Politics

The One Big Beautiful Bill is law. Now what? Not quite six months into his new term, President Donald Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises. He has cut taxes, launched trade wars, frustrated longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and slashed the federal government. He steamrolled the opposition, including members of his own party, to push through Congress a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation that contains nearly his entire domestic agenda. Now the next phase of his presidency—as well as next year’s midterms—could be defined by his bet that the Republican bill, and other Trump policies, will usher in a booming economy. If that wager pays off, it would reinforce one of Trump’s strongest issues—but Democrats see an opening to hit the president for disproportionately helping the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The White House won’t push for another big legislative package between now and next November, five White House aides and outside advisers told us. Instead, Trump will turn to selling and defending what his party just passed, in addition to focusing on what he believes are his core political strengths: high-stakes trade deals and high-profile immigration clashes. Oh, and he wouldn’t mind winning a Nobel Peace Prize too. Trump and his team spent the four years after his first term drafting a sweeping plan to overwhelm Washington—and, in particular, the Democrats—with a flurry of action. In his first months back in office, he signed one executive order after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE haphazardly chopped its way through government agencies. Law firms, universities, and media companies acceded to the administration’s demands. Its lawyers kept pushing the bounds of executive power in the courts. The point was to punish and confuse. And, although the administration stumbled along the way, the strategy allowed Trump to seize perhaps more power than he’d ever had in Washington. [From the June 2025 issue: “I run the country and the world”] Then, the past three weeks yielded what White House aides believe are a pair of monumental triumphs: the air strikes that Trump authorized on Iran’s nuclear program, and the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in time for Trump to sign it on July 4. White House officials believe they are entering the second phase of Trump’s second term with momentum. At the same time, the West Wing recognizes that, more than any other issue, the economy will dictate the outcome of next year’s midterms. The Republican legislation instituted a set of tax cuts that Trump believes to be the formula for rapid economic expansion. But they will primarily benefit the wealthy, and the bill was financed by cuts to federal safety-net programs, while adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt. Democratic groups plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars arguing that the bill rewarded wealthy donors and failed to address inflation, whereas Republicans hope that it will lead to real wage increases and a surging stock market deep into next year. “It’s going to be: How is the economy doing in a year and three months from now?” a GOP House strategist told us. (This person, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategy.) “If the economy continues to improve, we are going to have a great message to sell to voters.” Trump and his Cabinet plan to barnstorm the country in support of the bill. “We also have to sell it, right? Just because it passed doesn’t mean it goes away,” a White House official told us. Ads slamming Republicans for the bill are now running in swing districts across the country. At the core of the emerging Democratic message is a simple argument about the issue that still ranks as the most important for voters: affordability. A private polling memo from the Democratic group Future Forward USA Action that we obtained advises Democrats that voters tend to pin the blame for high prices on “elites in leadership positions in government and business,” who have “no idea what life is like for regular people.” The group argues that Democrats should tie Trump’s tax bill to these concerns. “When asked to choose who has benefitted more because of Trump’s policies, the most chosen actors are: billionaires (chosen 72% of the time); wealthy Americans (70%) and corporate CEOs (67%),” the memo, dated June 5, explains. “These rank much higher than middle class Americans and working people, each chosen just 43% of the time.” Trump’s approval on the economy is now lower than at any time in his first term, having dropped about 20 percentage points since January. So, for the first time since the presidential election, Democrats feel that they can go on the offensive regarding what has been a weak issue for their party. “The combination of what Trump did in the megabill and what he did with the tariffs set up a reality for voters where they believe that Republicans are on the wrong side on everyday costs,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told us. To this point in Trump’s term, unemployment and inflation have largely been steady, though consumer spending has started to slow. It will take time for the impact of the law to become apparent. This week, however, Trump added another combustible element to his economic agenda: He revived his trade war, threatening to increase tariffs on more than a dozen countries by August 1. Aides insisted to us that Trump, after blinking on imposing sweeping tariffs earlier this year, will not back down this time. (His belief in tariffs is one of his few consistent ideological positions, even though most economists oppose high tariffs.) [James Surowiecki: Trump’s only-okay economy] The advisers added that they hoped for a more systematic approach to trade negotiations in the months ahead—more senior-level talks, fewer Truth Social screeds—with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leading the discussions. One aide acknowledged to us that, even so, “there will be some fights” with other countries. Aides

