Lindsey Graham Dumps Cold Water on Trump-Backed Budget Bill

While House Republicans celebrated passing the president’s “big, beautiful” spending bill by a one-vote margin Thursday, caucus members in the upper chamber remained unimpressed.

Speaking with CNN’s Manu Raju later that day, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham shot down some of the cuts as “not real,” arguing that the House had done next to nothing to actually bring down federal spending.

Even a $880 billion cut into Medicaid couldn’t offset the gargantuan price tag on extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt. Those numbers have ruffled feathers among congressional budget hawks, who were under the impression that the Trump administration would be sizing down spending rather than beefing it up.

America’s national deficit is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing.

“Some of the Freedom Caucus members are warning you guys not to water down any of their cuts, what do you say to them?” Raju asked.

Graham could only laugh.

“Well, you had your chance,” the lawmaker said with a chuckle. “Some of these cuts are not real. And we’re talking about over a decade—you know, if you do a trillion and a half, that’s like a percent and a half.”

“So don’t get high on our horse here that we’ve somehow made some major advancement of reducing spending because we didn’t,” Graham noted.

Several conservative senators have indicated they won’t vote for the bill if it includes a debt limit increase, including Senators Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Rick Scott. The growing coalition of budget-conscious naysayers is threatening enough to potentially keep the bill from reaching the president’s desk, as Republicans grapple with their narrow majority in the Senate.

The Trump administration doesn’t want you to trust independent analysis of their “big, beautiful” tax bill.

The bill—now headed to the Senate—proposes cutting upward of $880 billion from Medicaid in order to make a multitrillion-dollar tax cut extension for multimillionaires and corporations more palatable to the American public. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.

But when pressed by Fox News Friday to explain the massive expenditure, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent simply brushed the numbers off.

“You’re referring to the [Congressional Budget Office] scoring, which is 10-year scoring and it’s D.C.-style scoring,” Bessent said, clearing his throat. “We think that we can both grow the economy and control the debt.”

“What’s important, Bill, is that the economy grows faster than the debt,” Bessent told Fox Host Bill Hemmer. “So what I would tell your viewers to focus on, is what I’m focused on, is what [former] Secretary [Janet] Yellen was focused on, is what is total debt to GDP.

“We can grow our way out of this. If we change the growth trajectory of the country, of the economy, then we will stabilize our finances and grow our way out of this,” Bessent added.

The CBO is a nonpartisan federal agency that provides prospective analytics to Congress. On Tuesday, a CBO report of the House’s reconciliation package found that—if passed—the bill would disproportionately aid the wealthiest among us, lowering household resources by 4 percent for the bottom 10 percent of America, while raising resources by 2 percent for the richest 10 percent of the country.

But America’s finances are not stabilizing, in no small part due to Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff plan that has rattled U.S. markets. Last week, credit firm Moody’s was the last of the three major bond rating agencies to downgrade the nation’s score. Moody’s reported that it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. economy will be able to keep up with its rising debt and interest payments, throwing off what was once an unshakeable confidence in U.S. growth.

In the wake of the downgrade, Bessent once again urged investors to close their eyes and disregard the news, claiming that the lowered score was simply a “lagging indicator” of U.S. performance.

America’s national debt is currently more than $36.8 trillion, as of the time of publishing. Whether or not the deficit actually affects the economy is still in debate, but having investors believe in the health of the economy is critical.

“The government deficit isn’t a problem until investors think it is,” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told Axios Monday. “And they’re increasingly telling us that the deficit is a problem.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inadvertently destroyed his own nominee for surgeon general by giving a rare, good piece of medical advice.  

During an interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins Thursday, Kennedy was asked to explain a remark he’d made that people should not take his medical advice. 

“Absolutely. People should not be taking medical advice from somebody who is not a physician,” Kennedy said. 

That’s not great news for Casey Means, the wellness influencer and author Donald Trump nominated at Kennedy’s suggestion to serve as the surgeon general. Means is not a practicing physician because she has no active medical license, and she never completed her physician residency.

Unaware of how ridiculous he sounded, Kennedy continued, muddling his point entirely. “And they should also be skeptical about any medical advice. They need to do their own research,” he said.

