Only Two Republicans Were Brave Enough to Vote Against Medicaid Cuts

House Republicans passed Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill by just one vote early Thursday morning.

After hours of deliberation, the bill passed 215–214, an incredibly slim margin that highlights the lack of political cohesion within the GOP. Two Republican representatives—Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio—voted with the Democrats.

The bill will include even more funding for the military and more funding for Trump’s border crackdown, while slashing crucial programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and also repealing clean energy credits put in place by the Biden administration. Up to 15 million Americans will be uninsured by 2034 due to the bill’s cuts, and 7.6 million will be at risk of losing Medicaid, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

“What we’re going to do here this morning is truly historic, and it will make all the difference in the daily lives of hardworking Americans.… To put it simply, this bill gets Americans back to winning again, and it’s been a long time coming,” Speaker Mike Johnson said, in a floor speech prior to the vote.

Democrats are accusing the GOP of pushing the anti-working-class bill “under the cover of darkness.”

“Here’s what it will mean for the American people,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, prior to the vote. “Children will get hurt. Women will get hurt. Older Americans who rely on Medicaid for nursing home care and for home care will get hurt. People with disabilities who rely on Medicaid to survive, will get hurt. Hospitals in your districts will close. Nursing homes will shut down. And people will die.”

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk’s shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have been the final nail in the coffin for the tech billionaire’s four-month stint in the White House, but it came after months of bubbling frustration at Musk’s “chain-saw” approach to dismantling the federal government.

Musk and Bessent exploded at each other in April when Musk attempted to force through his pick to lead the IRS—Gary Shapley—behind Bessent’s back. (Musk eventually lost this battle—Shapley lasted less than 72 hours before Bessent tapped Michael Faulkender to replace him.)

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” a typically mild-mannered Bessent was heard shouting after Musk as they charged down the halls of the West Wing.

“The fight had started outside the Oval Office; it continued past the Roosevelt Room and toward the chief of staff’s office, and then barreled around the corner to the national security adviser’s warren,” The Atlantic reported Wednesday.

But the gossip-worthy feud was just one of many that occurred between Musk and Trumpworld 2.0’s prominent members.

In March, Musk walked into what he understood to be an ambush, facing heated backlash from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Donald Trump had arranged the volatile meeting: “Bring them all in here, and we’ll have at it,” Trump said, according to The Atlantic. The advisers were frustrated with what they felt was Musk overstepping into their agencies.

Musk’s tenure wasn’t a total failure, according to former federal employees. He had managed to force out some of the federal workforce and shutter agencies (while “traumatizing the employees who remain,” The Atlantic reported). But ultimately, his Department of Government Efficiency’s Silicon Valley, hacking-and-slashing approach to reshaping the government failed to make bureaucracy more efficient. And some of his haphazardly introduced policies, such as requiring federal employees to submit weekly bullet-pointed progress reports, have quietly fallen by the wayside.

“He had some missteps in all of these agencies, which would have been fine because everyone acknowledges that when you’re moving fast and breaking things, not everything is going to go right. But it’s different when you do that and you don’t even have the buy-in of the agency you’re setting on fire,” one outside Trump adviser told The Atlantic.

Another adviser was a little more blunt. “How many people were fired because they didn’t send in their three things a week or whatever the fuck it was?” the adviser said anonymously. “I think that everyone is ready to move on from this part of the administration.”

And even those still on Musk’s side now see that a different approach would have been more effective at advancing the administration’s goals.

“In retrospect,” Matt Calkins, the CEO of Appian, a Virginia-based company that provides software for the federal government, told The Atlantic, “it wasn’t nearly as much as we needed, and we probably didn’t need the chain saw. We needed the chisel.”

Musk’s unceremonious exit from government followed widespread reports that several senior Trump officials practically hated the tech billionaire, finding him abrasive, unfunny, and pompous—with some describing Musk as the “most irritating person” they’d “ever had to deal with.”

“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” a senior Trump official told Rolling Stone last month. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Donald Trump’s many deals during his trip to the Middle East last week have rankled one of his closest allies on the right.

Tucker Carlson called out the president’s “corruption” on his podcast Tuesday while speaking with his guest on the program, fellow right-wing influencer Shawn Ryan. The pair were discussing their thoughts on the Trump administration, and while Ryan was happy with certain things from the president, such as his immigration crackdown and his war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Trump’s Middle East trip gave him pause.

“F--- it, I’m gonna get blasted for this,” Ryan said, “but I see all these negotiations going on in the Middle East, and then I don’t know when these buildings were approved or when these deals got done, but then I also see like, ‘Oh, there’s a brand-new hotel going up in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And another one going up in Doha.’”

“I’m like, ‘Did these just get done also with the deals that just happened over there, or was this earlier?’” Ryan continued, before telling Carlson, “You would probably know.”

Carlson denied knowing about Trump’s dealings, and Ryan said he thought the pundit was “a lot more on the inside than I am,” adding about Trump’s deals, “That stuff kind of worries me.”

“Well, it seems like corruption, yeah,” Carlson said.

