Trump’s big beautiful betrayal

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, how Donald Trump's mega bill will change America.

0:20Six months since he took office, what is Donald Trump's movement really about? He and his top officials give contradictory answers. Unleashing the US economy and tying it up in tariffs. Getting out of foreign wars and then bombing Iran. Crafting an economy that favours ordinary people over the elites. And then this mega bill that passed Congress last week. The one big, beautiful bill is Trump's biggest legislative accomplishment to date. It's not some executive order that a future president can undo at the stroke of a pen. It will reshape America. And amid the noise and the chaos and the distraction that Trump generates 24-7, this bill is the clearest answer yet as to what MAGA really is.

1:23From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, maybe the biggest upward transfer of wealth in US history and the people it leaves behind.

1:39Ed Pilkington, good to have you back on Today in Focus. You're the chief reporter for Guardian US. This legislation that passed Congress last week has been described as a mega bill, a sprawling thing covering all sorts of areas. Can you briefly outline for me what aspects of American life does this bill touch on? Yeah, I mean, essentially, this bill is everything Trump wants to do in his second time in the White House. So he's taken a very unconventional approach. He's just basically piled everything he wants into one, what he calls one big, beautiful bill and shoved it through Congress and demanded that his people in the Republican Party follow him into, you know, who knows what.

2:26So it covers vast kind of areas of the American landscape. It's extending a system that rewarded rich people and gave very, very little to poor people. And what's very, very different and very significant about it this time round is that in order to pay for that extension of tax cuts, which largely benefits the rich, he and the Republicans are actually cutting for the first time into the very basic safety net that exists in this country to help people who are struggling. This is an unusual thing for a president to do, to roll together so much of his agenda into one bill, a bill he's been calling the triple B, the big, beautiful bill.

3:16I mean, he's a master at branding. We know that about him at least. And this thing has been kicking around Washington for a few months. How big a deal for the Trump administration is it that it passed last week? Well, you can't oversell how important this is in the sense that it enshrines what Trump wants to do in his second term. And it's more than that. I mean, let's think about what he's so far, he's done 99 % of his actions have been through executive orders. That means he does it himself as president. Now, this is where he goes through the power of Congress. So he required congressional backing to get this done.

4:02And so it's a whole second channel of power that he's wielding here. So maybe the biggest thing we're working on, maybe bigger than tariffs in a certain sense is the, we call it the one big beautiful bill. And that's wielding its way right now through the Senate. It's just been a beautiful unified attack, really, because we have to attack because the Democrats are trying to stop it at every turn. What's critical about it is it shows that he has, as indeed, you know, it's fairly evident, he has got a lock tight grip on the Republican Party because both senators and Republican Congress members have followed him into this bill, much of which goes against traditional conservative policy.

4:49So it just shows how in control he is of everything now.

5:01So Ed, the impacts of a bill this big are difficult to sum up. People don't really know where to look to begin to understand how it's going to change the country. But you felt that one of the most important places was what it does to social welfare programs. One of those programs is called SNAP. Tell me about it. Yeah, SNAP is the system that the federal government set up more than 60 years ago to help low income and families, families in poverty, just put food on their table. I mean, it's literally that. It provides people with money on a card, which they can take to a grocer's and they can buy nourishing food to feed themselves and their families.

5:42Okay, so this, I guess, is what we used to call something like food stamps. It's what helps some of the poorest people in the country eat nutritious food. What's happening to it in the big, beautiful bill? Well, it's facing enormous cuts, about almost$300 billion worth of cuts to the program, which is almost a third of the entire scheme. And for the first time since it was set up in 1964 as a permanent program, the costs of the actual food benefits are being passed from the federal government to individual states. And we could see, as a result, states unable to pay for it. And some people fear some states will actually bail out of the scheme altogether, which would leave hundreds of thousands of people without, basically without food.