In one breath, Kennedy warned against taking advice from unproven sources and also urged Americans to question any actual advice they do get and seek out their own alternative, unproven medicines. As an anti-vaccine advocate, Kennedy has repeatedly championed alternative, unproven medicines. 

Harvard University is suing the Trump administration over its revocation of the school’s ability to enroll international students.

In a lawsuit filed on Friday in Boston, the university slammed the administration’s “unlawful and unwarranted action,” calling it a “blatant violation” of the law.

The school highlighted the over 6,800 visa holders from more than 100 countries that will be negatively impacted by the administration’s disdain for basic First Amendment principles.

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission,” Harvard said in the suit.

Harvard said it will also be seeking a temporary restraining order against the move.

The move comes one day after the Trump administration announced it is revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which would bar all international students on F- or J- nonimmigrant visas from enrolling in the university for the 2025–2026 academic year, including those already pursuing a degree at the school.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press release full of propaganda on Thursday. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused. They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law.”

Noem claims that Harvard can avoid the ban on future foreign student enrollment by simply doxxing all of its current foreign students to the Trump administration.

Weeks after negotiating a palatable trade deal with the United Kingdom to squash the tariffs, Donald Trump wants more.

The president pitched early Friday that the U.K. should—like his administration—focus on divesting from clean energy and return to oil drilling, claiming that the switch would bring energy costs “way down.”

“Our negotiated deal with the United Kingdom is working out well for all,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I strongly recommend to them, however, that in order to get their Energy Costs down, they stop with the costly and unsightly windmills, and incentivize modernized drilling in the North Sea, where large amounts of oil lay waiting to be taken.

“A century of drilling left, with Aberdeen as the hub,” he continued. “The old fashioned tax system disincentivizes drilling, rather than the opposite. U.K.’s Energy Costs would go WAY DOWN, and fast!”

Britain has some of the highest energy prices in the world, but experts don’t point their finger at green solutions as the problem. Instead, it’s the nation’s overreliance on gas for electricity and heat that has “led to record high levels of household energy debt and a sharp slump in industrial activity,” The Guardian reported earlier this week.

Industries reliant on vast energy resources have fallen by a third in the U.K. since 2021, marking their lowest level since 1990, according to a business overview released by Britain’s Office for National Statistics on Monday. Bringing business back up will depend on solving the crisis.

“These figures are a wake-up call,” Sam Richards, the chief executive of lobbying group Britain Remade, told The Guardian. “Sky-high energy costs have gutted Britain’s industrial base, with output in sectors like steel and chemicals collapsing to record lows. If we’re serious about protecting jobs and rebuilding our manufacturing strength, we need to cut industrial electricity costs, and fast.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s interest in expanding drilling isn’t without influence. Oil and gas lobbyists were Trump’s fourth-largest source of donations during his most recent presidential campaign, handing more than $14 million to the anti-environmentalist, according to campaign filings.

President Trump on Friday suggested ramping up tariffs against the European Union, indicating that his trade wars are still only just beginning. 

The president called for a 50 percent tariff on products from the EU, to begin on June 1. 

“The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with. Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025. There is no Tariff if the product is built or manufactured in the United States.”

Earlier in the morning, he suggested also directly tariffing Apple.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United  States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”

The iPhone is primarily manufactured in China, one of the countries with the iciest current trade relationships with the Trump administration (although Apple has moved some manufacturing to India in an attempt to offset that). This tariff, once again aimed to force companies into more domestic manufacturing, could raise the price of the iPhone by 25 percent, which could price it at around $3,000. 

Stock market futures in the U.S. took a dive after each announcement from the president, a persisting theme in his ongoing effort to destabilize the international market. The European stock market also fell by 2 percent. This all comes before what will likely be an uneasy Friday meeting between Trump administration trade representative Jameson Greer and his European counterpart. 

This story has been updated.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a tirade Thursday against a federal judge who ruled against Donald Trump’s illegal deportations to South Sudan.

During a press briefing, Leavitt railed against U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy of Massachusetts, who ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration had provided “plainly insufficient” notice to several third-country nationals before deporting them to South Sudan, which is in the midst of violence and political unrest. As a result, the migrants are being held at a U.S. naval base in Djibouti.

