The Big Beautiful Fear

It's All Trump Has to Offer

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The surprising thing about the Big Beautiful Bill isn’t that it’s bad. It's that they never really pretended it was good.

Here is a complete list of benefits Trump highlighted during his speech at the One Big Beautiful Event (yes really) on June 26th:

• No taxes on tips or overtime

• No taxes on interest for payments on cars made in the USA

• Permanent child tax credit expansion

• Businesses can continue to claim 100 percent of their depreciation credit for new equipment instead of spreading it over three years

• A tax credit for donating to any organization that provides “school choice” scholarships.

• An estate tax exemption for inheritances under $15 million. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal explains it:

  

  Source

  And here’s how Trump explained it:

  “It’ll virtually eliminate the so-called estate tax, or the death tax, so you have a farm, you leave it to your children. If you like the children, you leave it. If you don’t, don’t worry about the details. No, some people don’t want to leave them — they don’t like their kids, you know. Anyone in here not liking their children, farmers?”

(Trump really is a very funny person. Deeply unfortunate that he’s also evil)

These perks aren’t even big, let alone beautiful. Tax-free tips and overtime is cool. No tax on car payment interest is fine I guess, doesn’t seem life-changing but whatever. The child tax credit and 100 percent depreciation credit thing are both continuations of cuts passed in 2017. School choice tax credits is probably the biggest change, but it’s medium-sized at best. As for the estate tax, Trump can dress that up as much as he wants: that’s a gift for the wealthy, who already had plenty of strategies to avoid paying their fair share, even in death.

Trump is a salesman if nothing else; he knows he’s hawking a small, sad bill. But MAGA has never been about making anything better. It was always an opposition movement, defined entirely by the things it hates. The only thing it's ever really promised is defeat of some enemy. Welll, after ten years of fighting, they’ve done that. They have majority control of all three branches. Impediments cleared, no meaningful resistance, no one to stop their agenda but themselves. They finally have the power to make the lives of their constituents better. And instead, they do…this.

Trump couldn’t ask his party to vote for the bill on its merits, so he demanded they do it out of fear:

Source

Trump has used that 68 percent figure many times over the past month, and like most of the things he says, it’s not true. Taxes would have risen 7.5%, on average, across the board, and the 900-page Big Beautiful Bill wasn’t the only way to stop that from happening. The bill does cut costs by $1.3 trillion —Turnp’s only $300 billion off on this one —but it also cuts revenue by $3.7 trillion for a total of $2.4 trillion additional debt, and that’s using Republican Math that makes this bill look WAY more fiscally responsible than it actually is.

These lies aren't particularly interesting — Trump lies every day, it would be weirder if he didn’t lie. But look at how he’s lying. No concrete promises of something better. No false statistics about how much more income you’ll take home, how many jobs it will create, how many factory towns will come miraculously back to life. The stats are meant to scare you, because fear is all he has.

This budget bill will hurt a lot of Trump supporters, but that's ok: it’s not in Trump’s interest to make the lives of his constituents better. Happy, healthy people are a lot less easy to scare than, say, someone who’s one broken leg away from bankruptcy and trying to figure out how to afford both rent and groceries this month. Same goes for someone whose small business is on the verge of going bust, inches from foreclosure, unable to afford the signifiers of middle-class status. Anyone whose life is precarious or trending downwards can easily be frightened; it doesn't matter where they started. For MAGA to work, things can never get better. Adherents must be constantly on the verge of losing everything.

A good way to make someone feel like they’re they’re winning without easing that fear-based desperation is to claim some other group is stealing from them and then loudly take things away from that group. If they get less, you get more. Right? Between 12 million and 17 million people will lose Medicaid coverage because of this bill, but that’s a selling point. They’re enriching you by removing coverage from moochers and looters who don’t deserve it, like people who could work, but choose not to. How will the government determine who can or cannot work? Don’t worry about it! You know you deserve it, and Trump is on your side so you’ll definitely be fine. It’ll be a little like that time Trump said he was going to deport violent illegal alien criminals and than infamously did exactly that.

Oh.

Speaking of immigrants, the bill will supposedly stop those damned illegals from stealing all the healthcare. The only problem is that, except for emergency services, undocumented people don’t receive Medicaid. You know who will lose coverage? People here legally, who came here the “right way.” It’s almost like — and I know this sounds crazy — but it’s almost like some of the people with pull in the MAGAverse view non-white immigrants as invaders no matter how or when they came here:

Source for post. Source for stat. Source for Loomer’s MAGA clout. Source for how many Republican politicians have condemned this

Nobody likes this bill. It explodes the deficit. It raises the debt ceiling. It goes either too far or not far enough on benefit cuts. It’s a bonanza giveaway for the defense industry and the richest people on the planet, which the Bannonites can’t stand. They hate it— but they’re pushing for it anyway.

