Donald Trump is celebrating the passage of the giant budget resolution bill, which he labelled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and which barely passed both houses of Congress.
In fact, so many Republicans in both the Senate and the House had announced they planned to vote against the bill that it passed only after Trump and his lackeys threatened them with primary challenges if they didn’t vote for it. In the Senate, OBBBA passed only after Vice-President J. D. Vance voted to break a 50-50 tie.
Yes, that’s right. Contrary to what Trump claims, this bill was very unpopular, not only with Congress but with the American public (Philip Elliott, “The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Is Massively Unpopular and Democrats Plan to Keep It That Way,” TIME, July 2, 2025).
And rightfully so. It strips Medicaid funds away from millions of needy Americans, many of them Trump’s own supporters in red states (Suzanne Blake, “Medicaid Important to Nearly Half of Trump Voters and Their Families: Poll,” www.newsweek.com, March 7, 2025).
Not only will that cut in Medicaid hurt hard-up families, probably resulting in deaths of some who can’t otherwise afford medical care, but it will undoubtedly cause some rural hospitals, who depend heavily on Medicaid payments to cover their costs, to close.
So not only will poor people not be able to afford care, some won’t be able to get that care at all, at least not without driving hundreds more miles to access it.
Thanks, Trump. Thanks, Republicans in Congress.
Actually, OBBBA was so awful that even two Republicans voted against final passage of the bill in the House.
All Democrats opposed it.
And the reason so many will lose their Medicaid funding? In order to partially pay for continuing the huge tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—and yes, Trump himself—that Trump had managed to pass in his first term.
Note that I said “partially pay for” those tax cuts. The rest of the cost goes onto the national debt. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the impartial arm of Congress that predicts the effects each piece of legislation will have on various programs and groups within the population, predicts that OBBBA will add about $4 trillion to the debt (“CBO Score Shows Senate OBBA Adds over $3.9 Trillion to Debt,” (www. obba.org/blog/cbo.scoreshows- senate-obba-over-3.9trilion-debt).
That’s trillion with a “t.”
So once again, Republicans have proved that they only care about deficits and debt when Democrats are in power. Now that the Rs are in power both in Congress and the Whie House, they’re whooping it up with your money.
There are many other problems with the OBBBA, including the raising of interest rates that our creditors will charge us because we’ll now be borrowing so much more, and the fact that we won’t be able to do our part to mitigate climate change as we had promised other nations we would do.
Trump not only is harming individuals in our country, including a great many of his ardent supporters, but he’s destroying our reputation in the world.
This country isn’t perfect, obviously, but over the centuries we have often deserved a reputation as one of the “good guys” who come to the aid of weaker nations against brutal invaders, and as the supplier of food aid to starving people elsewhere in the world.
That reputation is suffering badly under Trump. The valiant people of Ukraine are made to worry that he’ll leave them defenseless against Trump’s aggressor buddy Vladimir Putin.
As for food assistance, USAID is being done away with entirely under Trump. Not only did the cost of that agency amount to a tiny part of our budget, since we mainly donated surplus food that we didn’t need anyway, but USAID’s exercise of “soft power” bought us good will that sometimes proved a smart, inexpensive substitute for military action by us.
Individuals may or may not be able to survive this Trump administration, depending on their own resources and what help they get from others around them. I’m not at all sure that this nation’s “goodguy” reputation ever will recover.