What The Hell America!

Fresh off his week in the Middle East, Donald Trump spent last night indulging in one of his favorite hobbies: yukking it up at the Kennedy Center with the place’s new stooge-laden board. Here’s HuffPo:

Trump, during a speech at a Kennedy Center board dinner, congratulated himself for securing during his first term the 2028 Olympics for Los Angeles and soccer’s 2026 FIFA World Cup for North America.

Had the election not been stolen from him by Joe Biden, Trump said, referring to his lie about the results, he’d now be out of office and his role in securing the two major sporting events would be forgotten.

“And then they rigged the election, and then I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll run again and I’ll shove it up their ass,’” he said.

Pretty gross stuff. But we stand by what we wrote before: Any day Trump spends indulging his weakness for Broadway camp by micromanaging the Kennedy Center is a day he isn’t spending damaging the country in more consequential ways. Enjoy yourself, Mr. President! Happy Tuesday.

Bill Kristol

If you go to the website of the House Rules Committee, you’ll find that the massive Republican budget reconciliation legislation currently being considered in the House is called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

No joke, as Joe Biden likes to say.

How did it get that name, you ask? After all, in Donald Trump’s first term, when things were still somewhat normal, the 2017 Republican budget reconciliation legislation had the fairly prosaic name of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

But we no longer live in prosaic times. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress were divided on the matter of legislative tactics over whether to pass one reconciliation bill or two separate pieces of legislation. Trump came down on the side of one bill over two, and called, in his way, for “one big beautiful bill.”

House Republicans took him both seriously and literally. In doing so, they channeled the ancient tribes who believed that by giving something beyond your control—and which you didn’t understand—a friendly name, you would make it less scary and ominous. The Republican party is very much an ancient tribe in fear of an all-powerful force it doesn’t control. So here we are with the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

A couple of weeks ago, I asked one Republican whether this wasn’t some kind of inside joke. Surely some clever Republican staffer had slapped this name on the bill as an ironic parody of the party’s subservience to and sycophancy on behalf of Trump. My interlocutor looked at me in horror and disbelief: “You really do have no understanding of today’s Republican party, Bill.”

Fair enough. In any case, the Republicans have slapped this aspirational name, if one wants to call it that, on to their budget bill. They’re going to give a tax break to the wealthy and cut health care for the less fortunate; they’re going to raise the debt limit and increase the budget deficit; they’re not going to do anything to address inflation or tariffs. It’s big. I doubt the results will be very beautiful. But the Republicans will pass their bill and hope for the best.

Democrats will attack it, Republicans will defend it, and reality will resolve the debate. We’ll see, a year and a half from now when voters go to the polls, where inflation, employment, interest rates, health insurance coverage, and the budget deficit stand. It’s a Republican bill, and Republicans will get the credit or the blame.

Democrats may not have the ability now to stop the Republicans’ big beautiful bill from passing. But what they will have to say about economic policy in 2026 and 2028, when voters go to the polls, will matter. They’ll presumably have a wide variety of arguments available as to why voters should prefer them. I should think they’ll be able to claim, in contrast with the Trump administration, both a kind of economic populism and a claim to fiscal responsibility. They’ll be able to combine attacks on plutocrats and kleptocrats with a promise to watch out for the middle class. They’ll be able to stand at some level of generality for combining the best aspects of democratic capitalism with those of a social democratic welfare state.

But underlying all of this, Democrats will have to accomplish something they have had trouble doing in recent years: presenting themselves as a party of growth and prosperity. Why they’ve had such difficulty is something of a mystery. Democratic presidents have been in power for 20 of the last 32 years. They can claim good economic results. Clinton presided over a period of prosperity and balanced the budget after a decade of GOP budget deficits. Obama brought us back from the Great Financial Crisis which we entered under George W Bush. Biden stabilized a challenging situation after the pandemic, unemployment was kept low, the stock market was high, and even the inflation that bedeviled him was brought under control.

