There will be many short- and long-term consequences if Republicans succeed in passing President Trump’s signature policy bill, as they aim to do before the July 4 holiday, David Leonhardt, the director of the Times editorial board, tells the national politics writer Michelle Cottle in this episode of “The Opinions.”
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle and I cover national politics for Times Opinion. So with the July 4 weekend looming, I thought we’d talk about a different kind of fireworks: that is, President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and as always, I hope the air quotes there are audible for everybody.
But that bill looks like it is on track for passage. From Medicaid cuts to tax breaks for the rich, it is a lot. Thankfully with me to talk about this is David Leonhardt, the fearless director of the New York Times editorial board, who has some very pointed thoughts on the matter. So let’s just get to it. David, welcome.
David Leonhardt: Thank you, Michelle. It’s great to be talking with you.
Cottle: I’m so excited, but warning to all: We are recording on Monday midday and even as we speak, the Senate is brawling its way through to a final vote. So the situation is fluid and could change the details by the time you all hear this.
Before we dive into any of those legislative juicy bits, David, I have to ask: Did you think this bill would lead to at least two Republican lawmakers announcing they will not be running again?
Leonhardt: I did not, but it is a pretty good sign of the deep tensions within the Republican Party about this bill. I think this bill is ultimately going to pass because when in doubt, you should bet on the Republican Party cutting taxes for rich people, and that’s mostly what this bill is. So I do think it’ll pass, but underneath that prediction, there are huge tensions within the party about what exactly it should look like.
Cottle: OK, so that takes us into the meat of the bill. I couldn’t help but notice that you have written not one, but two recent editorials taking this apart. Why does this bill, among so many not great bills, merit this attention?
Leonhardt: We’ve written two editorials about it focusing on what I think are two of the three big things that people should know about the effects of this bill. One of those editorials, that our colleague Binya Applebaum particularly worked on, looked at this idea that the bill really is going to cut health care for millions of people and it’s going to do so in a technocratic way — which is, the bill will introduce work requirements for Medicaid.
I actually understand why, at a top- line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.
But health care is different, and I don’t think we want to live in a society where in order to get health care, you have to have a job. That’s not the way other rich societies organize themselves. Obamacare helped us make progress toward the idea that you can get health care even if you don’t have a job. And so what this bill would do is, it would say more often, in order to get Medicaid, you have to prove that you’re working.
And in the experience of states like Arkansas that have put in place versions of this policy, it turns out that often people who already are working just struggle to prove that they’re working because forms are difficult, because government bureaucracies aren’t always that efficient. So what ends up happening is that not only does it take health care away from people who aren’t working and need health care, but it even takes health care away from people who are working, just through bureaucratic error. One of the main ways this bill saves money is by taking health care away from people who actually should be getting it — even by the bill’s rules.
Cottle: So we’re looking at, like, 11 or 12 million people is the estimate for those who are going to lose their health care, right?
Leonhardt: Yes. We don’t know exactly. These are forecasts, but we are looking at millions and millions of people. We are looking at a very significant retreat of the progress under Obamacare, and I think it’s important to remember that in President Trump’s first term, he and congressional Republicans said they were going to repeal Obamacare. They failed at doing that because there was a grass-roots movement led by disability-rights activists, led by other political organizers, that made the repeal of Obamacare so unpopular that a few Republicans, most notably John McCain — the famous thumbs-down vote late at night — led the repeal of Obamacare to fail.
And now, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, they’re not repealing Obamacare, but they’re basically undermining a large part of Obamacare while claiming otherwise. So they are basically doing a soft repeal of Obamacare and not telling the truth about it.
Cottle: OK, so there has not been a huge public outcry so far, at least not the size that you would think with this coming. Do you think Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening?
Leonhardt: That’s an interesting question. There certainly has not been as effective organizing around this bill as there was around the Obamacare repeal eight years ago. And I think there are a few reasons for that. I think one is, the Republican Party has gotten smarter, in a cynical way, about how to minimize opposition. So a lot of Republican members of Congress just aren’t holding town halls right now because they know that if they did, they would both get ordinary voters yelling about this and they would get activists showing up and doing big demonstrations.
But I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.
Having said that, this bill is deeply unpopular. I do think it’s likely to hurt Republicans in the midterms. It is not popular to take health insurance away from middle class and poor people, and I think they are going to pay a political price for this even if we don’t yet know how big that political price is.
