon Musk was claiming that he was going to find $2 trillion worth of fraud in the federal government. That didn’t happen.
The difference between the state of the world in which you can save hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent Social Security payments and one in which you can’t should alter your policies. But we’re not in that mode.
This is really a lot of money to put on the credit card at a time of high interest rates.
Because there is such a tendency for the out-of-power coalition to emphasize the deficit and the consequences of unpaid-for spending or tax cuts, I’m always trying to catch myself: Am I just doing motivated reasoning here?
But the Biden administration really did pay for the Inflation Reduction Act. That really did have pay-fors in it. Barack Obama paid for the Affordable Care Act.
How are you thinking about the debt and deficits right now? What is actually the problem? And why is it actually different than maybe it was 10 years ago? And how much does this actually then matter layered on top of that?
I remember four years ago we were talking about the American Rescue Plan, which was not paid for — deliberately. It was a stimulus measure. And some people were saying: This costs way too much money. It’s too big.
And my thought at the time was: Interest rates have been superlow forever. For basically my whole career.
So A, I sort of just don’t believe that inflation and high interest rates can happen. And B, if it does happen, the politics is just going to shift. We’re going to be back to where we were in 2011, when everybody was fanatically focused on deficit reduction — and that might be good.
And I was just completely wrong about that. Inflation did go up. Interest rates went up to get inflation contained. It became a serious concern. And then we got the Inflation Reduction Act, which, sure, it was paid for. But it wasn’t a deficit reduction bill.
And then there was nothing. There was no big speech about how we have to get everybody around the table and talk about things.
And Trump came back with just incredibly fiscally irresponsible proposals. And it’s weird, right? If you ask anyone in politics, they’ll be like: Voters are really upset about the cost of living.
And I get that it is a little bit complicated to explain to somebody why a giant deficit-increasing tax bill will raise your cost of living, but it will. Factually.
How?
Because it’s going to raise interest rates. It’s going to raise the cost of money.
Why will it raise interest rates? Explain it to me like I’m 5.
All right, here we go: So when the budget deficit goes up, the federal government needs to sell more debt. And the federal government is the safest entity you could lend money to in the universe — certainly in the United States of America.
So however much money is sort of loaned to the federal government drains the pool of potential savings that could be lent to everybody else. That’s one way to think about it: Loanable money will become scarcer because the federal government is borrowing all of it.
Another way is to look at it through the inflation mechanism. The gap between what the federal government spends and what it taxes is like extra money into the economy. That has an inflationary impact, which the Federal Reserve then has to offset by keeping interest rates higher.
So you have JD Vance and Trump and others who are on Twitter screaming: Powell has got to get the interest rates down.
And I think reasonable people can disagree: Should there be a quarter-point rate cut next meeting? Or should there be no rate cut?
But if you borrow trillions of additional dollars, that’s going to make it harder to make the case for those kinds of rate cuts. It’s also going to make it harder for these short-term rates to pass through to the longer term rates.
So if you’re talking about young people who want to buy a house, the sticker price of a house matters, but the price of a mortgage also matters. It’s a huge influence on what you can afford to do in practice: small business loans, car loans, large equipment. I don’t really think people should be financing consumer purchases with credit card debt, but a lot of people do.
So it’s going to raise costs across the board for middle-class people, take away health care from lower income people, put a big strain on rural hospital systems. We haven’t talked about the energy provisions — which are going to make electricity probably more expensive in the face of rising demand.
Let’s go back to the energy revisions in a moment.
The other thing I want to emphasize that you said there: When we talk about the cost of living in a bill like this, we tend to be talking about interest rates and inflation, just as you did.
But I do want to state the obvious, which is: If you are poor and you had Medicaid and now you don’t, your cost of living just went up. Health care becomes more expensive for you if you don’t have another form of equivalently subsidized and comprehensive health insurance sitting in your back pocket. If you were on food stamps, on SNAP, and you got thrown off the program because of these proposed cuts, food just became much more expensive for you.
Republicans sometimes try to pretend that government transfers are not real, that the role they play in people’s budgets is not real. But it is a real role.
