The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 1 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 has managed to drive Senator Thom Tillis out of the Republican Party. The North Carolina senator has been excoriating the Senate version of Trump’s big budget bill over its deep Medicaid cuts, prompting Trump to threaten him with a primary. Tillis reacted to that by announcing his retirement and continuing to speak out against the bill. It’s quite a telling moment: Daring to utter the truth about Trump’s policies apparently is now enough to get you pushed out of the GOP. Yet in key ways, this is already backfiring for Trump. It means the Senate may be more in play for Democrats—and that hasn’t shut Tillis up. Quite the opposite. We’re talking today about all of this with Timothy Noah, a staff writer at The New Republic and author of a good new piece on the epic lying that Republicans are employing to sell Trump’s budget bill. Tim, thanks for coming on.
Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with the reason Tillis got so angry. The Senate version of the budget bill is even worse than the House version. According to various analyses, in addition to adding $3.3 trillion to the national debt, the bill would result in over 11 million more Americans losing health insurance by 2034. It would cut $1 trillion from Medicaid. Tim, can you put the magnitude of that cut in context and explain it?
Noah: It’s the biggest cut there’s ever been to Medicaid. It’s about an 18 percent cut. And of course, the Republicans are running around saying it’s not a cut at all, which is one of many lies they’re telling about this bill. The Congressional Budget Office would beg to differ. They say that they’re cutting close to $1 trillion out of Medicaid and that there will be drastic reduction in those enrolled.
Sargent: Yeah, and the big reason for this discrepancy in opinions is that the Republican bill heaps a lot of work requirements and other bureaucratic impediments to getting Medicaid on recipients. Republicans just call that strengthening the bill because they say it’s just going after fraud, but the whole point of those things is to get people to get off the program. That’s why Republicans are able to point to it and call it “savings” to begin with, right?
Noah: Right. They don’t actually give a damn whether anybody actually gets a job. They just want to get people off the rolls, and throwing sand in the gears is a time-honored way to do it, specifically with work requirements. It works pretty well when you do it to food stamps too. And the budget analysts know this, so they make their calculations accordingly.
Sargent: Absolutely. So Tillis got furious about this because it’s going to mean hundreds of thousands of people in his home state of North Carolina losing health coverage. On Sunday, he shouted the following on the Senate floor, “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off Medicaid? Trump’s advisers in the White House are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.” That’s Thom Tillis. Tim, what’s striking to me about that is Tillis is saying straight out that Trump is getting scammed by his own advisers into believing that this bill doesn’t do what it actually does. Now, I think Trump knows perfectly well what it does, but still his advisers really are probably trying to scam him this way. Your thoughts about those quotes?
Noah: Yeah, well, there are a million ways that they’re scamming themselves on this. Josh Hawley is a counterexample to Tillis. Last month, he published an op-ed in The New York Times saying Republicans are committing suicide if they’re going to do these kinds of cuts to Medicaid. But over the weekend, he quietly signed off on the cuts and signed off on the legislation by allowing the bill to move forward. So yeah, I don’t think it’s any great secret to Trump or anybody else that they are cutting the hell out of both Medicaid and food stamps—which they’re cutting 20 percent, the largest cut ever made to food stamps, as well. And it’s kind of a neat trick. They are committing unprecedented cuts to the social safety net and at the same time more than doubling the deficit. That’s hard to do at the same time.
Sargent: They really want those tax cuts for the rich a lot, Tim.
Noah: Yes. And they are pretending that … they’ve even changed their accounting method. In effect, they are saying, Whenever we Republicans tell you that a tax cut is temporary, it’s not temporary. It’s permanent.
Sargent: I want to grab onto what you said about Josh Hawley, who’s the senator from Missouri, because he actually engaged in a two-step that’s really disgusting. As you say, he wrote a New York Times op-ed—Hawley did—saying, Trump, you must not cut Medicaid. It will screw your own voters. Working-class people did not vote for you, Donald Trump, for you to cut Medicaid. Our voters, working-class voters, rely on these programs. Great, right? It’s great to hear that from a Republican. And it actually caused Josh Hawley to stand out. But you could tell that he was heading toward a bullshit conclusion to all this because he was also saying, Well, work requirements are probably OK. And then of course at the end—
Noah: Right. He was saying those aren’t cuts. He was simultaneously arguing that the work requirements aren’t cuts. And he was saying that because they poll well, although they tend not to poll well if the people conducting the poll explain that the majority of people on Medicaid already have jobs.