“Judge Murphy is forcing federal officials to remain in Djibouti for over two weeks, threatening our U.S. diplomatic relationships with countries around the world, and putting these agents’ lives in danger by having to be with these illegal murderers, criminals, and rapists. This is completely absurd,” Leavitt said.

“Judge Brian Murphy is not the secretary of state, he is not the secretary of defense, or the commander in chief. He is a district court judge in Massachusetts. He cannot control foreign policy or national security of the United States of America, and to suggest otherwise is being completely absurd,” Leavitt continued, wrongly arguing that the judicial branch had no power to challenge illegal orders from the executive one.

The Trump administration has continually argued that its illegal deportations are a matter of foreign policy, and therefore exempt from judicial review. Some military officials were surprised when the controversial deportation flight that left Tuesday was described at a Department of Homeland Security press conference the following day as a “diplomatic and military security operation,” according to CNN.

If anything, Murphy’s status as a “district court judge in Massachusetts” might suggest he has a better grip on the law than the two former television stars that run the White House and Pentagon, respectively. As for Marco Rubio, a former attorney, there is literally no excuse.

Murphy had previously ruled to stop a similar spate of deportations to Libya.

Leavitt wasn’t the only one to blow a gasket over Murphy’s ruling. Trump had his own temper tantrum on Truth Social Thursday. “A Federal Judge in Boston, who knew absolutely nothing about the situation, or anything else, has ordered that EIGHT of the most violent criminals on Earth curtail their journey to South Sudan, and instead remain in Djibouti,” Trump wrote.

The president whined that a “a large number of ICE Officers, who would otherwise be in the United States, protecting our citizens,” had to remain in Djibouti to watch the detainees. He asked that the Supreme Court end the “quagmire that has been caused by the Radical Left.”

The president’s great solution to equalize America’s prescription costs with countries around the globe apparently boils down to raising the cost of drugs everywhere else.

Donald Trump explained during the unveiling of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report Thursday that his administration had had intense discussions with the country’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, allegedly cornering them into lowering the cost of drugs by raising them in other nations.

But further details of Trump’s plan didn’t sound like a leader that was hard on drug companies.

“The companies are all coming in, we’ve had some very promising interactions,” said former TV host and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz. “People have talked about drug prices in a silo in isolation, but when you start going to the countries where they give discounts to because they’re getting beat up there and you support these companies, they see a huge upside potential. Even greater than the numbers you mentioned.

“They should be able to charge more than what they would have historically been tolerant of, if they have the support of the U.S. government and you,” he continued, mentioning that Kennedy was aware of the conversations with drug companies.

“Well, they were artificially low and artificially high. We were artificially high, they were artificially low,” Trump responded, emphasizing that the government would be acting expediently to enact the international price changes.

It’s not the first time that Trump has lied that America subsidizes the health care of other countries, and that low drug prices outside the U.S. are because the American government has financially offset would-be high prices in other countries.

But that’s detached from reality: The U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, developed countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage—not because the U.S. government “subsidizes” drug costs in other developed nations.

Other things that researchers point to as potential solutions for high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to restrict out-of-pocket, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (like those in Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform. It’s unclear how the Trump administration would work to undo the policies and regulations in foreign countries that keep their drug prices low.

Beyond that, America’s lax drug pricing has historically been thanks to Trump’s party.

In a post on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump pledged that his executive order focused on hacking prescription drug prices would save the government trillions of dollars. He also falsely claimed that Democrats had stood in the way of this kind of pharmaceutical reform, ignoring the fact that health care and pharmacy drug reform has been a pillar of the progressive platform in recent years (see: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Medicare for All” 2021 revival, which would have created a single-payer system in this country).

“Campaign Contributions can do wonders, but not with me, and not with the Republican Party. We are going to do the right thing, something that the Democrats have fought for many years,” Trump wrote at the time.

But in 2006, Republicans were the ones who adamantly stood in the way of federal drug price negotiations, ripping the teeth out of a bill that would have mandated drug companies to negotiate lower drug prices with Medicare officials.

“Instead of actually tackling the issues that concern average American families, the Republicans have passed legislation to help their wealthy friends and the huge corporations that support their campaigns,” said former North Carolina Representative G.K. Butterfield at the time before the measure passed.

The federal government is now investigating the liberal media watchdog Media Matters, an organization that Elon Musk is currently suing. 

