Lisa Murkowski Gives Infuriating Defense of Vote for Trump Budget

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska on Tuesday supplied the deciding vote for Senate Republicans to pass Trump’s signature budget bill. After doing so, she registered concerns about the disastrous piece of legislation, even while defending her vote.

The bill, if also passed in the House, would increase the deficit while delivering tax cuts to the rich and historic cuts to social programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Murkowski, a last-minute holdout, caved after being presented with handouts to make the bill slightly less ruinous for Alaskans—such as one temporarily waiving provisions requiring Alaska to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits.

The decision process, Murkowski told reporters after the vote, had been “agonizing,” and she “struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country, when you look to Medicaid and SNAP.”

She also expressed hope that the House would alter the bill she voted for, saying she wants the House to “look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet.”

Why did she vote for it, then? “Kill it, and the provisions that are going to be very helpful for economic development in my state would no longer be available,” Murkowski replied, pointing directly to the handouts.

In an interview with NBC’s Ryan Nobles, Murkowski addressed suggestions that she’d accepted a “bailout,” saying, “When people suggest that federal dollars go to one of our fifty states in a quote, ‘bailout,’ I find that offensive. I advocated for my state’s interests.”

“Do I like this bill? No,” Murkowski said, lamenting that, “in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.”

But, she continued, “When I saw the direction that this is going, you can either say, ‘I don’t like it,’ and not try to help my state, or you can roll up your sleeves, and do so.”

The senator now faces intense criticism, including from Democratic Representative Jim McGovern who, during a House Rules Committee meeting, asked if Murkowski really hopes it’s improved in the house, “Why the hell did you vote for this bill? It doesn’t make any sense.”

McGovern called Murkowski’s vote “a dereliction of [her] duty as a United States senator,” as the bill is “a middle finger to millions of Americans.”

“If this is Republicans’ top legislative priority in this Congress, it tells us everything about where your values lie,” McGovern added. “And it’s not with working families, not with struggling communities, but with megacorporations, billionaires, and Donald Trump.”

Murkowski today is perhaps best rebutted by the words of Murkowski eight years ago, when she held fast as Senate Republicans dangled deals before her in hopes of getting her to help repeal Obamacare: “Let’s just say that they do something that’s so Alaska-specific just to quote, ‘get me,’” she told reporters at the time. “Then you have a nationwide system that doesn’t work. That then comes crashing down and Alaska’s not able to kind of keep it together on its own.”

Step right up: For a limited time, you, too, could smell like Donald Trump.

The president’s latest business venture is a pair of colognes that retail for $249 per 3.3-ounce bottle. The scent is called “Victory 47-45” for men and women, a nod to his dual election wins. The fragrance comes in a small container inscribed with Trump’s thick signature, and is topped by a gold statuette of a man in a business suit that doesn’t resemble the president but is, presumably, supposed to.

“Trump Fragrances are here. They’re called ‘Victory 45-47’ because they’re all about Winning, Strength, and Success—For men and women,” Trump posted on Truth Social Monday evening, announcing their arrival. “Get yourself a bottle, and don’t forget to get one for your loved ones too.”

“Enjoy, have fun, and keep winning!” the president wrote.

Neither of the listings for the cologne paint a picture of what it actually smells like, though both allege that they capture “strength” and “confidence.”

But Victory 47-45 is not the only scent advertised on the website. The president has also featured two other bottles that have supposedly sold out: one that is, curiously, also called “Victory,” though it appears to come in different packaging and one titled “COLOGNE: TRUMP FOR MEN” that arrives in a box emblazoned “Fight, fight, fight”—a reference to the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year.

Early reviews of the scents don’t bode well. Descriptions of the scent on perfume rating site Fragrantica say the men’s version of Victory 47-45 has outdoorsy top notes mixed with cardamom, middle notes of geranium, and woody base notes of amberwood. Overall, it received a rating of 1.66 out of five with 436 votes. One reviewer said it made them feel “nauseous,” while another said it was “way, way, way” overpriced with “very poor longevity and projection.”

It “legit smells like something you could get at Ross for $26,” the second reviewer wrote, noting that the cologne resembles a mixture of more popular perfumes, but worse. “There just really isn’t any reason to own this unless Trump is your God.”

The women’s version didn’t get better ratings, receiving a score of 1.45 out of five with 250 votes. The scent is supposed to smell citrusy, built on a base of vanilla with strawberry middle notes, though one reviewer said it smelled more like “Don’s Diaper.”