For a president who ran promising to bring down the cost of living and also promising to balance the budget, the scale of the dishonesty and the cruelty is so staggering.
There’s a robust debate happening about the health impact of Medicaid cuts.
The lottery-style evidence tends to show a fairly muted health impact but has a small sample size. If you look at different research designs that offer more statistical power — but raise more questions about causation — the data tends to show that many lives will be endangered by these Medicaid cuts.
The skeptical analysis shows that the financial benefit of Medicaid is large. I think it’s important for affluent people not to lose sight of that. For instance, my son has been to see the doctor a lot of times over the course of his life, but he’s never actually had a serious medical problem. If we had been unable to get him medical treatment all those times, I think in the grand scheme of things, he would have been fine. But the anxiety, for parents, of not being able to take your kid to the doctor when he’s sick is extreme. If you had any ability to pay for medical care for your sick child, you would do it.
What we see is that Medicaid expansion states reduce medical debt by about $1,400 to $2,300 per person because people are more likely to seek health care when they feel that they need it.
Per person on Medicaid or just per person in the state?
Per person on Medicaid.
The other thing is that you get uncompensated care in hospitals, because we don’t actually have a system in the United States where we’re going to leave you on the street corner if you’re having a stroke or something like that.
So you are shifting costs onto foregone care by poor people, medical debt and uncompensated care for hospitals. This cost is then paid for by the insured population.
There’s this threat that hospitals will go out of business. I’m in Maine right now in a very rural area, and hospitals don’t have a ton of customers here. If they lose let’s say 10 percent or 15 percent of their customer base and have higher uncompensated care burdens — some of the facilities will just close.
Senate Republicans have discussed creating a hospital bailout fund to prevent this, but it seems crazy to me to address hospitals’ business model problems by giving them direct payments to stay in business even though they’re not treating patients, rather than just letting people get the treatment they need.
I do want to talk about the energy credits. Tell me about that side of the bill.
The Inflation Reduction Act created a lot of tax credits for different kinds of zero-carbon energy. They took what were existing investments in production tax credits for wind and solar as well as somewhat different ones for geothermal and nuclear. They folded it all together into a technology-neutral tax credit program that was made permanent.
Republicans in the House have proposed basically scrapping all of this. That would leave us with less financial support for clean energy than we had in the previous Trump administration.
The context for this is that electricity demand is going up a lot, primarily because of data-center construction. The pipeline for building new natural gas turbines has been bottlenecked — the turbines are not available. Most of the new electricity that is coming onto the grid in the United States is utility-scale solar or onshore wind. There’s going to be less of that built.
If the House version were to pass, you would also be cutting off promising speculative research in clean firm technology. So we’re going to have less but dirtier electricity and higher bills.
These were promising sources of investment.
I was just reading a story the other day about how this is throwing battery investment into turmoil. That was a pretty bright part of the U.S. economy.
We’ve done a lot to begin building the supply chains, and we consider them important. We also consider the solar panel supply chains important.
One way we were inducing those supply chains to grow in the U.S. and in other friendly countries was through tax credits. There was always a lot being done by this part of the I.R.A. It had these intense “Buy American” provisions because we were trying to onshore this technology as well as deploy it.
If you rip this up, you have the increasing climate change risk and consequence. You also risk greater electricity volatility and possibly higher electricity bills. And you’re ceding yet more to China, which is investing massively in solar and battery technology. If you look at the charts of Chinese utility-scale solar installations, it is astonishing.
This has this quality of destroying a useful part of the economy — just because they ideologically don’t like renewables and didn’t like the I.R.A.
The battery stuff, especially. Batteries have improved significantly over the course of the past five, 10, 15 and 20 years. Most batteries are manufactured in China through supply chains dominated by China. This has been a Republican critique of electric car promotion — that it will only increase the United States’ dependence on the Chinese supply chain.
Democrats tried to address this concern by investing in creating an American supply chain for batteries. Republicans, however, are not assuaged by that and now want to eliminate the supply chain altogether.
