The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump really wants the Senate to pass the “big, beautiful bill” that House Republicans passed the other day. But a number of Senate Republicans are, for the time being anyway, speaking uncomfortable truths about that bill: It would balloon the deficit and slash spending on the poor, largely to fund a massive tax cut for the wealthy. That’s not supposed to be what the “working-class GOP” is all about. And indeed, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has just delivered two diatribes on Fox News that neatly capture how badly this bill and the selling of it will screw over Trump and MAGA voters. Today we’re talking about all this with Paul Waldman, co-author of the book White Rural Rage, who’s one of the best out there at documenting how badly Trump and GOP policies do harm those voters. Paul, thanks for coming on, man.
Paul Waldman: My pleasure.
Sargent: So we know that as many as 10 million people could lose Medicaid coverage under the House GOP bill, which cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from that program. Many of the people who would lose coverage come from red states. It also has big cuts to food stamps. The bill delivers a large tax cut for the rich, and it would in an overall sense redistribute resources upward, with the top 10 percent of households gaining and the bottom 10 percent losing. Paul, can you talk about the impact this bill would have on Trump and red-state voters?
Waldman: Republicans like to say these days that they are the party of the working class. And in some ways, that’s true. We have seen a transformation in voting where more educated voters with college degrees and graduate degrees are much more likely to vote for Democrats. And especially, white voters without college degrees are much more likely to vote Republicans. But one of the implications of that is that people who are more likely to vote for Trump are much more reliant on government services, both as individuals and in the areas in which they live. And you take a bill like this, which is slashing away at government services like Medicaid, like food stamps, like spending for education—those are all things that are going to hit Republicans and the areas where they live particularly hard. And then you layer on top of that a lot of the specific places that they’re going after—things like, for instance, green energy subsidies. Those, about 80 percent of the manufacturing subsidies that the Biden administration put into the legislation that they passed, go to Republican districts. So there are all different kinds of ways where by having this be the ideological realization of what Republicans have wanted all along, they’re actually going to hurt their own constituents and the people who voted for Trump the most.
Sargent: No question about it. In fact, a number of Republican senators agree with you on this, at least for now anyway. Republican senators oppose lots of things in the House GOP bill, including Medicaid cuts. Senator Rand Paul is also out there arguing that it really does balloon the deficit; that’s his concern. I want to come back to that in a second, but first, let’s listen to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Fox News. Here goes.
Sandra Smith (audio voiceover): How do you win over Rand Paul, and what changes is the president willing to see to this bill?
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Well, anyone who votes against the one big, beautiful bill, including Senator Rand Paul, will be voting for a tax hike of more than $4 trillion on the American people and their voters will know about it. That is unacceptable to Republican voters and all voters across the country who elected this president in a Republican majority to get things done on Capitol Hill.
Sargent: The contempt for Trump voters and for Republican voters here is just remarkable. Karoline Leavitt is absolutely certain that she can just gaslight those people into believing that anything that doesn’t do Trump’s bidding simply must be bad for them—that if Trump wants it, it must be good for them. To me, this really reveals how badly they’re trying to screw these people. What do you think, Paul?
Waldman: Yeah. And we’ve talked a lot in recent years about the way that Democrats supposedly condescend to heartland voters and look down on them, but there’s really no one that has more contempt for Trump voters than Donald Trump himself. He really believes that they are bigoted and simpleminded, that they’ll believe anything he tells them, and that they want to be their worst selves at all times. So he’s always felt this way about them. Famously, when he said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, well, what does that say about the people who support him? That they’re so amoral that they don’t care whether or not the people they vote for are murderers? So that’s a statement about them as much as it was meant to be a statement about him.
And I think that he does believe—and maybe not without evidence—that he can basically tell them that something is good for them when it’s actually bad for them, and they’ll believe it. And you can see, if you want to, all kinds of places where, in his first term, he didn’t do what he said he was going to do, or he hurt them in particular, and they still voted for him. That was true, for instance, in coal country, which is one of the places we addressed in our book White Rural Rage. In a lot of coal country, in West Virginia and Kentucky, he came and he promised them that he was going to bring back all the coal jobs. And he didn’t, of course. Coal was in a long decline for a lot of different reasons, and those jobs didn’t come back. But yet, they still voted for him with as high rates in 2020 as they had in 2016—or higher. And the same thing happened in 2024.
The fact that he didn’t keep his promise wasn’t relevant. They either felt like it didn’t matter if he kept his promise, or there were so many kinds of emotional things that he was offering them that the practical promise that he made—that he was going to make all their lives great—didn’t even matter. And he’s still doing it. He had an event at the White House not long ago where he brought a bunch of coal miners in and he told them—again—I’m going to bring back all the coal jobs. It’s not true. I don’t know if they believe it or not, but he is definitely not going to deliver what he says he will.
