At least the pretense and make-believe games are over.
And we can see things as they really are.
The battle over President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—the set of economic and policy priorities that are at the heart of his agenda—has torn away many masks and allowed Americans to see the snarling features beneath those masks.
When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he vowed to “make America great again” by restoring middle-class and working-class Americans to financial and cultural security. He blamed the perils they supposedly faced on outsiders, undocumented immigrants he labeled “dangerous hombres” who raped and murdered innocent U.S. citizens on a routine basis.
That there was little to no statistical evidence to back up his claims bothered neither Trump nor his followers, who seemed willing to accept anything he said.
Certainly, they accepted the fact that he devoted the first two years of his first term in office—his moment of greatest political leverage because his Republican Party controlled both chambers of Congress—not to building the wall along the southern border he’d promised or reinvigorating America’s industrial infrastructure, but instead to giving himself and other billionaires a massive tax cut.
Flash forward to now.
Trump is in the White House again, once more with the GOP controlling both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
And once again, he’s putting his own interests ahead of the people who put him in office.
The highest priority in Trump’s Frankenstein monster of a bill is the continuation of the massive tax cut for the uber-wealthy.
He and his cronies seem to think that it’s far more important for mega-billionaires to be able to afford that desperately-needed seventh luxury yacht than it is to provide health-care coverage to senior citizens, veterans and children.
Trump’s bill will result in nearly 18 million Americans losing their health care benefits. Many—perhaps even most—of those who will find themselves without coverage live in rural communities and states.
In other words, in the heart of Trump’s America.
But Trump’s focus never has been on helping the people who have offered him their devotion and treasure and twice made him president of the United States.
No, Trump’s focus, as always, has been on helping himself. He doesn’t want to make America great again.
He wants to make Donald Trump even richer.
That’s why this presidency has come to resemble one of those old-fashioned TV supermarket shopping sprees—a primitive game-show concept in which participants were turned loose in a store with instructions to grab anything they could carry away within a set period.
The haggling and infighting over this “big, beautiful bill”—which will add trillions to the national debt—has revealed the greedy, graspy nature of this second Trump era.
The bill started in the House, where Trump and Republican leaders arm-twisted and horse-whipped recalcitrant Republican members into supporting it. Many of those GOP House members beseeched the Senate to strip the measure of its more noxious features.
In the Senate, the process repeated itself—with one key difference.
One U.S. senator saw she had the leverage necessary to protect her state from the carnage that will ensue and used it.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, initially sent signals that she opposed Trump’s bill and its deep cuts to Medicaid. She was one of four Republican senators—Maine’s Susan Collins, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis were the others—who had done so.
Trump needed at least one of them to force a tie vote in the Senate that Vice President JD Vance then could break.
Murkowski has been vilified by left and right for “selling” her vote to protect Alaska’s most vulnerable citizens from this tragic fecklessness.
But all she did was read the situation. Murkowski realized that the passage of Trump’s bill was inevitable—does anyone really believe that Collins and Paul also wouldn’t have had prices?—and, in such a transactional environment, saw a chance to spare her constituents harm while millions of others suffered.
After Murkowski took care of her own, she along with other senators who voted for the bill then began all but begging the House to clean up the mess they’d just made.
Given that House Republicans have only three votes to spare, the shopping spree doubtless will continue.
Glory, glory hallelujah.