6:33And they would be scratching around trying to find food to feed themselves and their children. Some estimates say that up to 8 million people are likely to be thrown off this food assistance scheme, of whom 2 million will be children. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson and other Democrats slamming the bill tonight. He says roughly a million Washingtonians use SNAP benefits every month. He argues the bill takes food from the state's most vulnerable and gives tax breaks to the ultra wealthy. Ed, you spoke to people who fear they may be at risk from a bill like this. What did they tell you about how they would be managing what they and their families eat as a result of this?

7:16Yes, I spent time with people who explained to me what it was like before they managed to get on to SNAP. One woman I spoke to called it a process of humbling. She had a young child. She made sure that that child always had enough to eat and was fine, was unaware there was any problem. But she did that by going without meals herself. She fed herself once a day, only one meal a day, and she drank a lot of water to make her feel full. And she lost a lot of weight. And, you know, to hear it in person, what it actually means to go hungry in America is a harrowing experience. It's a kind of, it's an astonishing thing that in a country like America, one of the richest countries in the world, that there are so many people who go hungry and so many more people who may be going hungry after this bill.

8:12Absolutely. And that, I think, is critical. I mean, you mentioned earlier that it's such a huge bill. It's so confusing. It's got so much in it. People are completely bamboozled. They have no idea where to begin with it, which I think makes it all the more important to let's focus on what matters here. And for me, the giving money to the rich, which is part of extending the tax cuts part of the bill, is very critical. But the other piece is that it's ending a sort of fairly basic value that America's had since the war on poverty that JFK and LBJ began in the 1960s, which is that no American should go to bed hungry.

8:54it's essentially putting a deep cut into that value and saying well no we're not gonna we're not gonna guarantee that anymore uh and that's you know i think that's very very major and is in danger of getting lost amid this kind of enormous mountain of of you know different things that people are getting lost in in that enormous mountain are other cuts to social welfare programs too, right? Yes. I mean, the other absolutely critical thing that it's so important for people not to lose amid the noise here is the cuts on Medicaid. Medicaid is a system of health insurance for people who are on low incomes or disabled.

9:39That's more than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid. And it's essential. That's how they get health treatment. This is politically critical. What happens if it comes to your desk, has the tax cuts, but also cuts to Medicaid? Would you veto that? No, we're not doing that. Would you veto that? I would. Trump promised that he would not touch Medicaid. It affects so many voters, essentially, including many, many Republican voters and many MAGA voters. Snap, we talk about food assistance, That gets cut by about$300 billion, which is about a third of the value of the programme. But Medicaid, it's even worse.

10:24It's almost$1 trillion gets cut from Medicaid. And for the first time ever under Medicaid, people will be required to prove that they're looking for work. Now, this is a kind of political ruse. The Republicans are saying, oh, we're not cutting Medicaid at all. We're only cutting into fraud and people who are dodging, you know, looking for work, kind of the work shy. We're going to have growth. I'm not going to touch Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. No, we're going to get fraud out of there. You know, you see where I talk about it all the time. We have people 250 years old and all, you know, we're going to get the fraud out.

11:03And everybody wants us to get the fraud out. In truth, it's people who are trying to work very, very hard, finding it difficult to find jobs. and they will be turfed out of the program if they can't meet this very cumbersome paperwork. And if there are some 70 million Americans on Medicaid, how many do we expect will be kicked off it? The estimates are about 10 million people will lose, immediately will lose their Medicaid when these rules come in. And if you add on tweaks and changes to Obamacare, it could rise to about 17 million people. will lose their access to healthcare. And so if losing access to SNAP means people go hungry, what does it mean to lose access to Medicaid?

11:50I think there are two major things. The structural is that there's a danger that many, many smaller hospitals, particularly ones in rural areas, will actually close because they're dependent on patients who are bringing in money through Medicaid, gained politically very significant because rural hospitals serve people, the low-income families living in rural areas. And who are they? They tend to be Trump supporters, even part of the MAGA movement. So he's shooting his own people in the foot there. And then, you know, the most visceral human impact will be people will die. There's been research come out of Yale that estimates that as many as 50 ,000 people each year could die from preventable illness that would have been prevented under the current system because they don't get access to medical treatment.