Setting aside the electric cars, if you look at the war in Ukraine or the fighting between Israel and Iran, battery-powered drones clearly represent the future of warfare. It’s genuinely dangerous for the United States to cede the battery technology entirely to the People’s Republic of China. It’s probably not viable to have a military-only battery industry, because the batteries used in military drones aren’t special. So if you have a good civilian industry, you can also have a strong military industry.
Also the amount of money at stake there is not very big. A lot of it seems like cultural identity politics.
Trump claimed in his first campaign that he was going to bring back the American coal industry. That just completely didn’t happen during his first term — but he’s making another run at it.
They’re going to classify coal as a critical mineral. And they seem to be trying to cut off all other potential forms of energy other than coal.
And wind in particular is really big in red states. Iowa, Kansas — these are places with big, empty open space that are good for building wind.
So I don’t know that there’s any logic to it — other than just an affective disdain for batteries and renewables.
They also seemed — though you can tell me if this is still true in the current versions of the bill — to be causing havoc in nuclear loan guarantees and subsidies, which are the kinds of things that might support technologies like advanced geothermal.
In environmental politics, there’s this weird divide where a few clean energy technologies fall on the other side of the left-right culture divide. Nuclear and advanced geothermal were both in that group, but now it seems like they’re slashing into that, too.
The sort of center-right or right-wing innovation types I know have seemed very unhappy about what this bill is doing to the kinds of energy they support and get excited about.
The House bill in particular does. The Senate bill reflects more input from those kinds of people, such as Lisa Murkowski and others.
In the House bill, they were going to eliminate the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office — which has been supporting most nuclear development — and cut tax credits for geothermal. Republicans tend to like these technologies more than renewables, at least in principle, but they are very speculative.
The provision of subsidies to keep investment flowing into those industries is very important. Right now, you can’t actually make money right now by investing in advanced geothermal. The hope is that, in the future, as they adapt drilling technologies to the case of hot rocks — that this will unleash incredible amounts of clean energy. But someone still needs to drill the money-losing wells today.
You know what’s interesting? We say that Republicans like nuclear and geothermal a lot more than they like renewables. I think that’s true of D.C. Republicans and Republican Party theoreticians.
But the Republican Party is closely attuned with the fossil fuel industry as such. The natural gas industry, I would argue, is more fearful of nuclear and geothermal than it is of wind and solar.
Gas sort of complements renewables. When the sun doesn’t shine, you can just turn on the natural gas plants. The whole virtue of clean firm technology is that you don’t need to turn it off when the sun isn’t shining, and that could put fossil fuels out of business.
On an interest-group level, there’s as much or more hostility to those kinds of clean firm technologies. Even though, theoretically, Republicans are more open to it.
If you go back to the inauguration, you’ll see all the tech C.E.O.s arrayed at the inauguration. And if you’ve been listening to JD Vance interviews, you’ll notice that he’s very pro-nuclear.
This influence comes from figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both of whom have been strong advocates for technology and innovation. Musk is known for his work with rocket ships, electric cars and batteries.
And that kind of promise is reminiscent of the futuristic vision associated with the Trump administration — what I would call “reactionary futurism.” People like Marc Andreessen and Joe Lonsdale embody this idea. The folk understanding of where their ideology has gone is that we need an authoritarian leader to drive us past the weak, risk-averse interest groups and fractured mess of politics in order to get to this technofuturistic technocracy we’ve all imagined.
But that just has always seemed really weak. Elon Musk went around cutting organizations like U.S.A.I.D. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which was horrible — but didn’t build a government capable of innovating in a new way or getting us to space any faster. All this stuff where you could have imagined a technofuturistic right or dark abundance right — it’s just not happening. You’re not seeing it.
I think some of that is the slipshod nature of DOGE, which was put together by people who didn’t really know very much about the federal government and didn’t seem inclined to read any books.
I think the hyperpartisan nature of Trump’s politics makes it impossible to implement these kinds of effective government reforms or futurism.
One thing both parties have found is that when you try to push things along party lines during an era of high polarization, you’re working with very thin margins. That means you can’t alienate any of the people within your coalition.