ICE occupies an exalted place in President Donald Trump’s hierarchy of law enforcement. He praises the bravery and fortitude of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—“the toughest people you’ll ever meet,” he says—and depicts them as heroes in the central plot of his presidency, helping him rescue the country from an invasion of gang members and mental patients. The 20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They’re the Untouchables in his MAGA crime drama. The reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear. “It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.” I recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more. Despite Trump’s public praise for ICE officers, several staffers told me that they feel contempt from administration officials who have implied they were too passive—too comfortable—under the Biden administration. Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe. At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.” The administration argues that morale has actually never been higher—and will only improve as ICE officials begin spending billions in new federal funding. Tricia McLaughlin, the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement the agency’s workforce has welcomed its new mission under Trump. “After four years of not being allowed to do their jobs, the brave men and women at ICE are excited to be able to do their jobs again,” McLaughlin said. [Read: Take off the mask, ICE] But ICE’s physical infrastructure is buckling. The agency is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, but it has been funded for only 41,000 detention beds, so processing centers are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells with nowhere to shower.   “Morale is in the crapper,” another former investigative agent told me. “Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.” A common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically exhausting. The agency has never done more than a quarter of that number in a single year. But ICE’s top officials are so scared of being fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push back, another official told me. Miller has made clear that not hitting that goal is not an option. He and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called ICE’s top leaders to Washington in May and berated them in a tense meeting. Miller set a daily arrest quota of 3,000, a fourfold increase over the average during Trump’s first few months. Veteran officials murmured and shifted in their seats, but Miller steamrolled anyone who spoke up. “No one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” the official told me. “The answer is just to keep banging the field”—which is what ICE calls rank-and-file officers—“and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.” Several career officials have been pushed out of leadership roles. Other employees have decided to quit. Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track deportations that pad the stats. Some detainees had complex claims that attorneys have to screen before their initial hearings, to ensure due process. Others with strong asylum cases were likely to end up back in court later anyway. The hallway arrests sent the message that the immigration courts were just a convenient place to handcuff people. Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said. [Read: The terrible optics of ICE enforcement are fueling a Trump immigration backlash]

Jesse Duquette Walk this way. The post Transport appeared first on The Nation.

When President Joe Biden tried to enact student loan forgiveness programs, it was treated as an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach of power. But now that Donald Trump is president, mucking around in student loan programs is perfectly fine and dandy—though this time the goal is to hurt people rather than help them.  Trump is preparing to turn the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into yet another tool of retribution. Under PSLF, students who enter public service—including government and nonprofit jobs—have any remaining balance on student loans forgiven after 10 years of payments.  Public service jobs are often lower paying than their private-sector equivalents, especially for those requiring advanced degrees. Before PSLF was created in 2007, student loan debt would often act as a barrier preventing graduates from taking public-sector jobs.  But now, the Department of Education is gearing up to remove eligibility from any employer that it deems to be involved in “illegal activities.” The Trump administration’s warped sense of what constitutes an illegal activity is exactly what you’d expect. Trump’s March executive order requires Education Secretary Linda McMahon to redefine public service to exclude organizations that work on immigration issues or transgender rights, along with any employers that she determines are “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or violate state laws like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or blocking highways.  People rally outside of the Supreme Court in 2023, protesting against a lawsuit seeking to block President Joe Biden’s student loan relief efforts. In other words, organizations that focus on anything that Trump and McMahon don’t like will get yeeted from eligibility for the PSLF program.  Of course, it’s not illegal to work with immigrants, to help trans kids, or to engage in peaceful protests, but the Trump administration doesn’t care. The entire point is to make loan forgiveness unobtainable for filthy liberals. There’s no way that this won’t be used as a weapon, where the Trump administration can remove any organization it doesn’t like, for any reason, wiping out loan forgiveness for employees—regardless of the law. Contrast this with Biden’s detailed rulemaking efforts explaining his authority to enact student loan forgiveness and lengthy outlines of each proposed rule change. But honestly, it probably didn’t matter what Biden proposed: The Supreme Court was always going to rush to rule against him. Even when the Biden administration significantly narrowed the scope of relief after the ruling, red states kept suing to ensure that students would stay saddled with debt.  Watching Trump pretend that this is about “restoring” PSLF is ridiculous given his behavior during his first term, when only 7,000 people received loan forgiveness and the other 99% of applications were denied. While Biden fixed that deliberately broken process, Trump is wiping it out again.  When Biden exerted any presidential authority, no matter how well-grounded in law, it was deemed a historic crisis and a trampling of Congress. But when Trump throws up a lawless, bigoted executive order, it’s totally fine.  Who needs law when you’ve got Congress and the Supreme Court willing to let you do whatever you want?

