MAGA Republicans Get Ready to Gut Medicaid to Help Trump

Republicans are quietly pushing to slash Medicaid to fund Donald Trump’s tax cuts and immigration spending.

The effort has been subtle and behind the scenes, and disguised as a way to eliminate Medicaid  fraud and protect the program’s most vulnerable recipients. But several Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, are desperately trying to revive a yearslong fight to eliminate the expanded Medicaid eligibility requirements included in Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which gives millions of low-income adults health coverage.

“The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news—and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric,” The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn wrote in a recent piece. “But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy—and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News.” 

Speaking to Fox News, Johnson stuck to MAGA’s well-rehearsed safety-net program script. 

“We have to root out fraud, waste, and abuse.… When you have people on the program that are draining the resources, it takes it away from the people that are actually needing it the most and are intended to receive it,” Johnson said. “You’re talking about young, single mothers, down on their fortunes at a moment—the people with real disabilities, the elderly. And we’ve got to protect and preserve that program. So we’re going to preserve the integrity of it.”

The Louisiana Republican made a similar argument when he pushed for a budget resolution in February that would cut at least $880 billion from a funding pot that includes Medicaid to pay for Trump’s tax cuts. At the time, he argued Medicaid is “not for 29-year-olds sitting on their couches playing video games.”

But there are millions of low-income people on Medicaid—which provides health coverage to one in five Americans—who need health coverage regardless of their age, gender, or marital status, and many of them are GOP constituents. Nearly three dozen House Republicans represent districts with more people than average receiving coverage through Obama’s expansion, according to a data analysis from health nonprofit KNN. 

In Johnson’s own district in Louisiana, 38 percent of the population relies on Medicaid, the analysis found. The House speaker will clearly not be stopped by anything, not even the health of his constituents, in his never-ending tirade against universal health care.

The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to get American women to have more babies, according to The New York Times.

They are exploring options like reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships to applicants who are parents and/or married, giving mothers that $5,000 “baby bonus” that Trump promised during the campaign season, and even a government-funded program to better educate women on their own menstrual cycles so that they know when they should be trying for a baby. The administration has not yet settled on its final plan, according to the Times report.

“The President wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American dream,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As a mother myself, I am proud to work for a president who is taking significant action to leave a better country for the next generation.”

The impetus for this right-wing pronatalism is undeniably Project 2025 and the white ethnonationalists at the heart of it. Vice President JD Vance has also made childbearing a focus point, noting at the 2025 March for Life that he wanted more “babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to parent them. He also infamously described the Democratic Party as full of “childless cat ladies” who are anti-children.

An NPR report that a search is underway for a new secretary of defense is being met with vehement denials from the White House. 

In a post on X, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the news that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s job was in trouble, calling the story “total FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about.”

“As the President said this morning, he stands strongly behind [Hegseth],” Leavitt’s post said. 

President Trump was asked by a reporter at the White House Easter egg roll Monday morning, prior to the report’s publication, if he had confidence in Hegseth, to which he replied, “Why would you even ask a question like that?

“Ask the Houthis how much dysfunction there is. There’s none. Pete’s doing a great job. Everybody’s happy with him. We have the highest recruitment numbers I think we’ve had in 28 years,” Trump said. “No, he’s doing a great job. It’s just fake news.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump added. 

Hegseth is under fire for sharing details about U.S. airstrikes against targets in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother, at around the same time he shared the war plans in another group chat with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

According to other reports, the Pentagon has been in disarray for the past month, not just because of “Signalgate” but also due to other sensitive leaks and mass firings. On Friday, three top Pentagon employees were fired over a leak investigation in the department. If the NPR report is true, the president may be getting fed up with Hegseth’s constant flow of bad news. Perhaps his narrow confirmation was a sign that Hegseth shouldn’t have gotten the job. 

MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared to mock Pope Francis’s death on Monday, calling him “evil.”

“Today there were major shifts in global leaderships,” Taylor Greene wrote on X, alluding to the death of one of the world’s most influential religious leaders without naming him directly. “Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.”

She did not issue any clarification after coming under fire for the post.

This is par for the course for a far-right congresswoman who has expressed that she thinks Catholic bishops are “destroying” the country and that the Catholic Church as a whole is “controlled by Satan.”

American conservatives have maintained a fraught relationship with Pope Francis, as the first Latin American pope was often critical of the Trump administration and its policies.

Vice President JD Vance met with Pope Francis Sunday, just hours before the progressive pontiff passed. Coincidence? Yes—but good luck telling that to the internet, which won’t stop joking that Donald Trump’s antagonistic ally had something to do with it.

During his 12-year papacy, the pope was an advocate for the rights of LGBTQ+ people and Palestinians and a staunch critic of Trump’s MAGA agenda. He even openly spoke against Vance, who tried to refashion Catholic teaching to justify Trump’s massive deportation scheme.

Suffice it to say, the internet is now suggesting that Vance made quick work vanquishing the Vicar of Christ.

Not everyone was accusing him of doing something, just asking questions.

But people on X certainly had their theories. Specifically, that Vance might be the Antichrist.

Others weren’t quite as convinced.

To be sure, not everyone was suggesting that Vance had carried out some kind of unholy hit. But he certainly didn’t help things.

Some suggested there could be evidence of an emerging trend that Vance has a bad touch.

Pope Francis’s death report, released Monday afternoon by the Vatican, indicated he died of a cerebral stroke, which caused him to fall into a coma and suffer “irreversible cardiocirculatory collapse,” The New York Times reported. He had long suffered from chronic lung disease and developed double pneumonia earlier this year.

This story has been updated.