Everything ends up being a series of buy-offs, which makes it really difficult to advance a futuristic vision. You can’t drive big change —
I want to push on this. Because that’s true up until Donald Trump gives a damn himself. And then it’s like: R.F.K. Jr., a Democrat until 45 minutes ago, can be the head of H.H.S. Tulsi Gabbard is now the director of national intelligence.
If Donald Trump wanted big subsidies for nuclear energy in this bill, they would be there. What you’re saying about the dynamic is partly true, but I think it also reflects a kind of a drift.
Those people were there, but in the end, they didn’t maintain power. You don’t hear that much about Marc Andreessen at Mar-a-Lago anymore. Elon Musk, very famously, is no longer on the inside of the Trump administration. And Trump himself was never truly ideologically bought in. As for JD Vance, I guess he either doesn’t care enough to engage or doesn’t want to talk to Donald Trump about it.
The entire political economy of Trumpism is built on the fact that you don’t have a strong policy process. But if a random person can get Donald Trump to like something, he can make the Republican Party do anything he wants — including supporting things like crazy tariffs that they would have never touched at other times.
You’ve mentioned tariffs. That’s actually the one economic policy topic where Trump has persistently fought with conventional Republican Party thinking over the course of 10 years now.
That’s antithetical to this idea of a more dynamic American economy. AndtThe fact that there was a sect of futurists who were so annoyed with Joe Biden that they decided that Trump would be their champion — it never really made sense, especially in light of his profound commitment to trade protectionism.
Not just because trade is important on its own terms, but because the debate over trade protection is a question of: Are the costs of economic change worth paying for the benefits of growth and dynamism — or not?
Trump has been very clear that as long as the people paying the costs meet a certain Trumpy vision of the kind of person he likes, he doesn’t want change.
He supported the longshoremen’s union in opposing port automation because he has a longstanding personal relationship with the head of the East Coast dockworkers. And because it’s the kind of people he likes — burly white guys.
He also likes the coal mining industry. It’s very obsolete, but he doesn’t want it to be put out of business by change and dynamics. I think one should have known that on some level.
But the other thing I would say is that everything with Trump ends up being closer to base line Republican Party politics than it kind of seems at first glance. So Tulsi Gabbard is his director of national intelligence, but we bombed Iran. R.F.K. Jr. is the H.H.S. secretary, but we’re still not regulating the fast food industry.
No, we’re cutting Medicaid.
There are aspects of MAHA that kind of remind me of an Ezra Klein column from 15 years ago. But none of that is actually happening. There’s no actual taking on agribusiness concerns or any drive to transform the food system to make people healthier.
There’s no aspect of Trumpism that’s like: I’m going to take on the stakeholders in conservative politics in a really meaningful way. There’s a lot of personalism. He can push the “No tax on tips” idea onto the political agenda, but he’s not going to say we’re doing that instead of a business tax cut.
We’re not doing choice-making populism where the Chamber of Commerce says: No, Donald, you can’t do that because we need our business tax cuts. It’s more of a “yes, and” approach. Trump feels that it all worked out in the first term, and people liked that first Trump economy —
Here’s the thing about Donald Trump: Everybody knows that he has an incredible intuition for public opinion — what’s popular and what’s not. Granted, this bill has a lot of bad ideas, but at least it’s really popular in polling, right?
[Laughs.] No.
No? [Laughs.]
The polling is terrible. People really don’t like Medicaid cuts. This is a big political transformation of the past decade, that Medicaid has become dramatically more popular. A lot of people have had Medicaid themselves, or they have a friend or family member who’s on Medicaid. And they basically like it.
This has become a popular program as there has been class realignment. But as rich people become Democrats, they still feel sentimental about the poor. And as poor people become Republicans, they still like having health insurance.
This has become really toxically unpopular in a striking way — but it hasn’t received much attention. I wouldn’t say the dominant story of Trump’s first six months in government has been the one “big beautiful bill.”
It is extremely unpopular. And I’m actually surprised at how unpopular it is, given how little attention it has gotten.