Sargent: Well, that’s the critical point to all this. That’s really the throbbing core of the lie, of the scam that both Trump and Hawley are up to here. They say, We would never cut Medicaid because we know that our own voters would hate it. And that snookers pundits into saying, Wow, these Republicans are really different from other Republicans. They’re really trying to turn the Republican Party into a working-class party. But then out of the other side of their mouths, they say something like, We’re only going to implement work requirements, which aren’t really a cut. But of course, the thing with work requirements is that they target those very people, right? They keep additional requirements on the working poor: people who are on Medicaid and also already working. Can you talk about that dimension of it?
Noah: Yeah, they’re counting on a certain amount of false positives in the procedure of verifying that people work. It’s going to get gummed up. It’s going to be done badly. They’re not going to give enough funding to the bureaucrats who are supposed to enforce these new provisions, so it’ll be done badly. Thomas Frank wrote a book—I don’t know, about 20 years ago, maybe less—called The Wrecking Crew. Basically, its argument was the Republican game plan is you make government inefficient, as much as you can—and that way, you can reduce funding for it.
Sargent: It’s a trick that’s worked for half a century for them. I want to point out that Tillis also said something else on the Senate floor that relates to what we’re talking about here. He said that Republicans should “make sure that we do not break the promise of Donald J. Trump that he’s made to the people on Medicaid.” Now that’s a reference directly to what we’re talking about here, which is that Trump promised his voters that he would never cut Medicaid, right? And I think that’s what makes this campaign from Tillis so damaging. It blows the lid off of that scam. Tim, why is he the only Republican telling the GOP base the truth about any of this?
Noah: Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid of Trump. They’re more afraid of Trump than they are of their voters. But they should be afraid of their voters, because Hawley was right last month in The New York Times. This is political suicide. I wrote a piece a few weeks back explaining how Medicaid has over the decades joined Medicare and Social Security as a third rail of American politics. It didn’t used to be. In fact, way back in the beginning, if you wanted to go on Medicaid, you couldn’t have a job. The only people who were eligible for Medicaid were on welfare. But eligibility expanded over the years, and now there are more people on Medicaid than there are on Medicare—slightly more. So it’s a huge program. It’s a program that reaches into the working class. As Steve Bannon has pointed out, there are a lot of MAGA voters who are on Medicaid, and they are in for a very rude shock. The Republicans are just trying to wish this away. Maybe they can con people enough to pass the bill, but they’re not going to be able to con people when the cuts come.
Sargent: Well, you got to wonder why people like Steve Bannon aren’t raising their voices a little more loudly right now. It seems to me that there’s a chunk of the “working-class populist” MAGA types who are somewhat serious about the populism and the pro-worker movement that they want the GOP to pursue. Hawley has revealed himself to be full of shit on this after talking a pretty good game—but people like Bannon, why aren’t we hearing more from them?
Noah: Because he’s playing both sides as usual and is also afraid of alienating Trump. If he were to be really thoroughly denounced by Trump, he would be at risk of losing much of his audience. So he will tell the truth up to a point, and then he’ll fall in line.
Sargent: Unfortunately, that seems very likely. I got to ask, Tim, is this really doing anything for Trump, this campaign against Tillis? All Trump did was draw more media attention to Tillis telling the truth about how the bill screws Trump’s base. Tillis’s retirement means both that he can keep telling this truth without worrying about a primary, and it means that Democrats probably have a better pickup opportunity in the Senate. North Carolina is very slowly moving in a blue direction—
Noah: Right.
Sargent: —and without Tillis, Dems have a shot there, even if the odds remain long. Your thoughts on all that?
Noah: With a few more excommunications like this, the Democrats could hugely increase their chances of winning back the Senate in 2026. And The Wall Street Journal is already starting to worry about that. I’m curious, What are your thoughts about the Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate?
Sargent: I think they’re really long. I think North Carolina as well is just always the thing that breaks Democrats’ hearts, but the flip side is Democrats can get elected statewide in North Carolina. It has happened. We have a Democratic governor there right now. I want to point out, by the way, that The Wall Street Journal slammed Trump over this very point. They had an editorial saying, “Trump Puts the Senate in Play in 2026. By helping to drive Thom Tillis into retirement, he puts his Presidency at risk. A common feature of Donald Trump’s two terms as president,” the editorial continues, “is that he can’t stand political prosperity. When events are going in his direction, he has an uncanny habit of handing his opponents a sword.” So Trump’s media allies are really, really ticked about this, and they’re really nervous about it.
Noah: Yeah, the Journal is bitter because they really want that tax cut. People are always talking about how smart Trump is politically, and I’ve never thought he was especially smart. I think he has certain kind of animal instincts about how to rile the crowd in the moment, but he has no capability as a long-term strategist. None.