Cottle: Do you want to venture a reason why they’ve been so committed to focusing on these health care cuts? Because this is one of those things that it just seems like it should have been too toxic for them.
Leonhardt: Yes, so I mentioned a few minutes ago that there are three big things that I think people should know about this bill. And the second is the answer to your question. The Republican Party really wants to cut taxes for rich people, and if you want to cut taxes for rich people, you have to go find money to help pay for those tax cuts. And despite all the talk you hear of government waste and foreign aid, there’s not a lot of money in easily identifiable government waste or foreign aid.
And so, like Willie Sutton said about the banks: You have to go where the money is. And where is the money in the U.S. government budget? It’s basically in three things: The military, health care and Social Security. There are some other things as well — anti-poverty programs, agriculture — but those are the big three ones.
And so they’re not going to go after military spending. And actually, I don’t think they should. I don’t think the U.S. is spending too much on the military right now. It’s a different subject and I understand some listeners will disagree with that. They’re not going to go after Social Security. They’re not going to go after Medicare. And so by process of elimination, that leaves them going after Medicaid, which is health insurance for middle-class and poor people, and they’re going after that in order to pay for tax cuts, not exclusively for rich people — the tax cuts will be broader than that — but disproportionately for rich people.
In a one-sentence summary, this bill takes away health care from middle-class and poor people, and uses the money to pay for tax cuts mostly for rich people.
Cottle: But I’ve heard them discuss it, and I think this speaks to your point about them getting cynically smarter. They’re always pitching this as, oh, it’s just a way to weed out fraud. Fraud is like the answer to everything they have: We’re going to just do everything in the world by weeding out fraud.
Leonhardt: That is the way they talk about it. They’re absolutely trying to package this as just going after fraud, but it’s our job to obviously not let them get away with misleading packaging. So if we’re going to say it straight: They’re taking away health care from poor and middle-class people to pay for tax cuts, mostly for rich people.
There are even some Republican voices who acknowledge the reality of what this is doing. And I would really recommend the guest essay we had in our own pages by Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican. I would also recommend what Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carlona, has said about this.
Audio clip of Thom Tillis: So what do I tell 633,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off Medicaid?
Leonhardt: And what Tillis just said was, this will take health care away from people.
Audio clip of Thom Tillis: We owe it to the states to do the work to understand how these proposals affect them. How hard is that? What’s wrong with actually understanding what this bill does? Mr. President, we owe it to the American people and I owe it to the people of North Carolina to withhold my affirmative vote until it’s demonstrated to me that we’ve done our homework. But until that time, I will be withholding my vote.
Cottle: OK, before we get any deeper into the details, I wanted to just touch on this Thom Tillis thing, where he has announced that he is not supporting this bill, but along with that, he will not run for re-election. Whereas you also cited someone, Josh Hawley, who had been saying that he just cannot abide the Medicaid cuts and yet, Josh is folding because he is not leaving the Senate, which has folks wondering about the spinal fortitude of anybody looking to stay in the Senate these days. It does strike me that what’s different here is that people talk about TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out. I’m more along the lines of CRACO — the Congressional Republicans Always Chicken Out — because for all of their values or priorities or whatever, they just do not want to go head-to-head with Trump and get the beat down like Tillis was about to go in for.
Leonhardt: I think I agree with you, although I also think CRACO sounds not nearly as tasty as TACO. I’m not even sure what a CRACO would be. But yes, I think that’s right. I think that in Trump’s Republican Party we have really seen that it is virtually impossible, for now, to oppose him in a high-profile way and to keep your job.
So the list is Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake and it’s obviously Liz Cheney — and now it’s Thom Tillis. That is a reality, but I still think it’s worth taking a minute to honor a politician who decides that they have principles that are larger than simply trying to win re-election. And it can both be the case that Thom Tillis made a rational decision that he couldn’t do this and keep his job, which I think is probably the case, and we can honor Thom Tillis for saying he’s not going to play along with what is essentially a lie — that we are doing this bill and everyone will still have their health care because that’s not true.
Cottle: To be clear, I’m not really taking a poke at Thom Tillis. I’m really taking a poke at Josh Hawley and all of those other “so deeply concerned” Republicans who just have so many problems with this bill, but fundamentally are going to just roll over like they almost always do.