You and I have talked a lot over the years about what gets called popularism. The argument is that the big problem for the Democrats is they don’t take enough popular positions or abandon enough unpopular positions.
One of Donald Trump’s strengths is that he’s done a bunch of that — moderating on Medicare and Social Security.
But there’s always been this other question: Even if you are taking a popular or unpopular position, how much attention is that position actually getting? What is politics really about? Is it about your good issues or your bad issues?
One of the arguments you’ve been making about Democrats in the past month or so is that they’re not doing enough. Or not succeeding in doing enough to make politics about this bill. Which should not be a crazy thing for politics to be about. This is a $5 trillion bill — depending on how you count it — that’s actually going to be the signature legislation of Donald Trump’s term.
Walk me through that critique. Is that a problem with the Democrats — or with the media or voters who aren’t paying attention? How do you understand the sort of failure of this bill to become the thing we are talking about?
It’s a mixed bag. On some level, it’s just harder to get people engaged in discussions about J.C.T. dynamic scoring and Medicaid eligibility rules — compared to something like our deploying Marines to the streets of Los Angeles.
That said, eight years ago, the Affordable Care Act repeal was a really big deal. There were big protests around it, largely because Democrats had built up a health care advocacy infrastructure during the A.C.A. years.
But much of that advocacy has withered over the past few years. Partly because Democrats are more focused on climate change, and partly because the “Medicare for all” wars have become an ugly pain point for people. If you go stand up and say you really want to talk about health care, you’re going to get a bunch of people saying we should do Medicare for all.
And now you’re fighting with people to your left instead of making a point about Republicans. That said, party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are talking about this a lot. They’re constantly pushing to get more people discussing it and encouraging their colleagues in Congress to engage more on the issue.
I think a big problem is that the Democratic Party is leaderless at the moment. The leadership they have is held in low regard by their own voters. And there’s a lot of interest in factional infighting. For instance, we can have debates about abundance or about Zohran Mamdani.
My Twitter feed is national, and there’s more debate right now about the New York City mayoral primary than about the actually national “big beautiful bill.”
Yes, and it’s because in a genuine way, Democrats are interested in stories that have implications for factional infighting. I think one of the ironies of this bill is that all Democrats agree on it: Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Adam Gray — the most moderate members in the House think it’s terrible and are all voting no.
The most liberal members also don’t like it, so there’s nothing to fight about. And Republicans or conservative people are pretty disengaged from it, too. They’re not making a lot of noise about it, which I think is tactically savvy on their part.
You could call it a failure of the media. I wish the mainstream media would only run articles about the things I think are important. But the reality is we’re doing business here. My articles on this subject do not perform as well as my articles on other things that have more juice.
Let me ask you about that.
When we were at Vox, we both covered the Trump administration in its first term in their effort to repeal Obamacare.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but I remember that being a dominant news story for an extended period. I’m not sure if that’s because there was less that happened in the middle of it — like us bombing Iran.
I don’t know if it was because it was a clearer narrative. I have this view that these massive omnibus bills have become harder for people to talk about because there’s just too much going on in them. I think this is actually a problem for Build Back Better, which Democrats had trouble messaging and getting people to think about because it just did 80 different things. I think it was a little bit true with the Inflation Reduction Act.
There really does feel like there’s a difference between how central the Obamacare repeal effort was in Trump 1.0 and the way attention feels like it slides off this in Trump 2.0.
I think the analogy to the Biden-era megabills is a good one.
At the time, Democrats were claiming to believe that if people were paying a lot of attention to the contents of Build Back Better, they would love it and that there would be this outpouring of public enthusiasm. They were struggling to get attention for a bill that was a very miscellaneous hodgepodge of things.
I would say that’s probably working in Trump’s favor right now. People are having trouble getting their minds around an initiative that’s not very popular.
There’s always this idea that Trump is trying to distract our attention from things. Probably they didn’t have a war with Iran for the purposes of distracting our attention from this legislative fight. But that is what happens when you do big, dramatic things on other issues and just kind of say: You know what? I’m going to trust that congressional leaders can get this done without me spending a lot of time driving attention to it. I think that might be a good strategy.
