Trump Is Quickly Rolling Back Republican Gains With Key Demographic

More bad polling news for President Trump: The same Latino voters who helped him beat Kamala Harris in November now strongly disapprove of how he’s carried out his deportation crackdown.

A new poll by Equis Research, first reported on by The Bulwark, shows that 15 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump completely disapprove of his presidential actions to this point. A whopping 66 percent of all Latino voters also believe that his “actions are going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.”

When it comes to Latinos who flipped from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, 51 percent disapprove of his overall performance. And 36 percent of all Latino Trump voters feel like he’s crossed a line with his deportation crackdown, as he shirks the constraints of the checks and balances system to make an example of those like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Andry Hernández Romero.

Trump has also completely reversed the goodwill he had with young Latino men ages 18–34. He won them by a margin of +11 in November (54-43), but he now sits at an overall disapproval margin of -11 (44-55). Young Latino men have also cooled on Trump’s economy (-17) and his immigration policies (-12).

The most important issues for the respondents here were mass deportations.

“A very large share of Latinos believe mass deportations will ‘tear families apart, many of whom have been in the US for a long time’ (73% agree, 53% strongly) and will ‘unfairly impact undocumented immigrants who are law-abiding members of society, work hard and pay taxes’ (71% agree, 52% strongly),” according to the Equis poll. “While Latinos have not shed their concerns about border security, it is clear that they think Trump has overreached.”

A group that was initially hailed as a key part of some new, multiracial GOP coalition is now having serious second thoughts about the man they voted for. And while polls like this aren’t fatal, this certainly raises some alarms for how Trump’s actions will impact Republican downballot races in the upcoming midterm election.

Donald Trump’s tax bill is no more.

The House Budget Committee voted against the reconciliation bill Friday, with 16 members voting in favor of it and 21 voting against it. Those opposing the tax bill included Republican Representatives Andrew Clyde, Chip Roy, Josh Brecheen, Ralph Norman, and Vice Chair Lloyd Smucker—the last of whom changed his vote at the eleventh hour.

The president had resorted to panicking over his collapsing tax opus prior to the vote, posting in all caps on Truth Social that “Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’”

“We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party,” Trump continued. “STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE! It is time to fix the MESS that Biden and the Democrats gave us.”

Committee members, however, were tired of the spectacle.

“I do not anticipate us coming back today,” said Chairman Jodey Arrington at the close of the vote. “I’m going to let you know if we’ll return first thing Monday. Know that the weekend is yours.”

Freedom Caucus conservatives argued that the bill did not properly address their concerns, calling for more spending cuts and specific start dates for policy proposals such as Medicaid work requirements.

Republicans could only afford to lose two votes on the Budget Committee. Instead, they lost five—a damning indictment of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s whip operation. Johnson has committed to meeting members over the weekend, though it’s expected to be a long haul to get them on the side of a budget plan that they believe does not do enough to downsize the federal deficit.

“We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price,” Roy said in a statement Friday ahead of the vote, admonishing his colleagues for drafting a bill that falls “profoundly short.”

“So I am a no on this bill, unless serious reforms are made today, tomorrow, Sunday. We’re having conversations as we speak, but something needs to change, or you’re not going to get my support.”

“I’m not gonna sit here and say everything’s hunky dory when this is the Budget Committee,” he said. “This is the Budget Committee. We’re supposed to do something to actually result in balanced budgets, but we’re not doing it.”

Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and multimillionaires is estimated to add trillions to the national deficit. To offset the hike, Republicans proposed cutting $880 billion from Medicaid by way of adding work requirements and booting undocumented immigrants off the public health coverage program (undocumented immigrants are ineligible to receive Medicaid, though life-saving care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act can be covered by emergency Medicaid).

The bill also didn’t follow through on things that Trump had promised to his base, such as stripping taxes from tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits.