Leonhardt: I do think that’s an important point, which is Josh Hawley came out guns blazing: I won’t give into this, and I’m a populist Republican and the Republicans need to be the party of the working class. And in some ways, the Republicans are the party of the working class. They certainly have closer views to the working class on most social issues, but for him to then fold and go against what he himself said — in a way that is quite blatantly careerist, deserves exactly the opprobrium that you were just giving it.
Michelle: So as you mentioned, the reason Republicans are so keen to cut spending even on popular programs is that they want to extend the almost $4 trillion in tax cuts that were passed during the first Trump administration back in 2017. So what cuts are included in this bill? Can you explain the administration’s argument for why this is all such a stellar idea?
Leonhardt: Well, they’re still working through the details. The House has passed a bill, the Senate will presumably pass a bill and then the House will either have to pass the identical Senate bill or they’ll have to pass a third bill that basically reconciles the two. So we don’t know exactly, but the biggest tax cuts in this bill — as you just alluded to, Michelle — are basically extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts. And so Republicans are in a tricky situation here because this isn’t simply a matter of cutting taxes further as people would experience it. If current law remains as it is, taxes would go up for huge numbers of Americans.
And so they are in a tough political situation here. But when you look at economic history, what you see over the last several decades is slow-growing incomes for most Americans, hugely growing incomes for the wealthy and at the same time, rapidly falling tax rates for the wealthy. And so this extends this economic era of really high inequality, and this bill will make that even more true.
Cottle: So what you’re saying is, the next Bezos wedding will be even posher?
David: Exactly, or at least it doesn’t have to become less posh because the higher tax rates don’t go into effect. In fact, this brings us to the third of the three points I billboarded at the beginning. In fact, these tax cuts are so big that the health care cuts aren’t coming close to paying for them. And so not only are Republicans cutting health care for poor and middle-class people in order to pay for the tax cuts, they’re also adding large amounts to the national debt.
One of the things that we tried to point out in our most recent editorial on this is that the debt is not just a future risk. It is a future risk, but it is a current problem today. I don’t think most Americans understand that we are already spending more every year on the interest on the federal debt than we are spending on the military. So already the size of our federal debt is draining substantial resources from our government, and this tax cut is so big that it would significantly increase the debt in future years and decades.
Cottle: OK, so the Republican Party once celebrated itself as the party of fiscal responsibility and fiscal conservatism. Have you heard a compelling defense of why that just doesn’t matter anymore?
Leonhardt: I think in part the party has decided that it has not paid a big political price for not caring about the deficit. The last Republican president who cared about the deficit was George H.W. Bush, and he is remembered, sadly, for violating his “Read my lips: no new taxes” promise, and then he did violate it. He actually doesn’t get enough credit for the 1990s decline in the deficit.
But the lesson that the Republican Party took from that is that it is actually politically mistaken and damaging to raise taxes, and since then, you have had George W. Bush and Donald Trump — and Ronald Reagan did this as well — cut taxes by so much that it really does add to the deficit, they’ve essentially decided that they don’t pay a big political price for that.
They may be right about that, but I also think that there may be an opportunity here that the debt may be getting so big that there is an opportunity for the Democrats to try to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility and accurately paint the Republican Party as the party of fiscal irresponsibility.
Cottle: Do you have a lot of optimism from what you’re seeing that the Democrats can rise to this occasion? Because as chaotic as the Republicans are, the Democratic Party is having its own kind of moment of existential crisis.
Leonhardt: The easy answer is no. The easy answer is always not to be optimistic about the strategic acumen of the Democratic Party, but that’s not my only answer. This bill really, I think, will damage Donald Trump politically in a way that, frankly, some of the more substantively alarming things he’s done will not damage him.
So you’ve already heard me say that I think this is a really bad bill. It’s a big, bad, budget-busting bill. But it’s still not the same as undermining democracy, and so I think if we had to do a rank order of the negative consequences of President Trump’s policies, this wouldn’t be at the very bottom. Going after law firms, trying to quash free speech of immigrants — things like that would be much lower on the list. But this actually, I think, is more likely to weaken Trump than some of those other moves.
This notion of democracy can often feel intangible to people — particularly people who are struggling to pay their bills. Some of the things Trump is doing in other areas are actually popular. Closing the border is popular. Joe Biden’s immigration policy was so open — and led to the biggest influx of immigration in this country’s history, based on the records we have — that Trump gets some political benefits for closing the border.