In a sign Republicans are out of touch with regular Americans, Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday bragged that the Senate had “the longest continuous work period in 15 years.” “We’ve taken more roll-call votes so far this year than at the same point in any year since at least 1989,” Thune added in a speech on the Senate floor, as he tried to build support for Senate Republicans’ actions to strip health care and food aid from the poorest Americans in order to cut taxes for the rich and fund President Donald Trump’s masked deportation force. YouTube Video How long was this “continuous work period,” you might ask? The Senate was in session on weekdays from Jan. 3 through March 14, the chamber’s first scheduled weeklong break, according to the Senate’s official calendar. Of course, that time in session includes days off for federal holidays and days where they gaveled out early.  As of Wednesday, the Senate has had 111 days in session since Jan. 3, according to the secretary of the Senate. During that time, they’ve had 11 Fridays where they didn’t meet, in addition to various scheduled breaks. What’s more, Thune bragging about the number of votes taken is an odd choice. The GOP and its unified control of Washington have so far enacted just 49 pieces of legislation, according to GovTrack, which monitors actions in Congress. That’s far off track from the 117th Congress, when Democrats had unified control of the nation’s capitol. The Democratic-controlled 117th Congress had 1,234 pieces of legislation enacted over the course of two years. Republicans would have to seriously pick up the pace over the next year and a half to get to that level. And if Republicans want to talk about quality over quantity, Democrats have them beat there, too. In the 117th Congress, Democrats passed a sweeping COVID-19 relief bill, which gave Americans stimulus checks. They also expanded subsidies for Americans to obtain health care, passed $1 trillion in infrastructure funding, and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower prescription costs. What have Republicans done this Congress?  They passed a budget that will strip away health care and food stamps from millions of Americans. They made it harder for Americans to afford the cost of college, and beefed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make Trump’s deportation gestapo the largest police force in the United States. Republicans are also set to let the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, which will cause millions to become unable to afford their health insurance.  But congrats on working a few full weeks in a row, Republicans. What a sacrifice.

According to President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Americans are jumping at the chance to work long, low-paid hours in the fields.  Lori Chavez-DeRemer appeared Wednesday on Fox News, where both she and the hosts challenged the silly leftist notion that U.S. citizens aren’t keen to take certain difficult jobs.  “What happened to the threat from the left that American citizens won’t do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do?” asked Todd Piro, co=host of “Fox & Friends First.” “Because when I look at these numbers, I think, ‘Nope, the American citizen is willing to do those jobs.’” “Americans are willing to do the job,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.” YouTube Video While there’s nothing wrong with putting more money back into the pockets of American workers, some of the positions Chavez-DeRemer and the Trump administration are hounding about have a long history of low pay and abusive work conditions.  Forty-two percent of crop farmworkers are foreign born and not authorized to work in the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture. Undocumented immigrants have been known to live in bug-infested shacks as they work long hours on farms for little pay.  This push to put Americans in the fields comes amid the Trump administration’s brutal push to expel undocumented—and even some documented—immigrants from the U.S. And with the administration telling Americans to turn to the fields if they want to keep their Medicaid coverage, it seems as if Trump and his crew are aware of their dire need to fill the labor shortage they’re fomenting.

