Republican Votes for Budget After Dumping Medicaid-Related Stock

GOP Representative Robert Bresnahan voted for Trump’s budget on Thursday, conveniently after he dumped his shares of stock in a Medicaid provider.

The Pennsylvania representative sold his Centene stock in May, just one week before he voted “yes” on an early House version of the budget bill that crippled the health care system. By Thursday, when he voted for the final version of the bill, Centene stock had plummeted by 43 percent.

The Pennsylvania representative had a vested interest in seeing health care get slashed. He knew that ripping Medicaid and hospital funding from millions of Americans would help him make a quick buck before his stocks tanked in value. This is yet another classic example of congressional insider trading, a rampant issue on Capitol Hill. Representatives and senators on both sides of the aisle use the specific knowledge they have, due to their positions as legislators, to impact stock prices and make off with as much cash as possible in the process.

“Protecting his stock portfolio while ripping away health care from 17 million Americans. This is Washington at its worst,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on X. “We need to ban Congressional stock trading.”

“Wow. So he votes to gut Medicaid and throw 17 million people off of their healthcare and then dumps his Medicaid related stock to cover his own ass?” Representative Maxwell Frost echoed. “That’s just evil and cruel.”

Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is on its way to his desk thanks to a 218-214 vote in the House.

MAGA representatives, however, could hardly wait after the vote was over to reveal that some of their biggest advertising points on the bill to working-class America were actually complete duds.

Speaking with Fox News, New York Representative Mike Lawler confirmed that the bill’s “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” provisions would expire just before Trump’s term was out.

“This bill starts to make significant savings across the entirety of the federal government so that we can actually reduce spending and bring down the cost of living for Americans,” Lawler said. “This is a big win for Americans across the country, you look at the tax provisions, the doubling of the standard deduction, the enhanced child tax credit, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime—”

But the Fox reporter interjected to correct him: “Those expire in 2028, correct?”

“Sure, within the tax code, but that’s normal,” Lawler said. “The objective here is to provide real and immediate relief to Americans all across the country.”

But the bill is not expected to save the government any money. Instead, Trump’s key legislative victory—which will slice taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations—is expected to add upwards of $6 trillion to the debt, according to a projection from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scorched the “no tax on tips” provision during a heated floor speech Tuesday, telling lawmakers that, “as one of the only people in this body who has lived off of tips,” the promise was little more than a “scam.”

“The cap on that is $25,000,” she said, “while you’re jacking up taxes on people who make less than $50,000 across the United States, while taking away their [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance] program, while take taking away their Medicaid, while kicking them off of the [Affordable Care Act] and their health care extensions.”

The “big, beautiful bill” will also gut $880 billion from Medicaid and other crucial social programs, a detail so ill-favored by Americans that conservative lawmakers stopped holding town halls after the line item was announced due to staunch opposition from their constituents.

But Lawler wasn’t concerned that passing Trump’s glorious budget agenda could have ramifications on their own elections come midterms.

“Do you think that this could come back to bite Republicans next November by any chance?” Fox asked him.

“No, once the American people understand everything that is in the bill as opposed to what the Democrats have told them is in the bill, they are going to support the largest tax cut they have seen. Had we not passed this bill, you would have had the largest tax cut in history,” Lawler said.

That’s by design: Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 arranged for individual provisions to expire at the end of 2025, effectively forcing a tax increase for the majority of Americans by 2026.

Ocasio-Cortez, in turn, slammed the New York conservative, writing that “it’s not normal.”

“Lawler voted to make the tax breaks on billionaires PERMANENT while making the no tax on tips (just for those making less than $25k) EXPIRE in just 3 years,” she posted in response to Lawler’s interview. “He’s also kicking tipped employees off Medicaid, ACA, and clawing back their SNAP.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is being delusional as ever about the exorbitant cost of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

During an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Thursday, Bessent did his best to defend his title as a “fiscal hawk” despite the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office that say Trump’s behemoth budget bill will add trillions to the national deficit.

“I don’t believe in the CBO forecast,” Bessent said. The latest estimate from the CBO found that the legislation bill will add nearly $4 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years. An analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute think tank projected the budget bill could add upwards of $6 trillion.

