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Will the Bill Play in Peoria?
The BBB has passed and was signed Friday by Donald Trump. Now comes the spin. Initial polling shows that: (1) people don't know much about it (nor do the senators and representatives who voted for it) and (2) what they do know they don't like—by a wide margin. In a KFF poll 64% of adults oppose the bill and only 35% support it. Now it is up to the Democrats to use it as a baseball bat to whack the Republicans until Nov. 3, 2026. What they need is a simple message anyone can understand, like "12 million people will lose their health care and millions of children will go to bed hungry so billionaires can have a big fat tax cut." Oh, and virtually every Republican voted for it. Everything else (like ballooning the deficit) is gravy.
The ads practically write themselves. Cue mothers crying because their kids have cancer and now, due to the Medicaid cuts, they can't afford the treatment the kids were getting and the kids will die. Cue fathers saying that although they work two full-time jobs, without food stamps they can't feed their kids properly and the kids often go to bed hungry and crying. Expect to hear the words "cruel," "brutal" and "inhumane" a lot.
Republicans will frame it as a big win for wait staff who live on tips, but only about 2.5% of workers are in tipped occupations, and many of these make so little that they don't pay any federal tax at all, even now. Also, the new rule has many hoops you have to jump through to use it, so very few people will actually benefit. Democrats need to carp on that.
Historically, voters are slow to notice laws that actually help them. Obamacare was very unpopular at first. So was Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and other bills that created jobs. Big messy bills passed using reconciliation have often cost the president control of Congress in the next midterm. This happened in 1994, 2010, and 2018, and the latter two were about health care. It is partly due to media coverage emphasizing that the party in power is using a trick (reconciliation) to ram through a highly partisan and extreme bill that the other party despises. When some of the nasty details finally get out, approval sometimes goes down further because the president's supporters learn they didn't get everything they wanted (What? Abortion wasn't banned nationally?) and opponents keep learning about even more stuff they hate. During the process, the sausage-making is front and center and people don't like that. There was a lot of last-minute publicity about Trump winning votes by giving lowly congressmen tours of Mar-a-Lago and handing them autographed kewpie dolls or something as souvenirs. Voters hate that stuff.
Summer spin aside, the Republicans have a deeper problem that can't be easily spun away. In the Trump era, the voter base of the Republican Party has moved from well-off "country club" Republicans who liked tax cuts for the rich above all else to a more working-class base that doesn't care about that stuff. But the people who de facto run the party—the billionaire donor class—haven't changed their views one iota about what is important.
This means what the leaders of the Party want is now very different from what the base wants. This is only sustainable as long as the voters are content with the crumbs they get from time to time. Of course, this means the culture war stuff becomes very important and the party leaders have to pray daily that the voters are willing to give up their own healthcare and watch their kids get sick and maybe die in order to keep trans girls from playing on girls field hockey teams in California. There is a real danger the voters will eventually wise up and realize that they don't actually like much of what the GOP is selling, especially if it has negative consequences for them personally or for their friends or family.
A handful of influential Republicans, like Steve Bannon and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), are aware of this situation, but the rest are pretending business as usual can continue indefinitely. So far this is working, but there could be surprises ahead. (V)
Now Comes the Hard Part
Donald Trump has promised to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants per year. It is difficult, but can be done. In 1954, as part of Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower administration deported 1.1 million Mexicans. This is what it looked like:
The logistics of this were enormous. But remember, President Eisenhower was the guy in charge of winning World War II. He was a brilliant strategist and was equally good at logistics. He knew how to organize vast numbers of people, vehicles, supply chains, and more into a well-oiled machine. Donald Trump may have no hair on the top of his head, and he may have spent an undue amount of time in close proximity to Nazis, but otherwise he is no Dwight Eisenhower.
The BBB appropriated $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement. Now Trump has 3½ years to make it actually work. The administration has to hire and train at least 10,000 new immigration workers in an economy where there are plenty of other (easier) jobs available. It needs to issue contracts to dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies to build detention facilities (and hope they don't rob the government blind and they actually do what the contract says and on time). The White House also has to expand the court systems and hire more immigration judges. The logistics of this are enormous and neither Trump nor Stephen Miller nor Border Czar Tom Homan has ever run anything on the scale that will be needed. And Elon Musk isn't around to herd the DOGEys looking for waste and abuse—and in a loosely monitored project this size, there will be a lot of it.
Homan understands this. On Friday he told Politico: "Look, this isn't easy. Ten thousand ICE officers? Never happened before." He didn't dare state how long it will be before the administration can get to 1 million removals/year. He also didn't mention what will happen when native-born American citizens get deported and the courts rule that is illegal. And what happens when one or more of them file and win big lawsuits against the government? Instead, Homan focused on buying better radios so agents can talk to each other in areas where there is no cellular phone service.