Others were aghast at the “cheap” design of the bottle itself, with one user writing that it was “utterly appalling” that Trump remained atop the women’s scent, apparently lacking the “decency to put his third trophy wife on top.”

The company behind the operation, 45Footwear LLC, has a likeness partnership with CIC Ventures LLC, the same organization through which Trump has made millions off of his other tacky grifts, including his remarkably ugly $499 gold sneakers, an assortment of Trump-branded watches (that start at $499 and top out around $899), and a collection of $60-a-pop God Bless the USA Bibles. CIC Ventures LLC and CIC Digital LLC, which managed Trump’s Marvel-inspired NFT trading card project, were both fully owned by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust as of late last year.

Despite promises on the products’ respective websites that they are the only “official” locations to buy products “offered” by Trump, the Trump perfume website FAQ insists that the LLC is “not owned, managed or controlled” by Trump, the Trump Organization, or CIC. The no-refund website also stresses that Trump has no influence on the fragrances, and that the initiative “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign.”

Donald Trump took off on a winding rant about his summer vacation plans Tuesday when asked a crucial question about “Alligator Alcatraz.”

During a press conference at the ICE facility in the middle of the Florida Everglades, the president was asked whether there was an “expected time frame” that detainees would be kept at the hastily constructed immigrant detention center, and whether it would depend on the immigration judges staffed there.

“When you say, uh, what was the first part of your question?” Trump asked, clearly confused.

“Is there a specific time frame you expect the detainees to spend here—days, weeks, months?” the reporter repeated.

“In Florida?” Trump asked.

“Yes, here at Alligator Alcatraz,” the reporter responded, but the president had already jumped into a response about how much he loves the Sunshine State.

“I’m gonna spend a lot of—this is my home state. I love it. I love your government. I love all the people around—these are all friends of mine. They know me very well. I mean I’m not surprised that they do so well. They’re great people,” Trump said, singling out Governor Ron DeSantis, who previously campaigned against Trump but now acts as a cheerleader for his new wetland-themed concentration camp.

“I feel very comfortable in the state—I’ll spend a lot of time here,” Trump continued. He said that he would continue to visit despite his current digs at the White House, which had allowed him to “fix up” the “little Oval Office.”

“But I’ll spend as much time as I can here. You know my vacation is generally here ’cause it’s convenient. I live in Palm Beach. That’s my home. And I have a very nice little place—nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun,” Trump continued, joking about his massive estate at the Mar-a-Lago resort.

“Alligator Alcatraz,” a complex of tents built on a defunct Miami-Dade airstrip adjacent to the Big Cypress National Preserve, is expected to open later this month with 5,000 beds, eventually increasing to 10,000. How long immigrant detainees would be expected to stay there remains unclear.

The detention center will cost the state $450 million per year to run, which will be reimbursed through FEMA. Last week, environmental groups filed a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, the head of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County to block construction until a stringent environmental review of the project had taken place.

Donald Trump threatened to arrest New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani Tuesday.

Speaking with reporters during a press conference at “Alligator Alcatraz” regarding the newly passed “big, beautiful bill,” the president said that he would cuff Mamdani if the New York politico followed through on defying ICE.

“Well then we’ll have to arrest him,” Trump said. “Look, we don’t need a Communist in this country. But if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation. We send him money, we send him all the things he needs to run a government.”

He then accused the Ugandan-born immigrant of being in the nation “illegally.”

“A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything,” Trump noted.

The 33-year-old democratic socialist has been repeatedly accused by conservatives of being a Communist, a badge that he has roundly rejected. Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, said that the Queens lawmaker’s platform for free buses, subsidized day care, protected rent control, and city-owned grocery stores was not akin to communism, a system in which the government seizes and retains complete and total control over private property and industry. Instead, Politifact decried the cheap smear as a “red scare tactic that has existed in U.S. politics for decades.”

Mamdani clinched last week’s election with 56 percent of the vote once all the ranked-choice votes were tabulated and released Tuesday. He eclipsed former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits, beating out the establishment Democrat by 12 points.

But the threat of arrest is not the only backlash that Mamdani’s candidacy has received from the White House. Instead, in an incredible moralistic reversal for a conservative party that claims to advocate for states’ rights, Trump has further intervened in New York’s local elections by promising to cut off federal funding for the Big Apple if the citywide favorite wins Gracie Mansion in November.

The richest man in the world is processing the consequences of his own actions live on X.

Elon Musk, in the midst of condemning Trump’s budget bill, expressed regret Tuesday over his decision to wear sunglasses inside while waving a huge chain saw around with Argentinian President Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have taken the chainsaw on stage and acted a fool,” an X user told Musk as he complained about Republicans’ budget increasing the debt ceiling. “Maybe you could have gotten more done if you weren’t so worried about looking cool.”

