Trump 2.0 is a Wrecking Ball

With the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump has crushed a lot of Democratic dreams and plans, and — as I predicted right after the election — he’s also starting to lay an institutional foundation for Republicans.

The Big, Beautiful Bill is more big than it is beautiful, but the only way to get the changes that were needed through without a filibuster was through reconciliation. And the changes got through, and that is beautiful. It’s just the reality of our system that to get things done you have to buy votes.

Elon Musk, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, et al. don’t like that, and they’re not exactly wrong not to like it, they’re just wrong to think that we could have gotten what was needed any other way.

Hugh Hewitt offers some perspective here:

And even Hugh omitted some stuff:

This is a lot for a new president in less than six months, to put it mildly. And an important point about DOGE is that while yes, it saved money, it’s biggest impact was to defund the government-funded left — which turns out to be most of the left, especially the activist left — thus preparing the battlespace for other issues down the line.

Elon, et al., are right that the debt is an existential threat, but you can’t get at the debt and at spending without first taking apart the coalitions that created the problem. That’s what Trump is doing.

My suggestion for the GOP is that they now start hitting the Democrats with single-subject bills that will have to be voted up or down, and that will be very politically expensive for Democrats to oppose, when they’re clearly presented without a lot of extraneous legislative cover. Will some of them be filibustered? Maybe, but if they are, the Democrats look bad. (And if they’re really important bills, the GOP can drop the filibuster with a majority, as the Democrats did already.)

At any rate, as we go into the Fourth of July weekend, remember that it’s not just a calendar date, but that it’s really Independence Day. And especially this year.