Sargent: What do you think happens in the long run here? It sure looks to me like this bill passes.
Noah: I think the bill will pass. And I think it will be suicide for the Republicans, just like Hawley wrote in The New York Times. I wrote it before Hawley did. It’s insane. It is so self-destructive. Again, another way of describing the magnitude of this accomplishment is that they are alienating both MAGA voters and the bond markets because they are also.… The bond markets aren’t going to be fooled by the funky accounting that the Republicans have adopted for this. The bond markets will recognize that they are talking about more than doubling the current deficit, which the bond markets are already apoplectic about.
Sargent: It certainly seems like a bizarre strategy. Just to wrap this up, you sometimes hear it said that Trump and Republicans are doing these incredibly unpopular policies because they don’t really expect to face a real election ever again. I don’t think that’s what’s actually going on here, and I want to run this by you. I think what’s going on with Trump and Republicans is that they think, in some sense, they have broken the pattern of American politics, that Trump is some exception to typical political cycles. And I can see why they think that because of Trump’s really remarkable comeback. But the bottom line is: I think the underlying patterns of politics do reassert themselves and are reasserting themselves. Trump is very unpopular already. Opinion is proving to be thermostatic on issues like immigration, which he was supposed to be invincible on; he’s now unpopular on that. And I think in the midterms, we’re going to see something potentially typical of a midterm, right? In 2018, the last time Trump was in the White House, his effort to repeal Obamacare and his enormous tax cut for the rich led to a massive Democratic win—and I think that pattern could reassert itself. What do you think?
Noah: I think it could. And if it’s big enough, we might start to talk about the possibility of Trump being removed from office. Because by the end of his first week in office, he’d already committed enough impeachable offenses to be removed. But it takes a Democratic Congress to get the job done, and they need a lot of votes in the Senate to convict. But the way he’s going alienating members of his own party, I don’t rule anything out.
Sargent: Yeah, well, I certainly hope you’re right. I don’t know if I’m that optimistic. I think the House looks very gettable for Democrats. The Senate still seems very tough to me.
Noah: It’s hard.
Sargent: It’s hard. Although, in 2006, just to talk about patterns in politics reasserting themselves, nobody expected Democrats to win both the House and the Senate. At the very least, the Senate was considered a serious long shot. And by the way, I want to remind people that two years earlier, in 2004, George W. Bush looked absolutely invincible after having gotten reelected. He looked as if he was totally untouchable. It looked as if his lock on public opinion was unbreakable; very similar to the set of despairing emotions that I think people had after Trump won. But then the incompetence, the failures of governance eroded Bush’s popularity. And two years later, Dems won both houses. Talk about typical patterns reasserting themselves, right?
Noah: Things turned fast. It was also true of George H.W. Bush, where after the Persian Gulf War, he was absolutely unbeatable. I remember I was working at The Wall Street Journal at the time and Al Hunt, the bureau chief, had a meeting where he called all the political reporters together and apologized to us that we were going to have this boring assignment of covering the 1992 election because it was obvious that George H.W. Bush was going to win a second term.
Sargent: Well, old fuddy-duddies like us know that these things turn fast. So Tim, you seem somewhat optimistic. Can you give us a closing optimistic message?
Noah: Yeah. I thought from the beginning that Trump is on a path of self-destruction, and the Republican Party is on a path of self-destruction. I don’t know exactly how it plays out, but he is alienating everybody, including his own base. He just has, again, no sense of strategy—and he also has no impulse control. When you look at the Republicans in Congress, how many of those guys can stand the sight of Trump, really? They all pretend to love him now, but his support among Republicans is a quarter-inch deep. So all of these things could work out in interesting ways. I have not given up hope that Trump will be, one way or another, ousted from office within four years.
Sargent: And if that doesn’t happen, what happens here? Democrats potentially win the House, but not the Senate next year? And then Democrats do pretty well in the 2028 election and beat JD Vance?
Noah: Yes, absolutely. And Trump has never been able to transfer his popularity to his flunkies, and I think Vance will demonstrate that. And who knows what Vance is going to be in four years? This is a guy who has changed his identity—literally changed his name two or three times, right? And [he] has changed his political identity at least a couple of times. He’s an opportunist. He will do the opportunistic thing. And we can’t know right now what that will be.
Sargent: Yeah. I don’t think any other Republican alive can activate Trump voters the way Trump himself can. Timothy Noah, really great to talk to you as always. Thanks for coming on.
Noah: Thank you, Greg.