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TRUMP’S CRUEL AND COSTLY BUDGET BILL JUST GOT EVEN WORSE  
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Timothy Noah
June 18, 2025
The New Republic
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_ The Senate’s version will blow up the deficit just as much as the
House’s—and its Medicaid cuts are deeper. The Senate’s cuts to
Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, are bigger
than the House bill—probably in excess of $900 billion _

Senate GOP’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” Is Here — and It’s
Already Causing Headaches, Katie Couric Media / yahoo! news

 

Mencken! Thou shouldst be here at this hour
[[link removed]]. I didn’t
start reading H.L. Mencken until middle age, partly because
certain ugly aspects to his character came to light during my youth,
partly because conservatives adopted his style
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partly because I didn’t like Mencken’s contempt toward the
“booboisie
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Mencken’s rudeness was the right antidote to the politically
clueless 1920s, and it has a new relevance 100 years later.

“As democracy is perfected,” Mencken wrote
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1920, “the office [of the President] represents, more and more
closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal.
On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach
their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by
a downright moron.”

You’ve probably heard that quote before. We could conduct a lively
debate about when Mencken’s prophesy came true. In my opinion, it
was in January 1981. (You must remember that before he was a secular
saint, Ronald Reagan was a person whose forehead-smiting ignorance
occasioned a steady stream of news stories.) If not Reagan, then
certainly George W. Bush fulfilled Mencken’s prophecy. Which means I
should have been used to the phenomenon by the time Trump came along.
I am not.

The occasion for these sour observations is the Senate Republican
majority’s version of the House-passed budget reconciliation bill,
or anyway the most contentious parts of it (text
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summary
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summary
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Like the House bill, the Senate version is premised on the moronic
notion that you can cut taxes by $4 trillion and make it up by
throwing a bunch of people off Medicaid. President Donald Trump says
he believes this, and I’m inclined to believe that he believes this
because he is—well, you know.

But the Senate is supposed to know better. George
Washington reputedly said
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the Senate, being less responsive to popular passions than the House,
was like the saucer into which one pours coffee to cool it before
drinking (that’s apparently something people used to do). But not a
lot of cooling takes place in the Senate budget bill. 

Cuts to the food stamp program are a little smaller in the Senate bill
than in the House version, Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget
Committee staffer, now at the Center for American Progress, told me. I
phoned Kogan because the Congressional Budget Office and various
nonprofits hadn’t yet had time to score the proposal. Where the
House cuts nearly $300 billion, Kogan said, the Senate cuts more than
$200 billion. But either way, Kogan explained, this would be the
largest cut in the program’s history. 

The Senate’s cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance
Program, however, are bigger than in the House bill—probably in
excess of $900 billion, according to Kogan. The House bill cuts these
programs by somewhere north of $800 billion, at a cost, according to
the Yale School of Public Health, of 51,000 lives. As David
Dayen explains
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American Prospect_, “more people will die as a result of the
Senate’s actions.”  

These cuts aren’t just pathologically cruel, though they’re
certainly that. They’re also politically moronic. As I explained
last month
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Medicaid has evolved from a small program with a politically powerless
constituency into a large program covering much of the working class,
thereby merging into the third rail of American politics already
occupied by Social Security and Medicare.

As in the House bill, the Senate would impose a new Medicaid work
requirement for recipients aged 18 to 64. States can put off
implementing the work requirement until after the 2026 midterms (the
deadline is December 31). That sounds devilishly clever until one
learns that states will be required to notify recipients in danger of
losing their benefits three months in advance. Even if states manage
to delay that too, past Election Day, voters aren’t so dumb that
they won’t find out about this and other Medicaid cuts well before.
Democrats will be hollering about them from rooftops. 

In fact, the public dislikes the budget bill already: a 42 percent
plurality
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to a new _Washington Post_ poll; and a 64 percent
majority, according to
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new Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Republicans can perhaps take solace
in the KFF finding that 68 percent approve of the work requirement for
Medicaid. But that dropped to 35 percent after it was explained that
most Medicaid recipients work already.

We’ll likely see further changes to this measure before it becomes
law, but some version of this bill is going to become law, doubling
the budget deficit _and_ throwing  more than 16 million people
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Medicaid. It will happen because congressional Republicans are
terrified of displeasing Trump. They should be more terrified of
displeasing voters, but they aren’t. So idiocy wins. We’ve seen
moronic presidents before, but not a president who’s both
stupid _and_ mean. That’s a level of national debasement even
Mencken didn’t anticipate. I’ll give the sage of Baltimore the
last word: “In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always
something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a
Republican.”

_[TIMOTHY NOAH [[link removed]] is
a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence:
America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.]_

* Senate Budget Bill
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* GOP Budget
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* Trump Budget
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* Reconciliation Bill
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* Senate
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* Donald Trump
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* GOP
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* MAGA
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* Medicaid
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* social safety net
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