People think that Donald Trump is responsible for blowing up the democratic system of checks and balances, but he was actually a late comer to that game. It was establishment Republicans like former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also known as the “gravedigger of democracy,” who can take credit for that. From the moment he became the Republican minority leader in 2007, he laid out the roadmap for the modern GOP to achieve its goals by throwing bipartisanship on the trash heap and setting it on fire. As minority leader, McConnell believed in one thing: Obstruction. And when the GOP attained the majority, he pushed through the Republican agenda by any means necessary — norms, rules, even laws be damned.
Over the years, McConnell ended up having his differences with Trump. But this past week, as the Senate grappled with the bloated “big, beautiful bill” under Trump’s arbitrary July 4 deadline, McConnell shared with his Senate colleagues a bit of tactical wisdom he’d learned over the years. Asked about the danger of massive cuts to vital government programs to their reelection prospects, McConnell reassured both his party and the American people by saying, “they’ll get over it.”
In the long run they probably will; Americans have a short attention span. But to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, in the long run Mitch McConnell will be dead. There is no reason to believe he is right about Americans getting “over it” any more than he was when he vowed to make Obama a 1-termer. Nonetheless, with the exception of two GOP senators — McConnell’s fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who was compelled to announce his retirement in the wake of attacks following his “no” vote — the conference agreed to hold hands and take the plunge together.
Just as they did in 2001, 2003 and 2017, Republicans have betrayed what is allegedly their most cherished value, fiscal responsibility, in service of achieving their most priceless goal: Tax cuts for the wealthy.
Just as they did in 2001, 2003 and 2017, Republicans have betrayed what is allegedly their most cherished value, fiscal responsibility, in service of achieving their most priceless goal: Tax cuts for the wealthy. High on the drug that is Donald Trump, this time they’ve checked off as much of their long-standing wish list as they could cram into a thousand pages. Their cuts to the safety net, and health care in particular, don’t even come close to closing the deficits they are ballooning with irresponsible tax cuts and swollen Defense and Homeland Security budgets.
All this isn’t really a Trump thing. It’s a standard issue conservative movement thing. These ideas have been articles of faith for so long now that I wonder if modern Republicans even know why they believe in them.
These tenets started out as anti-communist, free market ideology, but that’s obviously no longer operative on the American right. Today it’s pretty clear, as Atlantic writer Adam Serwer memorably wrote, “the cruelty is the point.” Whether the GOP thinks the cruelty of their agenda will build our character or simply make us bow to their will, they do it because it hurts. And they expect us to “get over it.”
As we watch the party cut taxes for the richest Americans while decimating huge portions of the social safety net and exploding the deficit, the person who can take the deepest bow is Grover Norquist. “I don’t want to abolish government,” the anti-tax activist famously said. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” In a Saturday post on X, he strongly endorsed the legislation.
In a 2011 profile for “60 Minutes,” journalist Steve Kroft reported, “Norquist has been responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.” Now, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” shows that, for all the talk of MAGA populism, Norquist’s philosophy is still driving the Republican Party.
Trump is not a doctrinaire Republican in this way. Yes, he loves certain ideas in his big bill — the provisions killing climate change and green energy initiatives, for instance — because he knows how they are perceived by his base and, always the showman, he wants to be seen as a fighter. But it’s not about saving money or shrinking the government.
We need your help to stay independent
Sure, Trump has adopted the trite “waste, fraud and abuse” rhetoric that has become the mantra among Republicans trying to weasel out of responsibility for harming their own voters. But he knows these cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are a political problem. Yesterday, on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” the president lied in saying the bill cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion. But then he said this:
But we can grow our country so much more than that and we’re not gonna have to do… and you also have to get elected. When you do cutting, you have to be a little bit careful, because people don’t like necessarily cutting if they get used to something. And what I wanna do is do it through growth.
This was Trump’s line throughout the 2024 campaign. Yes, he said they’d cut the waste, but he didn’t dwell on that. It was always that tariffs and “growth” were going to fuel the new Gilded Age and everybody would be able to have everything.
In a TIME interview to mark 100 days in office, he even came out for raising taxes on the rich — “I’d be raising them on [the] wealthy to take care of [the] middle class” — before saying the quiet part out loud, that it would be “used against me politically.” He later repeated that sentiment, suggesting his rich pals would be happy to kick in more as well if only it wouldn’t be held against him. It’s fatuous nonsense, of course, but it does show that he understands tax cuts for the wealthy are not popular.
But Trump loves his big, beautiful bill because he believes it underscores his dominance — how he can rule the GOP with an iron first by insisting they pass a massive piece of legislation within a short time frame on his orders. While the bill undoubtedly contains a few of his hobby horses, for the most part it really isn’t Trump’s bill at all. It’s a Republican fantasy about to come true.
Short of eliminating Social Security and Medicare, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” contains — or at least it did before the Senate parliamentarian intervened — everything Norquist and McConnell ever dreamed of.
