CNN
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Is it the start of something bigger? Or the beginning of the end of the GOP House majority?
President Donald Trump’s triumph in forcing his massive agenda bill into law before his July Fourth deadline was the most significant domestic triumph of his two terms in office.
And his show of dominance in forcing Republican holdouts to back down has left GOP leaders wanting more at a time when his presidency is gathering momentum at home and abroad.
It was a holiday weekend of celebration for the Republican Party, though shock over the unspeakable tragedy in Texas — where flash floods claimed many lives and swept away young girls at summer camp — kept some of the heat out of partisan clashes on Sunday talk shows.
The GOP victory lap imposed huge pressure on Democrats to finally step up with an effective political strategy to take on an increasingly dominant president — and to turn his achievement into an anvil.
Party leaders will now anchor their midterm election strategy for next year on their warning that Trump’s law further enriched his billionaire friends and stuck working Americans with the bill.
“I cannot believe Congress was willing to pass this. I mean, it’s awful,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday.
Beshear, who said he was considering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, warned the bill could end Medicaid for 200,000 people in his commonwealth alone and would buckle state budgets.
Rep. Ro Khanna pressed home the new Democratic offensive against the new law. “I just don’t think that taking away the health care with the Medicaid cuts and food assistance to give the tax breaks for the very wealthy is going to be good for working- and middle-class Americans,” the California Democrat said on “Fox News Sunday.”
But House Speaker Mike Johnson doubled down Sunday on a plan to pass two more bills packed with Trump priorities using reconciliation — the budgetary trick the GOP used to ram through the president’s tax cuts along with huge boosts in spending on border enforcement, carbon energy and defense.
And he predicted Democrats would fail to make Trump’s bill a political loser for the president. “Everyone will have more take-home pay, they’ll have more jobs and opportunity, the economy will be doing better and we’ll be able to point to that as the obvious result of what we did,” Johnson said on Fox.
Republicans deny the Democrats’ claims about the effect of cuts to Medicaid, potentially the most emotive and politically sensitive aspect of the bill. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on “State of the Union” that new work requirements for access to the program would preserve its viability and do nothing to hurt the most vulnerable Americans.
And despite multiple independent assessments that the new law is a gift to the rich, Bessent highlighted its move to cut taxes on tips for some service workers for several years as proof that Trump had reoriented the economy toward workers. Bessent called his boss the “most economically sophisticated president we have had in 100 years, maybe ever.”
But legislation of this size and complexity, which has left many Americans unsure of what is actually included, always triggers a messaging war. Republicans, for instance, falsely presented the Affordable Care Act as a massive far-left takeover of government health care on the way to winning back the House in 2010. Democrats hope to inflict similar punishment on Trump.
When Americans were suffering from rising grocery prices and inflation, Republicans were successful in blaming former President Joe Biden’s billions of dollars in Covid-19 recovery legislation for making the situation worse.
Multiple polls show Democrats may have an opening. Trump’s new law is massively unpopular with Americans already — so a skillful public campaign by Democrats could play on voter discontent by blaming every future adverse economic event on the new law.
But the administration carefully drew up the bill to ensure that tax cuts come into force quickly while some of the most controversial cuts in spending on programs such as Medicaid do not take effect until after the midterm elections, or even until 2028. The strategy seemed designed to spare GOP candidates political heat — but it also ensures the new law will be at the centerpiece of midterm elections next year and the 2028 presidential race, when Trump is term-limited.
The swift passage of the bill — despite the GOP’s tiny House majority and internal suspicion between Republicans in the House and Senate — was possible only because of Trump’s crushing control over his party. It was not until nearly Christmas of his first term that his first tax-cutting legislation passed. This time, budget hawks in the House Freedom Caucus talked a good game, but ended up folding to the president’s power when a vastly changed bill returned from the Senate. It was the latest occasion when the president’s experience during his first White House spell helped make him more effective in his second.
Johnson, meanwhile, led the fractious GOP House conference with skill that has not always been obvious since he rose from the back benches to succeed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
But many of Trump’s top priorities — on border funding, tax cuts and defense — were packed into one big bill for a good reason. Logic suggested that a majority in which the speaker can lose only a handful of votes could not bear multiple tests of fire.
The upside of such an approach is that the bill was so vital to Trump’s authority and prestige that it was harder for significant numbers of Republicans to oppose.
Johnson is now testing the waters on pulling off the same trick again.
“We had always planned to do the first big reconciliation bill,” Johnson said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding he was eyeing two more such efforts in the fall and next spring. “Three more reconciliation bills before this Congress is over.”
If the Louisiana Republican can deliver that, he’d repay the faith in millions of Republican base voters.
But will divides in the GOP conference Trump papered over last week be as easily suppressed next time? Will budget hawks who swallowed their antipathy to widening the deficit fold for Trump again in the future?
It’s hard to believe that vulnerable swing-state Republicans will be more open to politically painful spending cuts even closer to the next election.
Trump’s wider economic political fortunes will therefore play a huge role in how the new law settles in the public’s mind.
If the economy proves resilient and his predictions of soaring growth materialize, it will be harder for Democrats to highlight the negative aspects of his leadership. But if inflation is rekindled and jobs and economic growth slow, they’ll have an easier target.
This is one reason why the coming days will be vital to the president. The deadline comes Wednesday for foreign nations to conclude trade deals with the US or face massive tariff hikes, which were pulled back amid global market panics in April.
Across-the-board tariff increases could hammer the economy and raise prices for Americans who sent a message in the presidential election last year that they were angry about the cost of living. But Trump is betting that a three-legged strategy of huge cuts in government spending, increased revenue in tariffs and huge tax cuts will be an unorthodox growth plan.
And Bessent appeared to indicate on “State of the Union” that Trump’s latest trade deadline this week is yet another bluff that might spare the economy the most adverse impacts.
“President Trump’s going to be sending letters to some of our trading partners, saying that ‘If you don’t move things along, then, on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.’ So I think we’re going to see a lot of deals very quickly.”
That sounds a lot like another extension to another deadline for trade deals that administration officials once predicted would arrive in huge numbers. Aside from a few framework agreements with nations including Britain and Vietnam, there have been no major breakthroughs.
Unlike the mirages and contradictions of Trump’s constantly shifting trade policy, however, the new agenda bill represents a big concrete bet. If rural hospitals are shuttered because of Medicaid cuts, if major immigration spending feeds a police state that alienates moderate Americans or if regular workers struggle in Trump’s new age of oligarchy, the GOP risks paying the price in coming elections.
But the president has a record of convincing millions of people of his own version of reality — and Democrats have rarely found a way to counter him.
They have yet another chance with the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