How is it possible that a party that has done pretty well in its management of the economy over the past three decades—and that has objectively done better than the other party on this front—gets no political benefit? Democrats have had a striking inability to get credit for good results. The contrast offered by Trump’s not-so-beautiful bill offers them a chance to begin to fix this problem.

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‘INSENSITIVE TO THE DAMAGE’: Donald Trump may have postponed the worst of his tariffs, but the economic damage from the trade wars is still starting to pile up. Last week, a group of South Texas mayors sent a letter to the White House sounding the alarm that staying the course “could significantly destabilize our region’s economy and the livelihoods of our constituents.”

“Our local industries, particularly agriculture, manufacturing, and automotive sectors, rely heavily on materials and products imported from Canada and Mexico,” reads the letter from the South Texas Alliance of Cities, which was shared with The Bulwark this week. “Our region has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. We are thriving because our economy has been given the runway to grow and the ability to innovate. We need stability. This level of uncertainty is hurting South Texas.”

The alliance, which was founded in 2023 and has been championed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, includes the mayors of cities from across the Rio Grande Valley. In an interview yesterday, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg told The Bulwark that the group felt compelled to speak up on behalf of regional businesses that were nervous of sounding the alarm themselves, “because of the well-demonstrated willingness of the Trump administration to retaliate against people who speak up.”

While the letter was addressed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, Nirenberg expressed doubt that even evidence of significant economic harms would sway the White House.

“On the one hand, it’s been the eternal truth that presidential administrations are sensitive to pain that’s felt by American families at their dinner table. On the other hand, it’s remarkable just how much Trump seems insensitive to the damage being caused to American families,” he said. “So the advocacy is largely directed towards Congress to step up and not continue to allow President Trump to usurp their authority given to them by the voters and by the Constitution.”

FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF FAFO: Elon Musk and DOGE have insisted for months that agencies like USAID are lousy with fraud, and Donald Trump’s hard-charging new U.S. attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro wants you to know she’s determined to get to the bottom of it. Yesterday, Pirro shared on social media a news release from her office: “Former Contractor of USAID-Funded Program Extradited to the United States, Convicted and Sentenced for Conspiracy to Obtain Grant Money Through Fraud.”

MAGA accounts did a victory dance in the replies: “I voted for this and much more.” “One down, 150 million to go.” “FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT.”

As the release quietly made clear, though, there was less here than met the eye. The fraudster, Stephen Sutton, had been exposed not by Pirro and DOGE but by USAID’s own inspector general office years ago. Nor was Sutton exactly a titan of crime. According to the release, he skimmed about $21,000 from a USAID program in Pakistan over a period of five years. After his extradition, he was sentenced to time served and one day of supervised release.

An all-sizzle, no-steak extradition to prop up White House propaganda about disfavored federal programs? That’s all in a day’s work for Trump’s favorite TV lawyer.

TUCKER QATARLSON?: You might think Tucker Carlson’s years of faithful service as the preeminent MAGA cable personality would inoculate him against becoming the target of a right-wing misinformation campaign. But that assumption proved wrong this weekend, when critics on the right accused him of being a Qatari agent.

The trouble started when pro-Israel activists badly mangled a Washington Examiner story published Saturday about Qatari influence over conservative media. The story mentioned a $180,000 monthly payment that Qatar’s government made to a firm called Lumen8 Advisors. One of the services that firm provided: Helping set up what turned out to be a friendly interview between Carlson and Qatar’s prime minister.

Online conservatives who see Carlson as insufficiently supportive of Israel pounced, misreading the story to claim that Carlson himself was taking money from Qatar. In one viral example, right-wing influencer Insurrection Barbie, who has more than 1 million followers on X, claimed it was proof Carlson was bought and paid for.

“Tucker Qatarlson,” activist Laura Loomer quipped.

But as the article itself makes clear, the Qatari money went to the media firm, not to Carlson himself. So we can declare Carlson innocent of this charge—for now.

—Will Sommer

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