The House had issued a self-imposed deadline to wrap the bill by Memorial Day, but the Republican-led movement to can Trump’s plan has cast doubt on the status of the reconciliation package. The committee is scheduled to reconvene at 10:00 p.m. Sunday for another vote on the bill. If it passes, the bill would then advance it to the Rules Committee on Wednesday, reported Punchbowl News.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump complained about a gift he received from the United Arab Emirates by making a joke Friday morning during his visit to the country.

Trump’s hosts presented the president with a plaque containing a drop of the country’s oil, and while accepting the present, Trump said, “This is the highest quality oil on the planet and they only gave me a drop of it, so I’m not thrilled, but it’s better than no drop, can you imagine?”

The joke was met with laughter from onlookers and Trump’s UAE hosts, but carries a more negative tone in the context of the president receiving a much bigger gift ahead of his Middle East tour: a luxury airplane from Qatar that is being described as a bribe. Trump has bristled from criticism over the jet, which he claims is free but will probably cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars to modify for presidential standards.

The airplane gift was preceded by Trump’s businesses cutting a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar earlier this month. In the UAE, the Trump family has also cut a number of recent deals, with an Emirati-backed firm recently spending $2 billion on Trump’s stablecoin to the unveiling of Trump International Hotel & Tower Dubai last week. And in Saudi, two Trump Towers are in the works. It seems the president should have little to complain about with all of the money he’s making, not to mention the deals that he claims to be cutting in the Middle East for U.S. industries.

After months of baseless claims about “extreme levels of fraud” within the Social Security Administration—even going so far as calling it the “biggest ponzi scheme of all time”—Elon Musk and DOGE have only found two likely fraudulent claims out of over 110,000 at the Social Security Administrations, according to Nextgov.

Musk and other DOGE workers were claiming that 40 percent of calls to the agency were fraudulent.

DOGE instructed the agency to install anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone. That policy impeded the agency’s retirement claim processing, while finding less than 1 percent rate of calls were potentially fraudulent. The two likely fraudulent cases make it a rate of .0018 percent. So DOGE found virtually no fraud and made a system integral to our country’s inner workings less efficient in the process.

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” an internal agency document read. The SSA is now weighing changing the policy entirely.

“The Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told Nextgov. ““Every one of DOGE’s so-called ‘mistakes’ is a backdoor cut to people’s benefits.... There’s nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed.”

“It seemed like a solution in search of a problem,” said Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “So many of these policy changes—the proposals, the reversals, the things that SSA has done over these past several months—seem to have been fueled by misinformation from people like Elon Musk.”

Donald Trump has the presidency, but now he seems to want Paris Hilton’s crown.

The president did very presidential things on social media Friday morning, including roasting Taylor Swift by deeming the notoriously litigious pop singer as not “hot.”

“Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump likes to dredge up his obsession with Swift every so often, especially during critical policy moments. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”

Swift has already found herself at the epicenter of A-list drama this week, after she was subpoenaed into her reportedly ex-BFF Blake Lively’s harassment lawsuit against It Ends With Us co-star Justin Baldoni. Another scandalous, Swift-related detail emerged from the case this week when Baldoni’s attorneys submitted a letter accusing Lively’s team of extorting Swift by threatening to release “ten years” of private texts with the popstar unless she expressed public support for Lively. A federal judge struck the letter from the docket Thursday, warning Baldoni’s team not to “promote scandal arising out of unproven potentially libelous statements.”

But the 35-year-old chantress isn’t the only singer beefing with Trump. Shortly after calling out Swift, the president took a stab at Bruce Springsteen, snubbing the singer of “Born in the USA”, one of his favorite rally tracks, as “highly overrated.”

“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country,” Trump posted. “If I wasn’t elected, it would have been GONE by now!”

“This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!” Trump added.

The jab followed remarks Springsteen made at a concert in Manchester, England Wednesday. The rock star said that the Trump administration was “taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers,” and that the richest men were “taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death.”

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll, in dangerous times,” Springsteen said. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”

“They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society,” he continued. “They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

This story has been updated.