Bessent pushed back on the CBO’s prediction that the bill will have only modest effects on long-term economic growth.

“If you turn up the growth projections to something like 2.8, 3 percent, which was achieved during President Trump’s first term, then the debt disappears,” Bessent said. “The other thing too is, are we growing the GDP faster than we’re growing the debt? Which I am sure will happen over the remainder of the president’s term.”

In January, the CBO had predicted that growth would cool to 1.9 percent in 2025 and 1.8 in 2026, down from 2.3 percent in 2024. The agency estimated that real GDP would then grow by 1.8 percent per year, on average, through 2035. Under Trump’s budget bill, the CBO estimated the real GDP would increase by an additional 0.5 percent on average through the 2025-2034 period, putting the yearly increase at roughly 2.4 percent—not anywhere near the 3 percent Bessent wants to offset the deficit.

As it turns out, you can’t just adjust projections based on what’s convenient for a political agenda. Still, House Republicans voted later Thursday to pass Trump’s sweeping, 887-page budget bill, a wildly unpopular piece of legislation poised to further enrich the wealthiest and tatter the social safety net.

House Republicans on Thursday passed Donald Trump’s sweeping, 887-page budget bill, an unpopular piece of legislation that is poised to further enrich the wealthiest Americans while tattering the social safety net.

The House of Representatives passed the bill 218-214, with every “yes” vote coming from a Republican. Only two Republicans, Representatives Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick, were brave enough to join Democrats and vote against the legislation.

The bill includes historic rollbacks of social programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will strip 17 million people of their health insurance by 2034 due to its cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and deal the most severe blow to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, in the program’s history. By some estimates, the bill’s Medicaid cuts alone are projected to cause 51,000 avoidable deaths per year.

And it will staggeringly transfer wealth from less-wealthy to ultra-wealthy Americans. According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, it is “the most regressive tax and budget law in at least the past 40 years.” Trump and other Republicans are sure to try to distract from this by pointing to the bill’s sops to those expecting populist reforms—such as its ‘no tax on tips’ provision—which themselves are “designed in ways that limit their benefits for less affluent taxpayers.”

And, of course, it will supercharge the Trump administration’s barbaric war on immigrants, pouring $100 billion dollars into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, all while the American public increasingly considers the agency’s actions of late to be going too far. This part of the bill, Vice President JD Vance implausibly argued, makes all of its odious effects “immaterial” by comparison.

All this while adding an estimated $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.

Moments after Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July, he demanded something unexpected from his doctors: a CT scan of his brain.

The then-presumptive Republican presidential nominee claimed that he wanted the image as proof of his intelligence, likening the scan to an IQ test, according to an excerpt of the upcoming book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, obtained by The Washington Post.

“Back in Trump’s room, he told the doctor he wanted a CT scan. The doctor asked why, and Trump said he felt like he needed it. He went down the hall with a squad of Secret Service agents to get the scan,” the excerpt reads. 

Trump then pressed for the image while ignoring a call from President Joe Biden, who had rung him via Trump’s then-campaign cochair Susie Wiles.

“He asked to see the ‘film’ from the scan. The doctor said that wasn’t done anymore, and offered him a written report,” the excerpt continues, but Trump was dead set. “I want the film,” he said, according to the book.

Wiles then went to retrieve a copy of the scan image. While she was gone, Trump explained to an aide that he wanted the CT scan because he believed they “tell you that your brain is good, so I just want to have that.”

CT scans are used to detect fractures, blood clots, internal bleeding, cancers, or other ailments via cross-sectional scans of the body. They have never been used to assess a person’s intelligence, however, à la some contemporary belief in phrenology.

Trump could have been confused—MRIs have been studied as a potential intelligence indicator due to their ability to measure brain activity while resting, according to CalTech.

The current president has tried (and failed) several times to inflate perceptions of his brainpower.  During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several cognitive exams, which he claimed to have “aced,” though his recollections of the tests called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

While bragging about his results to the press, Trump would invariably tweak the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication, while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is, in spite of the fact that the test’s authors reported that none of the three versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.

Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries has broken former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s record for longest floor speech in an attempt to delay voting on Trump’s destructive budget bill.

The House minority leader on Thursday spoke for eight hours and 44 minutes in an attempt to delay a vote on the bill, which is expected to rip away health care for the most vulnerable Americans in exchange for tax breaks for the wealthy.

“I feel the obligation, Mr. Speaker, to stand on this House floor and take my sweet time to tell the stories of the American people. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. Take my sweet time, on the behalf of the American people. And that’s exactly what I intend to do,” Jeffries said on Thursday. “On behalf of their health insurance, on behalf of their Medicaid, on behalf of their nutritional assistance, on behalf of veterans, on behalf of farmers, on behalf of children, on behalf of seniors, on behalf of people with disabilities, on behalf of small businesses, on behalf of every single American—I’m on this House floor after 6 a.m, and I am planning to take my sweet time!”

“Folks in this town talking about draining the swamp—guess what? You are the swamp,” Jeffries said hours later. “You are the swamp. We’ve never seen anything like this ... the type of corruption that has been unleashed on the American people.”

Kevin McCarthy held the previous record for the longest House floor speech, when he delivered an over eight-hour speech delivered in February 2018.

Jeffries’s efforts, while impressive, will likely do nothing to ultimately halt the budget bill, as the GOP still has the majority.

This story has been updated.

Measles is on the rise in Kentucky.

Health officials in the state confirmed that the disease has spread to Fayette County, marking the seventh case of the highly contagious illness in Kentucky since the beginning of the year. Previous cases had been reported in Woodfood County.

There are five active measles cases in the Bluegrass State, four of which are connected to the current outbreak, while another unrelated measles case was reported in Todd County last week, according to state health officials.

The life-threatening disease has so far infected 1,267 people and spread to 37 states in what public health experts are describing as the worst measles spread of the century. The majority of those cases are in Texas, where local officials have reported at least 753 confirmed cases since January. Ninety-nine of those cases were hospitalized, and at least two cases—who were unvaccinated, school-aged children—have died. An unvaccinated adult in New Mexico has also died of the disease.

Measles hasn’t been a national concern since 2000, when the long-term use of a corresponding vaccine proved so effective at minimizing risk and exposure to the disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated from the United States.

But the virus’s dormant status has been challenged by anti-vaxxers, who have opted against medicating their children in fear that vaccinations could cause autism. One such conspiracist, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has refused to combat the ensuing measles outbreak with vetted science—instead, he has issued guidance that the illness can be treated by simple vitamins.

In April, Kennedy fell short of offering a full-throated endorsement of the MMR vaccine that has historically been used to treat measles, telling CBS News that his agency was focused on finding treatments for unvaccinated individuals while falsely claiming that the jab had not been “safety tested” and was not effective for long-term prevention. As of 2025, there are no known effective treatments or cures for measles.

The return of historically eradicated diseases is thanks to a growing movement of anti-vaxx parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

But America’s is not the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under Kennedy’s stewardship, the anti-vaxx nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60 to 70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to coax wary House Republicans off the fence to support his “big, beautiful bill” have seemingly succeeded, as GOP leaders say the president’s centerpiece legislation will likely pass by Friday.

Trump pulled out all the stops to achieve this outcome, including turning to what he does best, or at least most unrelentingly: merchandise.

The president has commoditized his image and the office of the president like no other, constantly hawking Trump-branded products, from his trademark MAGA hats to more peculiar products, like cryptocurrency, cell phones, shoes, Bibles, guitars, watches—and, most recently, a fragrance.

Given Trump’s penchant for merchandising, it’s perhaps no surprise he made lavishing Republican holdouts with awful merch a central prong of his “charm offensive” to garner support for the bill, per The New York Times.

The Times reports that, on Wednesday, GOP lawmakers who entered the White House uncertain about the bill—which would gut social programs and tilt taxes to benefit the wealthy—“walked out with signed merchandise, photos in the Oval Office and, by some accounts, a newfound appreciation for the bill.”