During the A.C.A. repeal fight, Trump really pivoted his messaging — talking a lot about the need to get it done and staging big, splashy events with House Republicans. He believed, as presidents tend to — and you’ve written about this many times over the years — that if a president talks a lot about something, it will make people want to do what the president is saying. But all the evidence shows that’s not true.
I think Trump is wisely not talking about this and saying it’s party politics. He can convey his opinions to senators without making it a dominant story in the news.
At the same time, I’ve been thinking about how unbelievably uninspired the Democratic messaging is on this. When I was preparing for this conversation, I was watching Chuck Schumer — or Hakeem Jeffries on the House floor, holding up an Elmo puppet.
Whether or not the C-SPAN messaging is good or bad, it’s just not the kind of thing that breaks through. Democrats have a lot of money in their campaign accounts.
You could imagine really slick videos where you’re doing the man-on-the-street thing with people who use Medicaid in very Trumpy districts: talking about what Medicaid means to them, what it’s done for them and how they would feel if it were slashed to the bone or at these rural hospitals.
I’m not saying everything would break through. But it doesn’t seem impossible to me that, if you had millions of dollars to message things, you could come up with something that would dramatize what is happening here in ways that might get some attention.
Democrats and Republicans seem to have allowed this to become an inside game in Congress, and inside games are not that attractive for people to cover. That hasn’t been true, say, on immigration stuff — where Democrats are getting arrested by ICE because they’re trying to create mass mobilization events.
I feel like the news media is always thinking about whether this thing will pass. And if it seems they have the votes, the coverage kind of turns down because we mostly cover uncertainty and conflict. But there needs to be something. And it doesn’t feel impossible to me to create interesting content about this.
It just feels like if everybody is playing by real congressional rules, then the attention goes to the things that do not work that way and have more compelling visuals and mass participation in them.
I think that the younger, especially more media savvy and safe district members are not serving their caucus goals very well. They are putting a lot of time into thinking of ways to be creative about the immigration issue and be seen as fighting Trump on the level of tyranny.
We had these nationwide “No Kings” protests that were very successful and well organized. It got attention, and there were good visuals. Those could have been “No Medicaid Cuts” protests, but they weren’t.
We know that the democracy message has fallen flat in the Trump districts. Whereas the health care stuff is shocking to Trump voters. It’s new information.
And then if you ask the frontline members what they’re most comfortable talking about, it’s Medicaid, and it’s O.B.B.B.A. But when it comes to immigration, it’s more like “eh” on this immigration stuff.
I think there is blame to be leveled at Schumer and Jeffries for the lack of creativity in their own messaging, a lack of skill, things like that. But also there are many dimensions of political efficacy. I don’t think either of those guys was ever known as viral-video guys. The members who are gaining clout inside the coalition are finding that the way to do it is through advocacy on more postmaterial issues — the kinds of things that are more engaging to Democratic donors. I don’t think it’s serving the country well or the party all that well, either.
When Cory Booker did his talking filibuster, his key message point was about Medicaid and Medicare. Obviously he talked about a lot of things because he was going for 24 hours —
Twenty-five.
Twenty-five. But that was the focus.
A lot of this goes back to this factional argument. In 2017, Democrats felt more self-confident about the party. They’re like: What brings us together is health care, and we’re going to talk about that.
And now there’s a lot of uncertainty, depression and infighting: What brings us together is health care — and that’s boring. Let us fight with each other instead.
Something I’m taking out of what you’re saying or that feels true to me: A lot of what is engaging Democrats and liberals — and, certainly, abundance has been part of this — is a working backward from 2028.
I feel Democrats’ minds are not even in 2026, in the midterms. It’s in 2028. They’re sort of disassociating, in many ways, from this moment.
Zohran Mamdani might be the exception. But people are interested in him not necessarily because they care that much about the New York City mayoralty, but because maybe he represents the future — where the kinds of Democrats that democratic socialists actually want are the ones running the party. People are doing a lot of projecting forward.