Sargent: I want to note one other thing about that Leavitt rant that we just listened to. She was basically threatening GOP senators there. If they don’t back Trump’s bill, then Trump is going to go tell their voters that their senator has betrayed him. And they think that’s all it takes, right? That’s what the White House thinks is enough. Now, the senators who oppose the bill are people like Josh Hawley, who is against the Medicaid cuts, supposedly on populist grounds; Susan Collins, who opposes them because she plays a moderate on safety net–related things; Jerry Moran of Kansas, who opposes them because they will hurt rural hospitals; some others in the mix. Do you think Trump can move senators like these with this type of threat from Karoline Leavitt or not?
Waldman: I think the answer may be a little different for each one of them. Some of them, it may be genuine principle. Rand Paul really believes in small government, and he likes all the cuts that are being made. But the fact is this bill will balloon the deficit. And if you actually think the deficit is a problem, then you ought to be against it. And maybe he’s going to say, I’m going to take a principled stand for that reason. Josh Hawley is clearly trying to position himself as the guy who takes that rhetoric about Republicans being the party of the working class seriously. And so he has latched on to the Medicaid issue, and he seems to be serious about it, but how long is that going to stick? He could be positioning himself for 2028 or sometime in the future where he wants to make that stuff real, and that’s going to butt him up against Trump.
For each one of them, they may have their own calculation. They may say, Well, I’ve established enough of my own identity among my constituents and maybe my next reelection isn’t for two years or four years, so I can go out and make this stance and maybe people will see me as principled and maybe Trump will lose interest in taking revenge on me. But it’s always a risk. And there are plenty of people—especially in the House—[where] Trump has endorsed [their] primary opponent and that was the end of their career. But I think maybe senators, who represent a whole state and tend to have even larger egos than people in the House, feel like I can survive it because my constituents love me so much.
Sargent: Look, Josh Hawley actually has a pretty good argument. I don’t know to what degree he means it or to what degree he’ll stick with it, but it’s a good case. Here’s another diatribe from Karoline Leavitt on Fox News. Listen to this.
Leavitt (audio voiceover): This bill is the most historic piece of legislation to ever move through Congress in modern history. Not only does it save nearly $2 trillion, but it also delivers on the president’s key priorities. It also has historic investments in border security, historic funding for the Golden Dome and our national security, and so many other incredible things are packed into this bill. So now it is before the Senate. Those discussions are ongoing, but the president is not going to back down.
Sargent: So Paul, the line about saving trillions is a joke since it would actually add trillions to the deficit, per the Congressional Budget Office. And if you think about it, this is another way they’re really screwing their own people, not to mention everyone else. Invoking fiscal savings as a way to slash the safety net to ribbons while delivering a huge tax cut to the rich and imposing deficits on the children and grandchildren of GOP voters is a decades-old Republican trick. Can you talk about that larger context?
Waldman: Yeah, if they feel they can get away with that, it may be because they’ve gotten away with it before. We have this repetitive cycle where every time Republicans take power, there’s one thing they are absolutely going to do, which is cut taxes on the wealthy. And every time they make the same arguments, which is, This is going to cause such an explosion of economic growth that we won’t be able to count all the money we take in in tax revenue, and it won’t cost a thing. They say that every single time. Every single time it’s wrong, but they come back to it. Maybe it’s because they feel like the news media take it seriously enough that they can get away with it. Obviously, they have a dilemma that is at the core of the Republican political project, which is that if you’re going to advance the interests of a very small wealthy sliver of the population, you have to convince the rest of the population that it’s good for them too. And one of the ways you do it is by saying, It’s actually not going to cost anything because we’re all going to benefit. Cutting taxes for the wealthy will make us all rich.
And the fact that it never works out, well, people have short memories. The next time there’s a Republican president and a Republican Congress, they’re going to come up with another tax bill that will cut taxes for the wealthy, and they’re going to say the same thing. I think they feel like, even if there are fact-checks and liberals like us who are screaming about how wrong they are and how history has proven this wrong, it doesn’t really matter—because sometimes in that kind of argument, you don’t necessarily have to win the argument with everyone; you can just fight to a draw. And the Republican Party still believes in this, even though it has had some ideological changes over the years on how it approaches certain issues. The importance of cutting taxes for the wealthy is something they have always believed in, they still believe in, and they’re going to get the votes on that. So I think they feel like they can win that.