After Representative Tim Burchett met with the president, he posted a video in which he, walking with a gaggle of fellow House Republicans, heaped praise on the president.

“The president was wonderful, as always—informative, funny. He told me he likes seeing me on TV, which was kind of cool,” Burchett said.

From out of frame, Representative Byron Donald asked, “Did you show them what he signed for you?” to which Burchett, almost blushingly, replied, “Yeah, he signed a bunch of stuff. It’s cool.”

In response, Democrats such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have derided their Republican colleagues for being so easily swayed in favor of the bill.

Meanwhile, Trump is seemingly unaware of the content of the legislation he’s so vigorously pushing. According to NOTUS, during one meeting where he sought to court House Republicans, he impressed upon those in attendance that future electoral victories will require leaving social programs like Medicaid untouched.

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member of Congress replied. (The bill’s changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are estimated to strip at least 17 million Americans of their health insurance by 2034.)

If the bill passes as is expected, and social program cuts are the political loser Trump (wisely) says they are, then the MAGA merch with which he lavished lawmakers may be worth little within a couple election cycles.

The Department of Homeland Security is suddenly trying to distance itself from “Alligator Alcatraz,” after weeks of promoting the Trump administration’s premiere wetland-themed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades.

In a court filing Thursday responding to a lawsuit from environmental groups, the DHS claimed that it had “not implemented, authorized, directed or funded” the construction of the new ICE detention center made up of tents on a defunct airstrip in Miami-Dade County.

“Florida is constructing and operating the facility using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority and a preexisting general delegation of federal authority to implement immigration functions,” the filing said.  

Environmental groups had alleged that in addition to skipping the necessary environmental reviews, the DHS had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a window for public notice and comment. The DHS argued that because it had not been involved in approving construction, “the ‘final agency action’ that the Administrative Procedure Act requires as a prerequisite to judicial review is entirely absent here.” 

But that’s not what the Department of Homeland Security said earlier this week. The DHS said it had signed off on a plan to house up to 5,000 people in Florida and planned to use funding from FEMA’s shelter program to reimburse the $450 million in estimated costs, according to Politico.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “We will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”

But the Thursday filing asserted that it was up to Florida to file for reimbursement from FEMA, though the state had not yet done so. 

The filing also stated that because Florida has an agreement under Section 287 (g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act so that “any decision to detain aliens ... would be Florida’s decision, not DHS’s,” according to Politico’s Gary Fineout. A majority of states have such an agreement with ICE, which allows immigration officers to collaborate with state and local officials. Using this legal gimmick, DHS could attempt to skirt accountability for the construction and management of ICE detainment centers across the country—while still taking the credit. 

For all of the president’s braggadocio about the economy, a key detail in last month’s jobs report paints a bitter picture for America’s market.

The June jobs report came with droves of good news: the unemployment rate had fallen to 4.1 percent, the lowest since February, and the Trump administration touted that the market had added 147,000 new jobs. But within the folds of the expansive report was a worrying statistic: The lowered rate was largely due to a growing cohort of Americans who either weren’t working or looking for work.

The number of Americans who had not looked for a job in the last month rose by 234,000 to 1.8 million, according to the report.

And the vaunted job gains—which were primarily enjoyed by the health care sector, public education, and local government—weren’t as major when assessed from another angle.

“The household survey, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate, showed a smaller employment gain of just 93,000,” reported CNBC.

The report indicated other weaknesses in the market, including concentrated job gains in a handful of sectors, slowing wage growth, and lagging participation, which dropped to its lowest level (62.3 percent) since 2022.

The positive numbers did offer a slight boon to the stock market, with the S&P 500 blooming in reaction to the report, but analysts were wary to overhype the gains.

“The U.S. job market continues to largely stand tall and sturdy, even as headwinds mount—but it may be a tent increasingly held up by fewer poles,” Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote Thursday. “The headline job gains and surprising dip in unemployment are undoubtedly good news, but for job seekers outside of healthcare & social assistance, local government, and public education, the gains will likely ring hollow.”

“This is not a bad report, but it might not be as solid as it seems on the surface,” Stahle noted.