Ben Reacts: Trump Called It, Republicans Passed It—The Big Beautiful Bill Is Here

All righty, you folks.

So, big update, massive win for the Trump administration and for Republicans in Congress, of course.

So, this is a signature second term Trump victory, an enormous victory.

There's really only going to be one bite at the apple.

That's why this turned into one big, beautiful bill, because reconciliation, which is the process whereby you can basically pass a giant bill without having to deal with the Democratic filibuster, in one term, it is rare to have two separate bills pass under reconciliation.

So everything was going to have to get packed into this one.

And indeed, in the end, it was.

This bill maintains the Trump tax rates.

That is the most important thing about this bill.

Yes, there's no tax on tips and there are tax deductions with regard to Social Security.

Sure, there are changes that are made with regard to, for example, Medicaid.

Now, there are work requirements for Medicaid, which should have been the story in the first place.

Of course, of course.

And that's good.

That does bend the cost curve somewhat.

It doesn't bend the cost curve tremendously.

It doesn't make sure that our national debt is no longer a problem or that our national deficit is solved.

But if taxes had increased in the way Democrats wanted them to increase, it would have been a disaster for the economy and a disaster for the Trump administration.

President Trump narrowly averts that disaster because, number one, President Trump obviously has enormous coatels.

He can generate tremendous pressure within the party on anybody inside the party who's sort of on the fence.

And most of all, the negotiating prowess of the Senate Majority Leader John Thune on the one hand and the House Speaker Mike Johnson on the other, tremendous, tremendous work by both of them.

And I don't think this can really be overstated because when Mike Johnson came in as Speaker of the House, there's a lot of talk about how he wasn't going to be able to put together a coalition inside such a narrowly divided house.

Remember, he really needed to win pretty much every vote in the House.

He could only afford to lose a couple.

He only did lose a couple.

Thomas Massey, of course, of course, because Thomas Massey is one of the more useless members of Congress.

Call it principle.

But the reality is that there are many principled principled members of Congress who use their principle in order to generate better outcomes, whereas Thomas Massey uses his principle in order to generate no outcomes or worse outcomes.

In any case, Thomas Massey of Kentucky voted against it, much to President Trump's consternation.

Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who had also pledged that he was not going to vote for anything that contained significant cuts to Medicaid, for example, he voted against it as well.

Those are the only two votes in the House that Republicans lost.

Now, Democrats, of course, are despondent.

Hakeem Jeffries did a full-on seven-hour crazy towns talk trying to forestall the passage of the bill.

He finished, the bill passed like that.

And Mike Johnson then got up with a big binder and he was about to read from it and then he put it aside and said, this is ridiculous, of course.

Ronald Reagan said there's no such thing as a good speech over 20 minutes.

And then he proceeded to speak for significantly less than that.

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Bottom line here: Speaker Johnson has been one of the more effective house speakers in living memory.

He's been able to put together extraordinarily narrow majorities and hold them together.

Now, I've said before, there is a logic whereby a small majority is sometimes more cohesive than a large majority.

A large majority, sometimes you can put together a real movement against a bill.

And because there's safety in numbers, if it's 20, 30 people standing against a bill, everybody can kind of hide.

When it's a very narrow majority, then you know the names of the people who voted against the bill.

However, we do have to acknowledge here that the caucus for the Republicans ranges all the way from the New York delegation, which wanted gigantic salt deductions, state and local tax deductions, for example, all the way over on the right to the Freedom Caucus, which didn't want any of that stuff and wanted more cuts to, for example, electric vehicle subsidies, which, by the way, are going to be cut in the final passage of the bill.

And Speaker Johnson put that version of the bill together.

He was able to get that together and he was able to pass it.

And then in the Senate, Senator John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, who again came in on the heels of Senator McConnell, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, one of the more effective legislative strategists in modern history.

And I know he gets a lot of flack, but the reality is you would not have a conservative Supreme Court were it not for former Senate Majority Leader McConnell.

He gave way, and Senator Thune

is just as adept, it appears, in terms of being able to handle the levers of power.

He was somehow able to cobble together 50 votes.

He was able to kind of sweeten the deal a little bit at the very last minute for Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, make sure that she got on board.

And then Vice President J.D.

Vance is able to break the tie.

And now the bill has passed both the House and the Senate.

President Trump is expected to sign it into law tomorrow on July 4th.

Again, signature victory for the presidents of the United States, gigantic defeat for the Democrats.

And it shows that the president, he knows what he's doing.

I mean, he really does.

This time around, he really knows what he's doing.

Term two.

There are a lot of wonderful things about term one, but President Trump is doing something differently in term two, and that is he really knows where the switches are.

He knows where to pull and where to push.

And he is joined in that fight by, again, a couple of very adept legislative leaders.

Now, what does this mean for 2026?

Well, there are a lot of people today who are saying, well, Republicans are going to get crushed in 2026 because this bill is so unpopular.

And again, by the polling, the bill is not particularly popular.

I will tell you what would have been way more unpopular, a massive spike in taxes.

That would have been way more unpopular.

And very often, whenever a big bill is, very rare that you will have a big bill that passes that is highly popular.

Usually it's unpopular.

And then over time, these bills tend to become more popular.

That's actually what happened with Obamacare, which was highly unpopular.

And then as it became kind of status quo, it became more popular.

The same thing is likely to happen here.

Democrats, of course, will campaign against it.

But remember, the alternative would have been much, much worse.

And every Republican knows it.

Now, with this in the rearview mirror, with the trade war presumably winding down because Scott Bessons is going to ensure that we don't end up in a perennial trade war here, then you can expect that Jerome Powell sometime in the near future will seriously consider the possibility of lowering those interest rates, which, of course, is exactly what President Trump wants.

So, again, congratulations to all involved.

Congratulations to President Trump, to Speaker Johnson, to Senate Majority Leader Thune.

Well done, all around.

Again, I don't love everything about this bill.

This bill has major, major problems, major flaws, but it was this bill or nothing, and this bill is certainly much better than nothing would have been.