John Sandberg, the acting ICE director from 2013 to 2014, said that rapidly expanding ICE will not be easy. He highlighted the difficulty of recruiting, vetting, onboarding and training thousands of new workers and managers. It will require massively expanding ICE's HR department, building new training centers, leasing office space, and going through the process of writing tenders to acquire new vehicles, weapons and other equipment. And all this at a scale never before attempted. What could possibly go wrong? Sandberg said: "That is way harder than it sounds."
Now that most undocumented workers know that ICE is coming for them, they are going to be as careful as they can be (e.g., not going to church on Sundays), so just finding them will be problem #1. One (obvious) possibility is raiding businesses known to hire many undocumented workers, like meatpacking plants. The problem with that is that those businesses are often owned by large and powerful corporations that will squeal like stuck pigs when the government shuts them down. Trump may then have to tell ICE to skip the low-hanging fruit and find other ways to find potential deportees.
Past presidents, including Joe Biden, have gotten Congress to appropriate billions for some goal only to discover that "shovel-ready" projects are hard to come by. Just one example: Building a huge detention facility requires many permits and in some cases, requires using eminent domain to take over private property. The owners of the property are likely to sue, saying the government is not offering the fair market value for their property. Cases like that can take years to finish. Of course, the government can decide to build detention centers on federal land in the middle of the Sonoran desert in Arizona. That solves the eminent domain problem. But it creates the problem of building adequate roads to the construction site, and getting power, water, sewage facilities, and more infrastructure in place in the middle of the desert. That didn't happen automatically when Trump signed the bill on Friday. Then there is the small matter of hiring enough qualified, skilled construction workers who want to move to a burning desert for a job that will last maybe a year. Oh, and they will need housing, food, etc. Homan will soon discover how right Sandberg was. It won't be easy and there will be no easy wins for quite a while.
Separate from the issues of finding immigrants and building and staffing detention centers is the issue of the immigration courts. Judges in the immigration courts are not Art. III judges and don't need Senate confirmation. But they do need courtrooms, clerks, secretaries, computers and more. The current 700 immigration judges already have a backlog of 3.5 million cases. Adding another million cases per year is going to require many more judges. Maybe newly graduated law students might be willing to take the job for the experience, but suppose many of them take their work seriously, hold hearings, and decide many of the cases in favor of the immigrants? Then what? In short, getting the money was the easy part. Spending it in order to ramp up deportations to a million a year is the hard part. (V)
The MAGAbill Is Full of Secret Tax Breaks for Favored Insiders
Yes, the BBB contains $170 billion for immigration enforcement. But remember that, fundamentally, Donald Trump sees his presidency as a way to enrich himself and his millionaire and billionaire cronies, many of whom donated to his campaign. Consequently, the 1000-page bill contains many goodies for them. Also, there are special giveaways for senators whose vote needed to be bought.
Some of these goodies are very narrowly targeted. For example, there is a new huge deduction available for business meals—but only for Alaskan fishing boats and processing plants located in the United States north of the 50th parallel (which excludes Washington state, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota). Did some Alaska fishing tycoon make a modest donation to Trump's campaign? We don't know.
Or maybe it was a whaling captain (although whales aren't fish). There is a special deal buried in there for certain Alaskan whaling captains to buy weapons. After all, the risk of Russian pirates stealing their whales is a big problem up north.
There is a special carve-out from the minimum tax on big corporations for the oil and gas industry. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) was still a little miffed at Trump for killing the immigration bill he wrote last year, and wanted compensation for his state. There is also a $2 billion tax break for the all-important rum industry, which is located in Louisiana (because rum is made from fermented sugarcane, most of which grows in Louisiana). Why is the rum industry so important? Trump needed the vote of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and that's pretty important. What amazes us is how cheaply senators—even those with some integrity left—sell their souls.
There is also a $1 billion provision that allows "spaceports" to sell tax-exempt bonds to raise funds, like airports do. It is a wedding present to Jeff Bezos and a severance package to Elon Musk. Not many other people own spaceports in the U.S.
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) was made happy by the inclusion of a $3 billion tax break for real estate investment trusts. No doubt one of his donors has something to do with them.
But some items in the bill had broad support among Republicans. They loved the idea of repealing the federal tax on all firearms except machine guns. We have no idea why machine guns didn't make the cut.
On the other hand, some plans from special-interest groups didn't make the final bill. An $800 million tax break for corporations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, added by the House, was taken out by the Senate. The gym industry wanted gym memberships to count as a medical expense for Health Savings Accounts, but the Senate has its own private gym so members didn't care about gym memberships. A special Earned Income Tax Credit for certain veterans didn't make it either. Such is the nature of sausage-making.