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday announced the investigation into whether the nonprofit illegally colluded with advertisers in a boycott of X, The New York Times reports, citing two unnamed sources. The investigation demands that Media Matters turn over all documents the organization has received or created regarding advertiser boycotts. 

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, appointed by President Trump, hinted at conducting such investigations in December, saying, “We must prosecute any unlawful collusion between online platforms, and confront advertiser boycotts which threaten competition among those platforms” in a statement about an unrelated case. 

In 2023, Musk filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, which is still ongoing, claiming that it attempted to damage his social media company X’s relationship with advertisers.  That lawsuit seems hinged on research published by Media Matters on antisemitic and hateful content flourishing on X, shortly after Musk’s purchase of the platform. 

The study pointed out that the platform placed ads for major brands, including Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity, next to pro-Nazi content. The report resulted in Apple and IBM ending their advertising relationship with X, and most other major brands followed suit. 

In March, Media Matters, which monitors conservative media, sued X for breach of contract over the tech oligarch suing the nonprofit in Texas, Ireland, and Singapore, alleging that X’s terms of service required legal action to be filed in San Francisco. The organization called Musk’s actions “a vendetta-driven campaign of libel tourism.”

Media Matters alleges that Musk’s lawsuits have cost the organization millions of dollars and led to employee layoffs. 

“X’s worldwide campaign of intimidation seeks to punish Media Matters for exercising its core First Amendment rights on a matter of public importance,” the lawsuit states. “This Court should stop X’s antics and enforce the forum selection clause that X itself drafted.”

If Musk’s lawsuits proceed against Media Matters, they could open up X to the legal discovery process and expose internal communications within the company over how it handled hateful content and whether it knew about failed safeguards against brand advertisements appearing next to such content.  

Now, though, Musk not only has his pending lawsuits to bleed the nonprofit organization but also the power of a government agency investigation. All of this will help the world’s richest man silence media criticism of how his social media platform has helped racism, antisemitism, and other hateful content proliferate around the world.

The U.S. president’s meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Wednesday featured a clip cooked up by the White House falsely alleging “white genocide” in the post-apartheid nation. But when pressed as to why Donald Trump lied that thousands of white farmers had been “murdered” in South Africa, administration officials balked.

“The president showed a video that he said showed more than 1,000 burial sites of White South Africans that he said were murdered,” said NBC News’s Yamiche Alcindor, during a press briefing Thursday. “We know that that was not true, and that the video wasn’t true. So I wonder, why did the president choose to show that?”

“No, it is true that the video showed the crosses,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The video showed images of crosses in South Africa about white farmers who have been killed and politically persecuted because of the color of their skin, and those crosses are representing their lives and that they are now dead and their government did nothing about it.”

The clip in question showed a thin strip of highway from Newcastle and Normandein in South Africa. It was not a “burial site” as Trump had claimed, locals told the BBC Thursday. Instead, it was a “temporary memorial” to symbolically commemorate murdered farmers across the country. South Africa has 64 million people in it, but every year more than 26,000 people are murdered, making the country’s murder rate roughly nine times higher than that of the United States.

Studies indicate that the vast majority of murder victims in South Africa are Black or mixed-race men between the ages of 15 and 44 and that most of them are economically disadvantaged.

South Africa notoriously maintained its oppressive system of apartheid through the early 1990s, segregating Black South Africans from white residents and depriving them of civil and political power.

Despite that history, the world’s richest man—and richest white Afrikaner, Elon Musk, has used his platform to push the narrative that South Africa oppresses white people, particularly white people of means, claiming that the nation unfairly restricts white citizens via “racist laws.” (Ramaphosa offered Musk a Starlink contract ahead of the head of state’s meeting with Trump, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, in spite of the fact that Musk’s business doesn’t fit the parameters of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment laws.)

Even white South Africans have protested that claims of a “white genocide” in their country are false.

“There’s no sign of it, never has been. In fact, Whites are economically the strongest group” in the country, Piet Croucamp, an academic at North-West University in South Africa, told CBS News. “Sixty-four percent of all boardrooms in South Africa are still White. The average incomes of White South Africans are vastly higher than Black South Africans’.… They have better schools, they have better education, private health care. This is the land of milk and honey if you’re white.”