Republican Senator Tears Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Budget” to Shreds

Senate Republican Thom Tillis spent his Sunday night railing against the Medicaid cuts contained in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in a fiery speech just hours after he announced he would retire at the end of this term. 

“Between the state-directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill—there’s a reduction of state-directed payments. And then there’s the reduction of the provider tax. They can’t find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that ‘yeah, it’s rough, but North Carolina’s used the system, they’re gonna have to make it work,’” Tillis said. “Alright, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? The people in the White House advising the president … are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Tillis went on to compare the bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid to Obamacare, and posited that the wave of Republican victories that followed that policy will now be transferred to the Democrats in both the upcoming midterms and the general election. 

“Now, Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betray a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump was in the Oval Office.” 

Tillis announced his retirement Sunday after once again angering the MAGA base with a vote against Trump’s budget bill the day before. He isn’t the only Republican to realize that Trump’s marquee piece of legislation will have a direct negative impact on Medicaid access for his constituents, many of whom are Trump supporters, and many of whom believed Trump when he promised to leave Medicaid alone. While Rand Paul was the only other “no” vote on the bill, a recent Fox News poll showed that Republican voters, especially white men with degrees, oppose the legislation. But the “big, beautiful bill” trudges on, as the Senate convenes on Monday to finalize the 940-page piece of legislation.  

Early Monday morning, President Donald Trump lashed out against Democratic Senator Chris Coons for mentioning reports that the Trump administration is looking to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran eerily similar to the Obama-era agreement Trump discarded during his first term.

On Thursday, CNN, citing four sources familiar with the matter, reported that “the Trump administration has discussed possibly helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program, easing sanctions, and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds.” Trump at the time called such reports a “HOAX” propagated by a “SleazeBag” within the “Fake News Media.”

Coons cited the reports in a Sunday appearance on Fox News, telling host Shannon Bream, “I’ll just note that President Trump, by press accounts, is now moving towards negotiation and offering Iran a deal that looks somewhat similar to the Iran deal that was offered by Obama: tens of billions of dollars of incentives and reduced sanctions in exchange for abandoning their nuclear program.”

A piqued Trump took to Truth Social just before 3 a.m., posting, “Tell phony Democrat Senator Chris Coons that I am not offering Iran ANYTHING, unlike Obama, who paid them $Billions under the stupid road to a Nuclear Weapon JCPOA (which would now be expired!), nor am I even talking to them since we totally OBLITERATED their Nuclear Facilities.”

Trump set off the chain of events leading to his June 21 bombing of Iran by withdrawing from President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018—a decision which prompted Iran to “accelerate its nuclear program,” per Axios, which in turn led Trump, upon resuming office, to consider a renewed deal that geopolitics expert Jeffrey Lewis called “a dollar-store” JCPOA. “He’s trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Lewis said earlier this month.

This, of course, went up in smoke as the self-proclaimed dealmaker President Trump resorted to unlawful military action.

Donald Trump erupted Friday after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared victory over Israel.

In a defiant video statement released Thursday, Khamenei said that the United States had been dealt a “severe slap” and that Israel would have been “completely destroyed” if the U.S. had not stepped into the conflict.

Trump hit back the following day in a lengthy post on Truth Social. Trump said Khamenei should consider himself lucky he wasn’t killed. “I knew EXACTLY where he was sheltered, and would not let Israel, or the U.S. Armed Forces, by far the Greatest and Most Powerful in the World, terminate his life,” Trump wrote. “I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!’”

Trump had previously threatened to give in to Israel’s campaign for a regime change in Iran, even though the president’s own administration has claimed that is not a U.S. objective.

Trump patted himself on the back for desperately and publicly begging Israel to call off a massive attack shortly after he announced an imminent ceasefire earlier this week. “Tremendous damage would have ensued, and many Iranians would have been killed. It was going to be the biggest attack of the War, by far,” he wrote.

The president claimed that he had been making efforts to remove “BITING” sanctions on Iran, but in light of the ayatollah’s recent statements, he had “dropped all work on sanction relief.”

“Iran has to get back into the World Order flow, or things will only get worse for them,” Trump warned. He added, “I wish the leadership of Iran would realize that you often get more with HONEY than you do with VINEGAR.”

During a press conference Friday morning, Trump was asked whether he’d consider another strike on Iran, if intelligence determined that the country had rebuilt its uranium enrichment capabilities.

“Sure, without question, absolutely,” Trump replied. “It’d have to be unbelievable.”

The Trump administration announced Friday that it will soon end temporary protected status, or TPS, for Haiti. The move, set to take effect on September 2, would strip lawful status from more than 500,000 people, leading them to face possible deportation to the strife-racked country from which they fled.

The move reverses former President Joe Biden’s June 2024 decision to extend TPS for Haitians through February 2026.

According to the Trump administration’s announcement, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has “determined that, overall, country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.” (However, per the State Department’s ongoing advisory warning Americans against traveling to Haiti, the country is plagued by “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.”)

Noem also claimed “that permitting Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the national interest of the United States.”

The move is consistent with Trump’s long-standing penchant for demonizing immigrants—and Haitian immigrants in particular. In 2017, Trump reportedly said that 15,000 recently arrived immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” during a meeting in the Oval Office.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump notoriously elevated a baseless lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—many of whom reside there under TPS—eating their neighbors’ house pets. In reality, Haitians’ presence in Springfield helped revitalize the town, per a report in The Guardian.

The termination of TPS for Haiti would, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council observed, put the total number of people “de-documented” by the president at over one million. Last month, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, Trump stripped 532,000 other immigrants of their humanitarian legal status.

Donald Trump is ending trade talks with Canada after America’s northern neighbor imposed a digital services tax on U.S. technology companies.

The retaliatory duty amounted to a “direct and blatant attack on our Country,” according to Trump—though he did not elaborate on whether that meant his own tariff plan also constituted an attack on countries around the globe.

The president accused Canada of “copying” the European Union, which similarly imposed a tax on some of the biggest U.S. companies providing digital services, including Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

But the White House does not appear eager to organize its trade plan that has nauseated American markets for more than two months. The White House said Thursday that the deadline for countries to strike trade deals with the U.S. may be extended past July 9, a deadline that press secretary Karoline Leavitt described as “not critical.”

And in May, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick let slip that he believes reciprocity—or the idea of bringing tariffs between two countries to zero—would be the “silliest thing we could do.”

Trump’s tariff proposals haven’t won the U.S. too much negotiating ground. Instead, countries around the world began observing that—rather than playing the waiting game to meet with the White House over potential trade relief—China’s tough negotiating strategy with the former real estate mogul had actually gotten the Eastern powerhouse a significantly better deal.

In the end, it will be Americans who pay the price when the Trump administration runs out of time on its “90 deals in 90 days” promise. On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank would wait to see the residual impacts of the country’s new tariff plan before reducing its key interest rate, as companies have already decided to increase product prices this year in reaction to hampered global supply chains.