But it also goes against everything the Republican Party stood for in the past. Former Speaker Paul Ryan said: "The tax code is littered with hundreds of preferences and subsidies that pick winners and losers and create complexity. Instead of free-market competition that rewards success, our tax code directs resources to politically favored interests, creating a drag on economic growth and job creation." But who cares about Paul Ryan now? Or reducing the page count of the Internal Revenue Code? Karl Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said of the bill: "It's certainly a departure from what Republicans were trying to do in 2017 and broadly a departure from what Republicans have been arguing for decades about tax reform."
When a tax provision encourages job creation—e.g., letting companies depreciate new equipment faster so they buy even newer equipment—there is a case for it. But when it merely favors one specific group whose votes a candidate wants (like waitresses in Nevada), it just adds complexity to the tax code and avenues to exploit it for no real economic benefit to the country. (V)
More Americans Are Hungry Now than 4 Years Ago
Morning Consult has been running an interesting poll for the past 5 years. Rather than asking: "Which party do you want to win the House next time" or something like that, it has been asking: "Do you often or sometimes have insufficient food to eat?" Here are the results:
As you can see, the percentage of people who often have insufficient food is now at 15.6%, up more than 50% since 2021. This has been a long-term trend and will soon get much worse, as millions of people will lose their SNAP (food stamp) benefits. That one out of seven Americans often goes to bed hungry in the richest country in history, while other people hold $50 million weddings is, well, shameful. John Leer, chief economist at Morning Consult said: "There's such a disconnect now between record highs on Wall Street and elevated levels of food insecurity."
During the past few years, one of the causes of food insecurity has been higher grocery prices, driven by pandemic-induced inflation as a result of disrupted supply chains. In the coming years, the rate is sure to climb, due to the BBB. For example, until last Friday, adults over 54 were not required to work to get SNAP benefits. Now the age cutoff is 64. Also, fewer parents will be exempt from working, even if their childcare costs exceed the amount of their take-home pay. Due to these and other restrictions, many people will get less food and, most likely, less healthy food as well.
Some hungry people may turn to food banks to feed their families. However, the food banks say they are wholly unprepared for millions of new customers. Many are turning to state governments and private donors to make up the expected shortfall. But states are strapped and private donors tend not to think buying cornflakes is a sexy way to spend money.
According to Feeding America, the cuts to SNAP will eliminate 6-9 billion meals annually. This is equal to the total that all food banks in America provide each year. In other words, to make up for the SNAP cuts, food banks would need to give out twice as much food as they do now. Food bank leaders say this is completely unrealistic. They can't do it.
And there is more. Many grocery stores in low-income rural areas serve large numbers of customers who pay with SNAP benefits. If the customers buy less due to smaller benefits, the stores may not be able to survive, since the grocery business operates on extremely small margins. Some stores may fail, creating food deserts. So people in rural areas, also known as Trump voters, may discover in 2027 that the only grocery store in their county has closed along with the only hospital. But we doubt they will connect the dots. (V)
Bessent Warns Countries That, Absent a Deal, Tariffs will Go Back up on Aug. 1
Donald Trump's general approach to the world can be best described as "divide and conquer." He wants to break up NATO and deal with each country individually. On trade, he wants to make roughly 200 separate deals, one per country. So far, Trump has signed two actual trade deals, one with the U.K. and one with Vietnam, as well as a mini-deal with China.
Yesterday, to turn up the heat, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told CNN's State of the Union that any country that did not have a bilateral deal in place by Aug. 1 would be hit by the tariffs Trump announced on his so-called "Liberation Day." Some of the tariffs are astronomical and would block all trade with that country. This is true of many countries with people in them, not just the ones populated entirely by penguins. It is worth noting that, shortly after announcing the absurd tariffs, very possibly created by AI, Trump then paused them for 90 days. The new Aug. 1 deadline is thus actually an extension to his previous extension.
Trade deals are very complicated and most countries are not going to sign off on some half-baked deal that could wound their economies just to give Trump a "win." In some cases, countries don't export a lot of stuff to the U.S., so killing that trade won't mean a big hit to the U.S. economy, although it could hurt the other country more. Big countries (like China) and blocs (the E.U.) have plenty of leverage, so those deals won't be one-sided. But at this point, practically everyone who can read the news knows, well, TACO.
Bessent said that letters would be sent today to at least a dozen countries warning them that the clock is ticking and they better make a deal fast, or else. Bessent also lied, saying that foreign countries pay the tariffs. That's false and he knows it. They are paid by U.S. importers at the point of entry. In nearly all cases, the tariff is passed on to U.S. businesses or consumers in the form of higher prices.