12:49That is shocking. 50 ,000 people a year. Yeah. You know, they can still go to the ER when emergencies happen, but that's what goes on when people are stripped of their health insurance. They wait, wait, wait, wait, wait until their condition has become an emergency. And by that time, it's often too late.

13:19okay so on the one hand we have the people losing out from this bill tens of millions of people kicked off of medicaid off of food assistance potentially tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths so who is winning out of this essentially it's it's the wealthy um it's you know if you think of a sliding scale this is a classic uh regressive uh move in that the poorer you are the less you get the richer you are the more you get and it's kind of virtually a direct line if you're earning less than 18 000 a year and trying doing that in america you would actually see your your income decline by 165 dollars so you're having money taken away from you when you're at$18 ,000 a year.

14:09By contrast, if you're a part of the 0.1 % most wealthy, you will gain under this bill about$300 ,000 a year. The rich do very well out of it. Even the middle earning Americans will kind of stay still or potentially lose a little bit. So it's the poor are hammered and the rich do very nicely. One of the themes throughout this is a lot of these changes, are not what people voted for Trump wanting him to do. I want to talk more about that. But before we do, are there things in this bill that are more in line with the MAGA movement, the things we expected Trump to do in power? So yes, there's plenty in the bill that is in tune with the manifesto he laid out during all his rallies last year to his base and to everyone else in America, top of which probably is deportations, his idea that he will have the biggest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history.

15:10I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, and kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible. So the bill includes about$50 billion to extend the border wall, And so the bill also includes about 30 billion that would go to ICE. We've already seen ICE play a much more elevated role than it has in the past. In terms of its presence in the country, they're doing these visible raids all over the place. We saw the clashes it led to in Los Angeles. So they've got a much elevated position within law enforcement in America.

15:58and I think with this injection of new money we're going to see them again become a kind of new force something we haven't seen before. There are two other major areas that are core to Trump's political ambitions. Defence is going to be about$150 billion more for the Pentagon. Therefore when you add it to what the Pentagon already gets it's going to be very close to a record$1 trillion a year. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Part of the money will go towards the Golden Dome. He wants to build a missile shield similar to the one that Israel has. Many military experts think that is a complete fantasy that he'll never get to build that, but yet he's putting tons of money into it.

16:44And one other area, environment, as we know, he's determined to unleash fossil fuels and to rain back clean energy. and sure enough this bill has plenty in it to do that.

17:07Ed, one of the interesting things about this bill is just how difficult it was to get through the Congressional Republican caucus. Elon Musk called it a disgusting abomination, not because it was cutting services to the poor or transferring wealth upwards in this massive way, but because those tax cuts add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit. Just how much resistance did Republicans put up against this? Yeah, well, bear in mind that both the House and the Senate is incredibly evenly split. So the Republican managers had very, very little room to manoeuvre with. They could only afford in both chambers to lose two or three votes.

17:50and in both chambers the bill passed with a pipsqueak. Out of this kind of agonising last few weeks of debate and sort of cajoling, we've seen fault lines within the Republican Party become very clear and on two sides really. One is those politicians, whether in the House or in the Senate, who feared they may lose their jobs because they are hurting their own supporters in all the ways that we've discussed. But on the other side, it's that old, more traditional thing of the conservative movement being, you know, the party of fiscal responsibility. Trump, I mean, he did it in his first term, but surely he's done it in his second term.

18:35He's blasted right through that. The estimates of how much this will add to the national debt are way above$3 trillion over the next 10 years. So he's run roughshod over that whole philosophy that the conservative movement should be fiscally responsible.

19:01Coming up, it was poorer voters who put Trump back in the White House. Will they let him get away with this?