“Valid point,” Musk responded directly. “Milei gave me the chainsaw backstage and I ran with it, but, in retrospect, it lacked empathy.”

The chain saw incident in question happened during a strange, nearly incoherent interview Musk gave at the conservative conference that raises questions around his alleged drug use during and after the campaign.

It seems that Musk has come to regret quite a few of the decisions he made as a key Trump confidant just halfway into the president’s first year in office. He’s gone from living at Mar-a-Lago to insinuating the president is a pedophile, threatening to primary MAGA Republicans and start a third party, and now to excoriating the president’s marquee legislation. All while he complains about his “suffering” companies.

The budget bill has already passed the Senate, and will likely pass the House for a final vote, regardless of how much Musk tweets.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have repeatedly cited an increase in assaults against federal agents conducting immigration enforcement to justify agents concealing their identities (and thereby conveniently avoiding accountability) while making arrests.

Newly reported data sheds clearer light on these figures.

On Tuesday, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported on X that DHS told him assaults against ICE and federal immigration enforcement are now up 690 percent from last year. While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).

It’s also worth noting that the increase comes at a time when, under Trump, the number of ICE encounters taking place has increased staggeringly—a fact that criminal justice journalist Jessica Pishko said makes the figures “uniquely unimpressive.”

And the increasingly common encounters have been accompanied by increasingly aggressive policing tactics.

According to USA Today, law enforcement experts say that, by employing “practices that many American police departments have largely disavowed,” immigration enforcement agents “are exacerbating tense situations” and “provoking unnecessarily dangerous encounters.” Regarding these tactics, retired law enforcement veteran Diane Goldstein told USA Today that immigration enforcement officers’ “direction and their leadership is directly putting them in a horrific situation.”

The practice of wearing masks and making arrests that are virtually indistinguishable from kidnappings also increases the likelihood of confusion and bystander intervention, according to former ICE acting Director John Sandweg.

Further, reckoning rationally with ICE’s data would require scrutinizing what constitutes an assault in ICE’s eyes, as the agency has done itself no favors by making dubious assault accusations. Take, for example, those it made against New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who was arrested “for assaulting law enforcement” earlier this month—a claim that The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump likened to a bully accusing his victim “of having gotten in the way of his fist.”

Donald Trump’s wildly unpopular “big, beautiful bill” just barely passed in the Senate Tuesday, and it’s all thanks to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

The bill passed with a vote of 51–50, with Vice President JD Vance providing the tie-breaking vote. But it was Murkowski’s vote that ultimately tipped the scales so the bill could pass.

In order to win Murkowski’s support, Republicans had added several provisions that would sweeten the deal for her state. But at the very last second, the Senate parliamentarian struck a carve-out that would’ve expanded federal funding for Medicaid in Alaska.

All 47 Democrats voted against the bill, and they were joined by Senators Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins. Had Murkowski also voted “no,” the bill would have been defeated.

Murkowski told reporters that she hoped the House would send the bill back to the Senate so they could continue working on it. “My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” Murkowski said, revealing just how misguided her support actually was.

When asked why she voted to pass the bill if she thought it wasn’t ready, Murkowski said, “Kill it and it’s gone.”

“There is a tax impact coming forward. That’s gonna hurt the people in my state,” she added.

In return for supporting the gutting of Medicaid to fund tax breaks for the rich, and adding trillions of dollars to the national deficit over the next 10 years, Murkowski walked away with some nice cash prizes.

The Alaska Republican won an exemption for a provision shifting greater portions of the cost to administer the Supplemental National Assistance Program (SNAP) onto the states. The exemption would apply to 10 states with the highest payment error rates, including New York, Florida, and of course, Alaska. Trump’s budget bill directs nearly $300 billion to be cut from SNAP through 2034 to help fund tax cuts skewed for the very rich.

Murkowski also secured a tax break for Alaskan fishing villages and whaling captains. Hope it was worth it.

This story has been updated.

Only three Senate Republicans were brave enough to vote against Trump’s catastrophic budget, as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed through the Senate on Tuesday by the slimmest of margins, 51-50.

Republicans Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins—who each voiced their distaste for the bill due to the $3.3 trillion it adds to the debt and the millions of Americans it takes Medicaid away from—voted no, along with all 47 Democrats.

Every other Republican voted yes, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the 50-50 tie. The bill now heads back to the House of Representatives.