It’s surprising to see Carlson offering criticism of the president, considering how close he is to Trump. He even spoke at a Trump campaign rally in late October, just days before the election.

Trump’s Middle East trip came with several announcements from his businesses in the region, as well as a $2 billion investment in his family’s cryptocurrency business from a firm backed by the United Arab Emirates government.

But the worst of it was the “gift” of a $400 million luxury plane from Qatar to Trump, ostensibly to replace Air Force One, which drew criticism even from Republicans, such as Senator Rand Paul, Ben Shapiro, and Laura Loomer. Now it seems even Carlson has some misgivings about Trump’s dealings. Does this mean that there are cracks in Trump’s base, or will all of these personalities forget Trump’s corruption the next time he panders to them?

A federal judge slammed the Department of Justice Wednesday for its “hasty arrest” of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and agreed to dismiss the ridiculous trespassing charge against the Democratic mayor.

U.S. Judge Andre Espionosa questioned why federal prosecutors would arrest Baraka only to retract the charges days later.

“An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence,” Espionosa said, in a nearly 10-minute tirade against the DOJ’s attorneys.

Earlier this month, Baraka was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and charged with trespassing after visiting Delaney Hall, a newly reopened detention facility where he had previously been denied entry. It marked the first immigration-related arrest of a sitting U.S. mayor by the Trump administration and yet another indication that the White House will try to take down just about anybody who gets in the way of its unlawful attack on immigrants. Last month, the FBI arrested a federal judge in Milwaukee for “obstructing” an attempted deportation.

Alina Habba, the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey and Donald Trump’s former lawyer, announced the Democratic mayor’s arrest on X. “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW,” she wrote, an absurd proclamation given her former client Donald Trump’s criminal history.

Just 13 days later, however, Habba announced her office would drop the misdemeanor charge against Baraka—though in the same announcement she revealed new charges against Representative LaMonica McIver, who accompanied Baraka on his visit to Delaney Hall.

Espinosa scolded Habba’s “worrisome misstep” in Baraka’s “hasty arrest,” calling the retraction of charges “embarrassing.” He dismissed the charge with prejudice.

“Federal prosecutors serve a single paramount client: justice itself. Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas,” Espinosa said. “Your allegiance is to the impartial application of the law, to the pursuit of truth, and to the upholding of due process for all.”

Despite Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attestations against the use of fluoride, his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda is apparently going easy on one of the root causes of fluorosis (the only known side effect of over-fluoridated water): pesticides.

Under Donald Trump’s helm, the Health Department secretary has sworn to remove fluoride from all public water systems. Last month, Kennedy said he was assembling a task force on the issue, with plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end its fluoridation program for good.

But a forthcoming report from Kennedy, expected to be released Thursday, will apparently not label two popular pesticides used by U.S. farmers as “unsafe,” reported The Wall Street Journal. They include atrazine, a herbicide used on grasses and corn, and glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.

Bayer and Monsanto (which transferred ownership of Roundup to Bayer in 2018) have jointly paid nearly $11 billion to settle multiple lawsuits and class actions related to accusations that Roundup’s use is behind a host of cancer cases, including lymphoma and leukemia. Approximately 165,000 Roundup lawsuits had been filed against the companies as of January 2024, according to the law firm Simmons Hanly Conroy, which represented some of the victims.

Well water, fed by groundwater, is one of the most common sources of over-fluoridated water. But why that water is exposed to high concentrations of the naturally occurring mineral is largely related to local industries and agrobusiness operations “that increase the risk of heavy metals, pesticides, nitrates, radon and fluoride in the water,” according to a 2023 study that extracted data from 15 fluoride-related studies conducted around the world.

Fluoride was first introduced to U.S. water in 1945 as part of a public health decision to reduce cavities and tooth decay in adults and children. It was remarkably successful, lowering the cavity and decay rate in both groups by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association. In 1999, the CDC listed water fluoridation as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements in the twentieth century, for that reason.

Furthermore, fluoride levels in public water are lower than they’ve been in decades. In 2015, the Obama administration dropped the maximum level of fluoride per liter of water to 0.7 milligrams from the previous guidance issued in 1962, which allowed levels to range between 0.7 and 1.2 milligrams per liter, in an effort to further waylay instances of dental fluorosis (discoloration and poor mineralization of the tooth).

“The benefits of fluoride for oral health considerably outweigh the risks,” Rodrigo Lacruz, a professor at New York University’s College of Dentistry, said in 2020, after he published a study on the effects of high fluoride ingestion.

Kennedy’s report will reportedly promise to question pesticide use. But falling short of actually enacting policy around it, all while duplicating and repeating research already conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency, is making ag industry experts further question whether the Trump administration is actually focused on efficiency, as they claim.

“If the administration’s goal is to bring more efficiency to government, then why is the MAHA Commission duplicating efforts by raising questions about pesticides that have been answered repeatedly through research and reviews by the Environmental Protection Agency?” Illinois farmer and National Corn Growers Association President Kenneth Hartman Jr. told the Journal.

Kennedy’s report will reportedly take actual aim at childhood vaccines (a popular topic for Kennedy) and ultraprocessed foods.