19:20The thing I think about, Ed, is that Trump's base was built largely on these low-income voters, people who felt like the system had been failing them for generations, and voted for a man who promised to burn it all down and build something new in its place, something that would make their lives more dignified, easier. This bill is not that. So politically, how is he going to sell it? Yeah, I think you put your finger on another thing that's absolutely critical to keep your eye on. Don't get distracted by all the noise. This is an act of political sleight of hand. He promised people last year who are low income, who are struggling, who are finding the price of eggs unbearable, that he would be the person to finally help them.

20:12And our first hundred days have also produced historic results in the battle to defeat Biden's inflation disaster and bring jobs and wealth back to America. Prices are coming way down. You know, the fake news doesn't say it. They said he pledged. They said he pledged to bring prices down. Well, that's what I've done. Trump turns up. I'm your man. I've got your back. Finally, they feel someone's standing up for them. This bill is the absolute opposite of that. So what will happen to those people? And I think there are a number of answers to that question which are important to get your head around.

20:48First off is a very low level of political education in this country and political familiarity. It's tied in with the fragmentation of the media and the rise of far right and right wing media. Polls show that two thirds of Americans, just in the last week or two, two thirds of Americans had heard little or nothing about the bill. and which is a stunning, I think one of the most stunning poll results that I've heard in recent times. I mean, this massive thing that is going to change people's lives, people do not know anything about it. And I think Trump is hoping that it will stay that way. But at some point, won't people actually feel this in their lives?

21:34And when that happens, won't they come for the man who passed this bill for Donald Trump and the Republicans? Well, again, political sleight of hand here. Some of the most swinging cuts, particularly to Medicaid and to food assistance, are being delayed until 2028. And that is after the midterms. The biggest cuts won't have happened by then. meanwhile the tax cuts which will help you know the slightly wealthier and super wealthy americans they will have happened so they're making sure they're not stupid they're making sure that the things that people feel good about like you're paying less tax happen quickly the things that people will feel bad about like you've lost your food assistance or you can no longer go to hospital they won't happen until after the next round of elections next year and when they do come in They're going to be so close to the next presidential election in 2028 that I think the calculation is that people won't quite have felt it, won't quite have worked it out, and that they might get away with it in the next presidential election.

22:42And then who knows what happens after that. Ed, there has been this ongoing debate over the past few months about what is really the soul of this MAGA movement. Is it about ushering in a kind of techno-feudalism? Is it about consigning this era of neoliberal economics to the dustbin of history? Is it just about whatever Trump wants in a given moment? And I wonder if in this bill that seems like it could have come from the wildest dreams of any Republican since Ronald Reagan, we're getting the answer. This is what MAGA is. Yeah, I mean, I think of all those things, all of which are true to some degree, I think top of the pile is this is what Trump wants.

23:26I mean, the fact that it's just one big, beautiful bill, that it's got so many different things in it, all of which are his sort of personal obsessions, the fact that he's been driven through in such an aggressive way by one man threatening to unseat everyone in Congress if they don't go with him. So for me, that's what MAGA is. It's what Trump says it is. Beyond that, you do have aspects that run deep within the Republican and increasingly far right, a conservative movement, notably the idea that if If you get government out the way, the economy will thrive. People will do their thing. It's sort of classic American capitalism, government evil, individual entrepreneurship good.

24:19And that runs deep in this bill. And a suspicion of helping people, you know, which another way of putting that, it could be almost cruelty. The idea that if you're not good enough, you're not energetic enough, you're not clever enough to look after you and yourself and your family, then tough luck. That runs deep in America, always has done, and I think that's very present in this bill. Ed, it's a big moment. Thank you for coming and telling us about it. Thank you.

24:53And that was Ed Pilkington, chief reporter for Guardian US. You can read more about this bill and its consequences at our website, theguardian.com. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by Leah Green, Ruth Abraham and Maxed Adnan. Sound design was by Rudy Zagadlo. The executive producer was Sammy Kent. We're back with you tomorrow.

25:24This is The Guardian. Thank you.