One former top Republican operative didn’t mince words when addressing the GOP holdouts to Trump’s megabill—all of whom but one ultimately decided to allow the bill to go toward a final vote on Thursday morning.
On an appearance on MSNBC’s 11th Hour on Wednesday night, former chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele was asked about the rushed process Republicans have engaged in to try to pass the OBBB before a July 4th deadline—so rushed that many GOP representatives don’t seem to have read the bill they will soon vote on.
“They set an arbitrary time clock,” Steele said. “Because Donald Trump wanted to do something on the 4th of July, to have a big, bad celebration. Who knows?”
The prominent Republican pundit, who was the first Black person to lead the RNC, continued to hammer congressional Republicans for sprinting toward the arbitrary deadline.
“I mean, you’ve gone beyond the budgetary process before. Why rush now?” Steele said.
The answer, in Steele’s view, lies in the president’s priorities.
“Donald Trump has put his members in a very tough spot, and that’s largely because he doesn’t care about the consequences to them,” he said. ”He’s only concerned about his ability to get a win and to prove that he owns this town.”
As Steele alluded to, polling shows that majorities of Americans are opposed to the megabill, with the most unpopular provisions being tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll from June 6th found that just 29 percent of Americans favored cutting taxes on wealthy individuals and 30 percent favored tax cuts for businesses.
Yet that polling reality hasn’t stopped Trump from threatening to primary any Republican who expresses dissent from the party line, such as Rep. Thomas Massie and Senator Thom Tillis.
The OBBB looks it will likely pass on Thursday, but with a potentially steep cost to GOP representatives focused on giving the president a victory.
Steele predicted that “a lot of members may give him that, but they won’t be back in January of [2027].”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
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