Mamdani holds forth the possibility that, in the future, Democrats will break with the longstanding bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. And that’s interesting.
You look at something like the New Jersey gubernatorial primary — it was just a bunch of Democrats running. Mikie Sherrill won. Good for her. I like her. She’s against Medicaid cuts. But so is everybody, right? It’s just about New Jersey, and therefore people are appropriately not interested unless they happen to live there.
But what happens between now and 2028 is important for millions of people. It would be good to get some more focus and some more attention on it, even though it doesn’t connect to “blue sky” questions or questions about what the future of Democrats will be.
Everyone agrees that the future of Democrats is that they’re going to support progressive taxation and a social safety net. I actually think that’s important and the actual foundation.
Yes, it’s funny — one of the critiques I got over the past couple months that I wasn’t expecting was people being like: “Abundance” doesn’t talk about things like Medicaid or universal health care. And that supposedly shows you don’t care.
But it’s like: No — I just thought that was settled. I didn’t think I needed to edit my support for Medicaid or universal health care.
It’s a great example. If you had put a chapter in the book where you talked about how Medicaid is good and we should have incremental expansions of health care access, people would have read it and thought: That’s a boring chapter. Why is it in the book? It’s not good content to reiterate Democratic Party conventional wisdom.
But there are millions of people with health care on the line, and it’s important to find ways to talk about and get people engaged.
But there’s so much investment in: What does this mean for 2028? What are the prospects for generational change in the Democratic Party? That’s interesting to people.
I’ve honestly heard more about the David Hogg infighting around the Democratic Party and primarying older Democrats.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the dynamics that sustain attention. You get attention on one thing. There have been plenty of tweets on this or a video or floor speech. But the question of: How do you sustain attention? It requires people arguing about a thing.
And the other thing that I think is real here is the dynamics of social media algorithms, which means that people are mainly talking to others within their coalition. And so arguments happening within the coalition are very salient. And then arguments between the coalitions are much less so — there’s less engagement between the two sides.
The things that they debate become a big deal during an election. But in off times it actually creates this sort of weird dynamic where it’s like all the Democrats are against this.
You’re an attentional merchant. What do you think would make this more salient?
What do you think the actual hooks of it are?
I do think, obviously, Medicaid cuts and hospital closures are good.
Good for getting attention — not that you’re super pro Medicaid cuts, right? [Laughs.]
Yes, it’s the attention-grabbing part.
Republicans and conservatives writ large have been pretty disciplined about not debating this kind of issue in a way that’s a little bit challenging to deal with. I do think that it would be helpful to have more of an affirmative agenda on health care, something people could actually talk about and argue over.
If you could get people together on the same issue — how we want to make health care more affordable for the American people — because they want to make it less affordable — then you can have a somewhat more focused and structured argument that hopefully gets some people on the right to articulate their opinions about this. Otherwise, it’s too easy to sort of let things slide.
You raised the point that political media is a very interested in process and in wins and losses. The Republican Senate margin is just big enough that I don’t think anybody thinks: This is not going to pass.
The question is: What will this be? The House majority is thin, but House moderates have never blocked a bill, as far as I can remember. I’m sure it happened in the 1870s or something, but it has always been Senate moderates who have more independent stature, or are sort of known in their home states. But we’re no longer in a mode where Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and one other person can block this thing.
Josh Hawley wrote a piece in The New York Times saying that the Medicaid cuts were bad.
There’s a weirder dynamic here and a more exploitable dynamic than just: Democrats like Medicaid, and Republicans don’t.
A bunch of the rising populist generation of Republicans think they shouldn’t be doing this, and have clearly just been cowed into submission.
I think that’s right, and it should be a good opportunity for things.
I saw, for the first time this week, Medicaid protesters at the Capitol. People in wheelchairs were getting arrested and zip-tied to chairs — to keep the Capitol safe, I guess, from people who can’t walk.
You know how seriously Donald Trump and the Republicans take the safety of the U.S. Capitol.
The integrity of the U.S. Capitol has always been his top thing. So maybe it’s just about to begin now, this mobilization.