The Senate version of the bill contains the biggest Medicaid cuts in history, and 17 million people are expected to lose their health insurance by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Tillis warned about the dangers of the bill on Sunday night shortly after announcing his retirement 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.”

The bill is likely to face some minor obstruction in the House.

This story has been updated.

The New York City Democratic primary ranked-choice voting results are officially in: Zohran Mamdani won by a landslide.

The 33-year-old democratic socialist swept the competition with 56 percent of the vote once all the ranked-choice votes were tabulated. He eclipsed former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits, beating out the establishment Democrat by 12 points.

Ranked choice voting asks voters to mark multiple candidates in order of their preference. Unless a candidate is ranked first by more than 50 percent of voters, then the lowest-performing candidates will be knocked out of the running in instant runoff elections, until a majority winner emerges.

Last week’s election results exhausted just five percent of the city’s total ballots, indicating that 95 percent of voters had ranked either Cuomo or Mamdani in the race. That was a significant turnaround from the city’s first ranked choice voting election, conducted in 2021, when eight rounds of runoff elections gave Mayor Eric Adams the win, while leaving 140,000 ballots on the table.

Mamdani’s results are the inverse of what pollsters predicted prior to the election: that Cuomo, who resigned from the governor’s mansion in disgrace after he was accused of sexually assaulting his staff and covering up thousands of Covid-19-related nursing home deaths, would win the city’s mayoral election by 12 percentage points.

In a video statement Monday, Mamdani credited his primary success with his campaign’s focus on working class issues and actually “talking with New Yorkers.” Grassroots organizing was one of the biggest boons to his campaign: Mamdani’s 29,000 door-knocker army held talks with tens of thousands of New Yorkers, investing in topics where city governance impacts them most, such as childcare, housing, and public transportation.

Still, the biggest names in New York politics have refused to support Mamdani and the growing movement behind him. They include Governor Kathy Hochul, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Representatives Hakeem Jeffries, Richie Torres, Laura Gillen, Tom Suozzi, Dan Goldman, and George Latimer.

Some of those opposing the Ugandan-born Queens lawmaker have been sickeningly Islamophobic in their remarks, purportedly on behalf of New York’s Jewish community. During a radio interview Thursday, Gillibrand accused Mamdani of condoning “global jihad” after he refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which she claimed translated to “kill all the Jews.”

Many pro-Palestinian activists disagree: they argue that the phrase calls for Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation. The smear brought protesters to the footsteps of Gillibrand’s New York City office. In a post, Gillibrand’s communications director walked back the senator’s language, claiming that Gillibrand “misspoke.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s wishy-washy tariffs have been good for one thing: keeping Federal Reserve interest rates high, according to the central bank’s Chair Jerome Powell.

Speaking at a European Central Bank forum in Portugal Tuesday, Powell said that the Federal Reserve probably would have brought down rates already if it hadn’t been for the president’s “Liberation Day” announcement.

“In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs,” Powell said.

Last month, Powell announced that the central bank would maintain its key borrowing rate—between 4.25 percent and 4.5 percent—and wait to see the residual impacts of America’s new tariff plan before reducing interest. That’s because companies had already decided to increase product prices through the remainder of the year in reaction to hampered global supply chains, according to Powell.

“For the time being, we are well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy before considering any adjustments to our policy stance,” Powell said at the time.

The White House has not taken the news well. Last week, Trump derided the chairman as “terrible” and a “very average mentally person.”

“I’d say low in terms of what he does. Low IQ for what he does,” Trump said during a press conference at the NATO summit in The Hague.

Powell’s term atop the Federal Reserve expires May 2026, while his term as a Fed board member ends on January 31, 2028. And the president is already dreaming of the day, advertising to reporters that he has three or four replacements in mind for Powell, whom Trump appointed in 2018.

Trump threw even more pressure on America’s financial backbone Monday, when he wrote Powell a handwritten letter claiming that the chairman had cost America “a fortune.” The letter, held up by press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a press briefing, demanded that Powell cut rates “by a lot.”

In a social media post later that day, Trump also went after the Federal Reserve board, accusing them of standing by while Powell does his job balancing the American dollar in light of Trump’s trade antics.

“If they were doing their job properly, our Country would be saving Trillions of Dollars in Interest Cost,” Trump wrote. “The Board just sits there and watches, so they are equally to blame.”

But Powell is not alone in his assessment. Leading economists outside of the Federal Reserve have similarly argued that now is not the time to cut interest rates. Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic told Reuters last week that the country has “space and time” to figure out its ideal rates considering that companies have already boosted prices in reaction to heightened material and service costs in the wake of Trump’s tariffs.