But this bill — cutting taxes for rich people, cutting health care for middle-class and poor people, and increasing the national debt — it will create an opportunity for Democrats to criticize him in a way that may resonate. I don’t think Democrats can get a lot of attention right now for their criticisms, relative to the attention that’s just going to go to Republicans passing the bill. Once it passes, there will be more opportunities for the Democratic Party to make an effective case about just how bad this bill is.
Cottle: See, I totally agree with you on this. This has come up in different ways over the years, just talking about why Trump is so scary. And I’ve found that when I’m talking to people — whether it’s family members who don’t pay that much attention to politics or voters out in the states — you can talk a good game about the threat to democracy and the things that we get really exercised about. But if people are feeling surly about kitchen-table issues like gas prices, egg prices, the cost of education, that sort of thing, they don’t have the bandwidth to get as freaked out about the kind of more philosophical issues or the broader picture issues.
I’ve been talking to some governors lately about where to go from here for the Democrats, and they are kind of adamant that until people actually feel the pain of the cuts that are coming, there’s just not a lot you can do. It’s not that people don’t care about democratic ideals and things like that. But when you’re in the trenches trying to make ends meet, dealing with inflation, or whatever kind of life issues are coming at you, it’s the pain to your pocketbook, the pain from those DOGE cuts and these cuts, and all of that, that will give Democrats the opening.
So I think you’re completely right that Democrats are going to get their moment. The Republicans are going to get their moment. Trump is going to pass his bill. They’ll be all this hoopla, and then we’ll see what happens.
Leonhardt: There was a wonderful guest essay in The Times just after Trump won the election nine years ago by Luigi Zingales, who is Italian and a professor at the University of Chicago. The headline on it was, “The Right Way to Resist Trump.” The analogy he drew was to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and he pointed out that the Italian politicians from the center and the center left who were most effective at defeating Berlusconi over the years were the ones who didn’t say: Look how outrageous he is. Look how beyond the pale he is. He isn’t us.
That tended to fail for reasons connected to what you just said, Michelle. The ones who were more successful said: Look at how he’s failing to deliver on his promises. They treated him more like a normal politician who was failing to deliver than they treated him like some kind of existential threat. And I know that is very hard for those of us who do see really serious anti-democratic threats coming from Trump, as I do. But it’s really important to ask yourself what kind of political strategy doesn’t just feel good, but actually is effective. And I do think this bill will create an opening for people who are alarmed by Trump’s governance and his hostile attitudes toward democracy to weaken him politically and strengthen people who believe more deeply in American democracy.
And the most effective way to do that is going to be talking about health care and talking about prices, and I would really encourage people to look at the 2024 campaigns of Democrats who actually won in places that Trump also won. So that’s Marcy Kaptur. It’s Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. It’s Ruben Gallego in Arizona. They talk about kitchen-table issues. They directly addressed the Democratic Party’s huge weaknesses on immigration. And that is actually going to be even easier in 2026 because Democrats are then going to be able to blame Trump for the things that he didn’t fix, and this bill can be a central part of that argument.
Cottle: I just want to throw in here that already we’re seeing some of this on the governor’s trail in Virginia. Abigail Spanberger is doing a bus tour — she’s the Democratic candidate — and she’s talking about how what’s going on in Washington is materially hurting her constituents in Virginia already, and looking ahead to how it’s potentially going to get worse. So I think your approach has kind of sunk in with at least some members of the party already.
David: And I think we should also say that boy, are Republicans providing them with some good tape to use. I mean both the Thom Tillis stuff about how deeply they’re cutting Medicaid and Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, about just how bad this is for the national debt. Whether it’s Democrats or independents or Republicans who are worried about Trump, there are going to be very harsh words about this bill coming from Republicans that can be used against the people who voted for this bill.
Michelle: OK, remind me of your alliterative preference to the big, beautiful bill — we’re going to get T-shirts made up for it.
Leonhardt: It is the big, bad, budget-busting bill.
Cottle: OK and with that, David, we are going to land this plane. Thank you for coming by to make sense of this entire mess for me.
Leonhardt: Thank you, Michelle.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David Leonhardt is an editorial director for the Times Opinion section, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
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