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A growing number of U.S. citizens—many of them Latino—say they’ve been detained by immigration agents in what critics are calling blatant racial profiling and overzealous policing. Of course, citizens aren’t supposed to be arrested or detained unless agents believe they’ve broken the law. But across the country, reports are piling up of Latino citizens being stopped, questioned, and even jailed—just for looking “foreign.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t released statistics on these incidents in months, but the Department of Homeland Security is already doing damage control. Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Axios that claims of citizens being wrongfully detained are not true, and accused the media of “shamefully peddling a false narrative” to smear ICE agents. Protesters gather to denounce ICE operations in Los Angeles on June 10. “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE,” McLaughlin said. But anecdotal evidence paints a murkier picture. Axios reviewed news reports, social media clips, and complaints from advocacy groups and found several cases where citizens were taken by ICE, sometimes for days. In May, ICE detained Florida native Leonardo Garcia Venegas while he was on the job at a construction site in Foley, Alabama. They accused him of carrying a fake Real ID, ordered him to his knees, and handcuffed him, according to Noticias Telemundo. Then there’s Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who spent 10 days in ICE custody after agents arrested him in Arizona and refused to believe his citizenship. Last month, ICE briefly held Elzon Lemus, an electrician from Brentwood, New York, during a routine traffic stop, saying he matched the description of someone they were looking for. Related | Trump goons arrest another politician, laws be damned In California, plainclothes ICE agents briefly detained Jason Brian Gavidia, born in East Los Angeles, outside of a Montebello body shop and demanded to know where he was born. “I’m an American, bro!” he shouted, as captured on video. In Southern California alone, at least five more incidents have been reported, according to Guadalupe Gonzalez of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. And they don’t appear isolated.  ICE raids have continued aggressively across Latino-heavy regions like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego, and states like Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and New York—raising fears that the agency is targeting communities by ethnicity, not evidence. Civil rights groups are pushing back. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund plans to file a $1 million federal lawsuit on behalf of Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen and photographer who was allegedly detained while filming an ICE raid outside of a Hollywood Home Depot. Garcia had no criminal record and confirmed his citizenship, but he was still held for a day. Sen Alex Padilla is pushed out of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s news conference on June 12. “We do our due diligence,” McLaughlin insisted. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted and are not resulting in the arrest of U.S. citizens.” But advocates aren’t buying it. “Let’s just call it what it is: This is racial discrimination,” said councilmember Mario Trujillo of Downey, California.  Even Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who was physically removed from a Homeland Security briefing in June, weighed in on the matter. “Reports of American citizens detained by ICE purely based on their race are wholly unacceptable and run afoul of our Fourth Amendment rights,” he told Axios. “No one should feel unsafe because of the color of their skin, but in [President] Donald Trump’s America—where indiscriminate immigration raids are commonplace—this is the stark reality.” For now, ICE denies any wrongdoing. But to many Latino citizens, the message is clear: In Trump’s America, having the right papers isn’t enough.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals just did scuzzy businesses a solid by throwing out the click-to-cancel rule. Finalized during the Biden administration, back when the Federal Trade Commission was actually doing its job, the rule would have required companies to make canceling their services as easy as signing up.  This rule was a slam dunk, because literally no consumer is clamoring for the right to drive to the gym to cancel your free trial or to sit on the phone with a newspaper hell-bent on keeping you trapped in a subscription. But companies desperately want that, so they ran to a friendly court to whine about how unfair it was to rob them of the ability to drain consumer pocketbooks.  Going to the 8th Circuit was a pretty safe bet, as the court has only one Democratic appointee. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall Republicans eager to lend a helping hand to businesses. Five days before the rule was supposed to go into effect, the 8th Circuit obligingly blocked the rule, providing American consumers with the god-given freedom to have unwanted subscription charges hammer their bank accounts.  “On the Court” by Clay Bennett One of the bases for the ruling was that the FTC failed to do a preliminary regulatory analysis, required when a rule’s impact on the economy would exceed $100 million. Of course, the only way companies can complain that making it easier to cancel things would cost at least nine figures is to acknowledge that trapping people into paying for services they can’t cancel is a significant moneymaker. The Trump administration could always choose to restart the rulemaking process and do the necessary regulatory analysis, but these days, the FTC is not really all that jazzed about consumer protection. Instead, the agency is currently busy investigating Elon Musk’s enemies and making merger approvals contingent on companies agreeing to let the administration dictate what advertisers they choose to work with and what platforms they will advertise on. What company doesn’t love the idea of being forced to buy ads on Trump’s social media network or to have their ads appear alongside Grok’s open praise for Adolf Hitler over on X? Though the FTC did go to court to defend the rule, the Trump administration had already tipped its hand in mid-May when it delayed the implementation of the click-to-cancel rule for two months, which just happened to be long enough for the appeals court to issue its ruling. The word salad justification for the delay was “Having conducted a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose, the Commission has determined that the original deferral period insufficiently accounted for the complexity of compliance”—which sounds like giving businesses a pass because they said it’s just too darn hard for them to obey.  Since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC appointees months ago, there’s no real worry that any commissioners would come forward to say that maybe it is good to protect consumers from sleazy corporate tactics. So now, you can continue racking up unwanted fees with dirtbag companies whose business plan relies on keeping you trapped. Freedom!

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