I think a great thing for Zohran Mamdani to do would be to spend some time talking about a big consensus issue.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is: In whose interest is it to facilitate a lack of factional infighting? And it’s the guy who just won the contentious primary. He already won. Now he needs is to remind people who didn’t vote for him of all the stuff they agree with him about.
It’s just an amazing revealed insight into how weird the dynamics of political attention are. Because I’m not saying you’re wrong — you’re right. But it’s obvious to both of us that it would be more meaningful for the 33-year-old assembly member who won a New York mayoral primary to really engage on this Medicaid bill than for all of the Democratic politicians who actually hold office and might have a vote. [Laughs.]
There’s something about the way attention does not accrue to power that’s really interesting. Hakeem Jefferies can’t get people to pay attention to this, and he’s the minority leader in the House.
I agree with you: Zohran Mamdani could. A.O.C. has obviously been messaging about it, but I think she could focus on it more. Attention is just such an unevenly distributed capacity.
Yes, and you know this old saw: Dog bites man and man bites dog. Of course the Democratic leaders are saying this is bad.
Jimmy Kimmel played an important role in the A.C.A. repeal fight —
With his story about pre-existing conditions.
Yes. In part because he’s not a very political person. So when he decided to talk about something, it was like: Oh, my God, Jimmy Kimmel! I agreed with the point he was making, but it’s not like nobody else had ever thought of that in the preceding 10 years of talking about this. [Laughs.]
It was just: You heard from somebody fresh and somebody famous making a really sort of banal point about the importance of those pre-existing conditions regulations.
Everybody likes to talk about who is and isn’t going on “Joe Rogan.” Where’s he at on Medicaid cuts? I don’t know, and that’s interesting.
Obviously I hope everybody listens to “The Ezra Klein Show” and talks about this with their friends. Because one of the things about attention in a social media era is we’re not passive, helpless victims of the attention economy.
We decide to an extent what to pay attention to. What to give hearts on, what to argue about, what to retweet or what to discuss with our friends. Part of the message here is the metamessage.
You, the listener, ought to try to increase your personal level of engagement with this topic and with content related to it — rather than being monomaniacally focused only on factional positioning for the future.
It’s good to talk about abundance — I think it’s important. It’s good to talk about the housing legislation that’s pending in California — that’s a big one. But we also need to talk about aspects of consensus.
I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Laura Spinney’s book “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.” It’s about the rise of the Proto-Indo-European language. That’s a really good one.
“Wuthering Heights,” a classic novel that I just finished.
I also revisited Paul Starr’s classic “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” because I’ve been trying to get my attention back on the health care issue.
Did you really? Or are you just saying you did?
No — I picked it up, and I was reading through it. I wanted to read about the origins of our path-dependent health care system.
I will tell you: I did not do a cover-to-cover reread.
That book is great.
And just while we’re discussing old health care books: If anyone wants to read a book about how differently health care and policy processes work — something you and I talk about sometimes when we get together is that it feels like there’s no policy process anymore. But David Broder wrote a book about the 1994 health care fight, the Bill Clinton health care fight, called “The System.”
If you read that book and about how much energy went into the crafting, debating, recrafting and redebating and committee members and everything of the Clinton health care bill — and then you think about the insanely slapdash way a giant bill has been put together now: barely debated, with things traded in and out and no serious analysis.
I don’t want to say it’s unserious — because the consequences here are deadly serious. But there’s been a real deterioration of the procedural scaffolding and deliberative structure of politics and how we make bills, particularly on the Republican side — although not only.
I think people would be more shocked by it than they realize.
Yes, because if you read Jonathan Cohn’s book “The Ten Year War,” about Obamacare, it’s not the same committee-driven process from Broder’s book. It has become more leadership-driven, but they were still very focused on the actual policy stakes.
At critical points, people in the White House say you have to do it this way for boring wonk reasons. And lots of members of Congress really don’t want to — they’re pushing them on the policy merits really hard. That kind of thing seems completely out the window these days.
Matt Yglesias, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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