Here's something Bannon said last Tuesday while covering Trump’s visit to “Alligator Alcatraz,” which Bannon describes as Florida’s new “congregation facility.” This, to me, sounds like what might happen if you threw “concentration camp” into a thesaurus, but I digress. Here’s the quote:

"One of the points of the Big Beautiful Bill, which is not perfect, far from perfect…besides the supply-side tax cut, you need this money now to actually expedite the deportations of 10 million people. And the deportations of 10 million people are absolutely essential for stopping what is, I think, is the most dangerous front on the third world war, and that is the invasion of the United States of America. And if the Israeli First crowd and the globalists don't understand that, that's their problem…

“Israeli First” and “globalist” in close proximity like that sure is interesting; anyway, say more about that third world war:

Florida has done a really excellent job of working with local law enforcement, national guard, all of that with federal authorities. This is the way it has to be done. And this is what I keep telling people and talking to people about this situation in LA, in Chicago, and soon to be -- or, New York's bad, but soon to be worse. That the main front of the Third World War, of which we are in, and particularly in the kinetic piece, is the front here in the United States of America, and that is the ten million illegal aliens that are here and have to be, um -- can we put the President’s other part in a small box in the middle? I’ll do some more directing."

(Bannon is directing his producers to expand one of the three videos onscreen. I include it only to convey how abruptly he cuts himself off here and to show that I'm not leaving anything out)

We never do find out exactly what has to be done with the ten million illegal aliens, but the point is this: we have to pass this godawful abortion of a budget bill for the sake of civil war.

At one point during Trump’s One Big Beautiful Event speech I quoted at the beginning of the article, the president called ICE director Tom Homan to the podium. “Look, I don't call up the Speaker of the House, I don't call Marco or Peter or any of them, but I want to call this guy, because this guy is keeping us very, very safe.”

Homan took the stage and, visibly furious, addressed the crowd:

"Idon't know how the what the hell's the matter with everybody up in Congress. People are dying every day...If we get this bill passed we get more agents on the road, we buy more beds, we get more transportation flights. More agents means more bad guy s arrested, taken off the streets of this country, every single day. Every day we arrest a public safety threat or national security threat. This makes this country much safer. Who the hell would be against that?"

Me. I’m against that. I’m against masked, armed goons in paramilitary clothing who don’t identify themselves throwing people into unmarked vans with no license plates. I am against taking those human beings to facilities that regularly abuse detainees or, most recently, a concentration camp in Florida swamplands staffed in part by the National Guard; a camp that flooded shortly after Trump’s visit there during a normal, seasonal Florida rainstorm.

But the Republicans aren’t against it. They’re slavering for it. Hungry for the boot, eager for that third world war, or at least desperate not to appear against it. And so the Big Beautiful Bill is now the Big Beautiful Law. The House passed it last night, despite all their posturing and complaining. Only Brian Fitzpatrick and the eternally pugnacious Thomas Massie voted against it.

Millions will lose healthcare and food assistance. Rural hospitals will close. and people will die who could easily have lived. The wealthy will consolidate yet more wealth, while the poorest among us will take home $1600 less per year. Climate change will accelerate. So will the surveillance state.

And ICE now has a larger budget than the militaries of most countries. $150 billion Big, Beautiful Dollars to fight that third world war.

There is one thing that gives me hope, and it’s bigger than it seems at first, so stay with me. The original bill included a ban on all state and local regulation on AI for the next ten years. On Tuesday, the Senate voted 99-1 to remove that provision. I cannot prove that Musk’s decision to reignite his feud with Trump on June 28th caused this 180-degree pivot, but it's hard to imagine any other explanation.

Nevertheless, Bannon took credit for the ban’s demise, which he presents (correctly) as a victory for everyday Americans. "We made sure that the administration didn't get duped by the tech bros and weigh in in favor of the AI Amnesty,” he said.

And then, he said this:

And for AOC and Bernie, your oligarchs tour: we're actually taking on the oligarchs. You're just doing performance art. And for Mamdani up in New York City: it’s more performance art…they haven't done anything about it, they haven't talked about any of these important issues, and they're not prepared to do the work.”

Can you hear it? Can you hear the fear?

Bannon really, really needs his audience to believe that his solution is the best the working and middle class can hope for. He needs you to ignore AOC and Bernie and especially Mamdani, who will likely have a chance to implement his concrete and achievable policy goals shortly: simple yet sweeping changes able to materially improve New Yorkers’ lives in ways that Bannon’s foul ideology never could. Progressive and socialist politics do not require an impoverished, desperate electorate clinging by their fingernails to the little they have. They are striving for a better world, and they have a road map to get there.

Want to feel better? Two weeks ago, Bernie Sanders went on Joe Rogan. You can listen to him bring his message of hope and progress to the very audience Bannon is so desperately trying to innoculate against this politics of actual progress, all while Rogan meekly agrees with nearly every point. Bernie doesn’t have to scare people into agreeing with him. All he has to do is explain.

Even now, with majorities in every branch of government and a newly-neutered judicial system and a turbocharged secret police force, this administration is terrified of what the left has to offer, which is why Trump is now explicitly threatening to strip Mamdani of his citizenship and deport him. If Mamdani shows the world what Democratic Socialism can do for a city — that a better world is possible, that neoliberalism isn’t the only alternative to MAGA — they’ll have to fight a real enemy instead of a paper tiger party. They can't allow it to happen.

I believe in peaceful protest. Look at my post history on any platform: you’ll find me talking about why violence and property destruction is a bad idea and a bunch of people telling me I’m a lib and a centrist for saying it.

So hear me very clearly when I say this: If the Trump administration follows through on its threat to strip citizenship from enemies of the regime and remove them from political life by force, we have to fight. I don’t mean protest. I don’t mean block roads. I mean exactly what I said.

It’s Fourth of July weekend. Odds are good, if you're in America, that you will hear our National Anthem at some point. That anthem is about war, and it ends with a question. It's never been more worth asking.