The country with the most leverage over Trump is China. There are a vast number of products that come only from China and if trade stops, those products will cease to be available. Consumers will notice that. Will they blame Chinese President Xi Jinping? We very much doubt it. China also is the main source of rare earth elements used in many industries. If China stops exporting them, many factories will close, American workers will be unemployed, GDP will crash, and Trump will get the blame. Xi knows this but Trump may not. (V)
COVID Is Back
Not so much the disease (which never went away) as the fights over how it was handled. One of the highest-profile public health officials during the pandemic, Dr. Amy Acton, is running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio. She was director of the Ohio Department of Health in the early months of the pandemic and is almost as reviled on the right, in her state, as Dr. Anthony Fauci was nationally. She was responsible for many regulations intended to slow the spread of the virus, like masking requirements and prohibiting certain gatherings. This made her the enemy for many right-wing groups who believe that the pandemic was caused by God to punish America for allowing gay people to exist or something like that, and not by a communicable virus. The fact that Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) deferred to her on most health decisions made it even worse for her enemies. She had bamboozled a Republican governor, in addition to her other sins.
The pressure on Acton was immense. On March 12, 2020, she issued stay-at-home orders in an attempt to stop the pandemic in its tracks. The governor backed her up. She was on television and in the news constantly warning people that COVID was deadly and people needed to take some precautions to save lives. Many public health officials lauded her bravery and attempt to save lives. The New York Times called her "the leader we wish we all had." The Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club on Facebook quickly amassed 100,000 members. But she got enormous pushback from the right and death threats, some of which were openly antisemitic (Acton is Jewish). By June, the threats against her and her family had grown very intense. In addition, she was under great political pressure to allow people to attend the Ohio State Fair without masks, which she thought would be a superspreader event. She refused and resigned her position as health director, but remained as an adviser to the governor.
Her campaign is an attempt by both sides to relitigate COVID and all the restrictions. Was it worth it having to wear a mask in public so granny wouldn't die? Opinions are still very strong on that. Of course, we know a lot more about COVID now and what happened than she (or anyone) knew in the spring of 2020. Vivek Ramaswamy, the probable Republican nominee, will be the perfect foil for her, basically maintaining that medical science is bad and governments should not restrict anyone's freedom in any way. If millions of people have to die as a result, well, that's life (actually, it's death).
DeWine defended Acton during her entire tenure as health director. He hailed her as a "good, compassionate, and honorable person." This resulted in his being primaried when he ran for reelection, though he won the primary and general election. Even after her resignation, DeWine continued to laud her, saying "It's true not all heroes wear capes."
Now Acton is trying to parlay her fame into becoming governor of Ohio. If she gets the Democratic nomination, which is by no means certain, her likely opponent will be Vivek Ramaswamy, who is about as Trumpy as they come, which cuts both ways. Her entire campaign is about her time as health director and whether she saved thousands of Ohioans from death or whether she was some kind of dictator who ruled people's lives with an iron fist. It is also about whether the Middle Ages are alive and well in Ohio and whether science is a good idea or the spawn of the devil. (V)
Democrats Are Actively Recruiting Veterans to Run for the House
Many voters perceive Democrats as weak on national security. This holds double for conservatives in rural areas. The Democratic Party is trying to change that view by recruiting veterans, especially combat veterans, to run for House seats. The hope is that their service will neutralize attacks on them about national security, especially if their opponents are not veterans.
Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a former Army Ranger, is helping lead the recruitment efforts. He believes that veterans can engage with voters who are otherwise hostile to Democrats, especially voters who are also veterans. Crow thinks he can bring in new voters this way.
It could work. Veterans supported Trump 65% to 34% over Kamala Harris in 2024. In a race between a Democrat who is a veteran and a Republican who is not, there could well be veterans who will go for the veteran over the nonveteran, regardless of party. Currently there are 70 Republican veterans and 28 Democratic veterans in Congress.
Some have already been recruited. Former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett is running in NJ-07. Cait Conley, who was deployed overseas six times, is challenging Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in the very competitive (D+1) NY-17 Hudson Valley district. It could help. Several Democrats with military or national security backgrounds have won Senate races recently, notably Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Two others are running for governor this year, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey. If both of them win, especially if they win big, that will encourage the DCCC to look for more candidates with military or national security backgrounds next year. (V)
Welcome, America Party
On Saturday, Elon Musk formed a new political party, the America Party. We thought you'd want to know. If it goes out with a bang rather than a whimper, we'll let you know. Maybe Musk missed the whole discussion about No Labels last year. It fizzled because nobody wanted to run for president on its ticket. The problem wasn't money.
As an aside, do you know how many political parties have ballot access in at least one state? Make a guess. Then look up the answer here. You will be quite surprised. Promise. (V)
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