Sargent: I want to dig in on what you said there about the core Republican political project and the flaws at the very center of it. We’ve got a number of GOP senators who oppose the Medicaid cuts, as we mentioned earlier, and also a few of them who oppose the ballooning of the deficits that the bill would bring, like Senator Rand Paul; I think maybe Ron Johnson is in that mix as well. It’s a math problem, isn’t it, Paul, in which they don’t want to be seen gutting Medicaid but they can’t offset tax cuts for the rich any other way? How do they get out of that box?
Waldman: Yeah, you really can’t, especially if you add in the fact that they want to increase defense spending. There’s this quip that some people use: that the government is basically an insurance company with an army. And those are the biggest things. It’s health care—Medicare and Medicaid—[and] defense spending. Those are the biggest expenditures. And so people who don’t really understand how it works think that you can just go in and find waste, fraud, and abuse.… When Elon Musk said he was going to be able to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, anyone who knew anything about it knew that that was ridiculous. He just didn’t understand how it worked.
You cannot get trillions of dollars in cuts without going after those core programs that are the most expensive—and that’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And they feel that Social Security and Medicare have to be off the table because seniors are highly motivated. They keep close track on what’s happening with those two programs that they rely on, and they’re going to mobilize against you and vote against you if you touch Social Security and Medicare. So what’s left? Well, Medicaid is left. And Medicaid is an enormous program. It now serves—if you include the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is a subsidiary—80 million Americans. It is huge. And we spend a lot of money on it. And it gives health insurance to tens of millions of Americans. That’s a worthwhile thing.
And even if you’re a Republican who doesn’t like it [in] a fundamental, ideological way, well, you look at your constituents and you say, 20, 30, 40 percent of my constituents are on Medicaid. If I cut that, they’re suddenly going to say, “Oh, wait, you screwed me over.” So you can’t make the math work. The only way to make the math work is to say, Well, the tax cuts basically don’t count, that we’re just going to claim that they don’t count for the deficit because they’re going to pay for themselves with the ensuing economic growth. You just can’t make it work in a realistic way without going deep into Medicaid.
Sargent: I think this Gordian knot that we’re talking about is actually made worse by the demographic shifts in the Republican coalition and by people like Josh Hawley, who temporarily at least are taking the rhetoric about the working-class GOP seriously. I do think one way this could all go is that in the end, Republican senators accept a lot of big Medicaid cuts that they just redescribe as cutting waste and fraud. Trump himself has laid the groundwork for this by saying, We’re not going to touch Medicaid. We’re only going to go after waste and fraud. And the funny thing about this, I think, is this is how the Republican Party has been operating for decades. Returning to that old ruse after vowing to be a working-class party would like be a capstone to Trump’s scam. Do you predict something like that? How do you see it playing out?
Waldman: Yeah, it’s hard to predict, but it’s hard to imagine that they’re not going to get this thing over the finish line. And when it comes to describing what they’re doing as rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, you can do that at the front end. The bill passes, and you can tell people, This is going to be fine. Yes, you’re seeing headlines about cuts to Medicaid, and you’re on Medicaid or your mom or your neighbor is on Medicaid, but don’t worry, it’ll be OK. You can say that to people—but once the cuts hit, you can’t convince somebody that they didn’t lose their health insurance, that they were the waste, when people know that they are not the waste.
So you you can play all kinds of rhetorical tricks. There have been a number of different studies looking at how many millions of people are going to lose their health coverage because of, for instance, work requirements—which are really just paperwork requirements, setting up an obstacle course of bureaucracy that you have to navigate. And if you don’t do it, you lose your health coverage. You can characterize that. And Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, has done this in saying, Well, there are 10 million people or something like that who shouldn’t be getting it, because that’s what the study says, that those all those people will lose their coverage if they institute the work requirements. Now, you can say that those people are undeserving—but once the cuts happen, and it turns out it’s your brother who is working a job but didn’t fill in his form quickly enough and lost his health coverage, you’re not going to say that he was undeserving. Once those start to really hit communities, that rhetoric doesn’t really hold up anymore.
So they’re going to probably play with the dates when certain things will take effect. Maybe they can delay some things until after the midterm elections, and that might help. That might be effective because then, at that point, nobody has lost their coverage yet. So they’re going to try to finagle this in a way that will minimize the political harm, but I think they all know that there is going to be political harm. And that’s why you see plenty of Republicans who ideologically don’t like Medicaid, never liked Medicaid, feel like [it] is not something the government should be doing—that’s their perspective as small-government conservatives—but they are still very reluctant to do this, because they see the danger once their constituents realize what’s actually happening.
Sargent: I think you really put your finger on something important, Paul, which is that to Trump and many Republicans and Karoline Leavitt, their own voters really are the waste. That is what they think, at bottom. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Paul Waldman’s Substack, The Cross Section, and his book, White Rural Rage, which talks about this stuff a lot. Paul, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.