Only Two House Republicans Vote Against Trump’s Cruel Budget

House Republicans on Thursday passed Donald Trump’s sweeping, 887-page budget bill, an unpopular piece of legislation that is poised to further enrich the wealthiest Americans while tattering the social safety net.

The House of Representatives passed the bill 218–214, with every “yes” vote coming from a Republican. Only two Republicans, Representatives Thomas Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick, were brave enough to join Democrats and vote against the legislation.

The bill includes historic rollbacks of social programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will strip 17 million people of their health insurance by 2034 due to its cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and deal the most severe blow to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, in the program’s history. By some estimates, the bill’s Medicaid cuts alone are projected to cause 51,000 avoidable deaths per year.

And it will staggeringly transfer wealth from less wealthy to ultrawealthy Americans. According to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, it is “the most regressive tax and budget law in at least the past 40 years.” Trump and other Republicans are sure to try to distract from this by pointing to the bill’s sops to those expecting populist reforms—such as its “no tax on tips” provision—which themselves are “designed in ways that limit their benefits for less affluent taxpayers.”

And, of course, it will supercharge the Trump administration’s barbaric war on immigrants, pouring $100 billion into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, all while the American public increasingly considers the agency’s actions of late to be going too far. This part of the bill, Vice President JD Vance implausibly argued, makes all of its odious effects “immaterial” by comparison.

All this while adding an estimated $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.

Moments after Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July, he demanded something unexpected from his doctors: a CT scan of his brain.

The then-presumptive Republican presidential nominee claimed that he wanted the image as proof of his intelligence, likening the scan to an IQ test, according to an excerpt of the upcoming book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, obtained by The Washington Post.

“Back in Trump’s room, he told the doctor he wanted a CT scan. The doctor asked why, and Trump said he felt like he needed it. He went down the hall with a squad of Secret Service agents to get the scan,” the excerpt reads. 

Trump then pressed for the image while ignoring a call from President Joe Biden, who had rung him via Trump’s then-campaign co-chair Susie Wiles.

“He asked to see the ‘film’ from the scan. The doctor said that wasn’t done anymore, and offered him a written report,” the excerpt continues, but Trump was dead set. “I want the film,” he said, according to the book.

Wiles then went to retrieve a copy of the scan image. While she was gone, Trump explained to an aide that he wanted the CT scan because he believed they “tell you that your brain is good, so I just want to have that.”

CT scans are used to detect fractures, blood clots, internal bleeding, cancers, or other ailments via cross-sectional scans of the body. They have never, however, been used to assess a person’s intelligence à la some contemporary belief in phrenology.

Trump could have been confused—MRIs have been studied as a potential intelligence indicator due to their ability to measure brain activity while resting, according to CalTech.

The current president has tried (and failed) several times to inflate perceptions of his brainpower.  During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several cognitive exams, which he claimed to have “aced,” though his recollections of the tests called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

While bragging about his results to the press, Trump would invariably tweak the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication, while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is, in spite of the fact that the test’s authors reported that none of the three versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.

Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries has broken former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s record for longest floor speech in an attempt to delay voting on Trump’s destructive budget bill.

The House minority leader on Thursday spoke for eight hours and 44 minutes in an attempt to delay a vote on the bill, which is expected to rip away health care for the most vulnerable Americans in exchange for tax breaks for the wealthy.

“I feel the obligation, Mr. Speaker, to stand on this House floor and take my sweet time to tell the stories of the American people. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. Take my sweet time, on the behalf of the American people. And that’s exactly what I intend to do,” Jeffries said on Thursday. “On behalf of their health insurance, on behalf of their Medicaid, on behalf of their nutritional assistance, on behalf of veterans, on behalf of farmers, on behalf of children, on behalf of seniors, on behalf of people with disabilities, on behalf of small businesses, on behalf of every single American—I’m on this House floor after 6 a.m, and I am planning to take my sweet time!

“Folks in this town talking about draining the swamp—guess what? You are the swamp,” Jeffries said hours later. “You are the swamp. We’ve never seen anything like this ... the type of corruption that has been unleashed on the American people.”

Kevin McCarthy held the previous record for the longest House floor speech, when he delivered an over-eight-hour speech in February 2018.

Jeffries’s efforts, while impressive, will likely do nothing to ultimately halt the budget bill, as the GOP still has the majority.

This story has been updated.

Measles is on the rise in Kentucky.

Health officials in the state confirmed that the disease has spread to Fayette County, marking the seventh case of the highly contagious illness in Kentucky since the beginning of the year. Previous cases had been reported in Woodfood County.

There are five active measles cases in the Bluegrass State, four of which are connected to the current outbreak, while another unrelated measles case was reported in Todd County last week, according to state health officials.

The life-threatening disease has so far infected 1,267 people and spread to 37 states in what public health experts are describing as the worst measles spread of the century. The majority of those cases are in Texas, where local officials have reported at least 753 confirmed cases since January. Ninety-nine of those cases were hospitalized, and at least two cases—who were unvaccinated, school-aged children—have died. An unvaccinated adult in New Mexico has also died of the disease.

Measles hasn’t been a national concern since 2000, when the long-term use of a corresponding vaccine proved so effective at minimizing risk and exposure to the disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated from the United States.

But the virus’s dormant status has been challenged by anti-vaxxers, who have opted against medicating their children in fear that vaccinations could cause autism. One such conspiracist, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has refused to combat the ensuing measles outbreak with vetted science—instead, he has issued guidance that the illness can be treated by simple vitamins.

In April, Kennedy fell short of offering a full-throated endorsement of the MMR vaccine that has historically been used to treat measles, telling CBS News that his agency was focused on finding treatments for unvaccinated individuals while falsely claiming that the jab had not been “safety tested” and was not effective for long-term prevention. As of 2025, there are no known effective treatments or cures for measles.

The return of historically eradicated diseases is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

But America’s is not the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under Kennedy’s stewardship, the anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60 to 70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were those of children under the age of 5.

President Donald Trump’s efforts to coax wary House Republicans off the fence to support his “big, beautiful bill” have seemingly succeeded, as GOP leaders say the president’s centerpiece legislation will likely pass by Friday.

Trump pulled out all the stops to achieve this outcome, including turning to what he does best, or at least most unrelentingly: merchandise.

The president has commoditized his image and the office of the president like no other, constantly hawking Trump-branded products, from his trademark MAGA hats to more peculiar products, like cryptocurrency, cell phones, shoes, Bibles, guitars, watches—and, most recently, a fragrance.

Given Trump’s penchant for merchandising, it’s perhaps no surprise he made lavishing Republican holdouts with awful merch a central prong of his “charm offensive” to garner support for the bill, per The New York Times.

The Times reports that, on Wednesday, GOP lawmakers who entered the White House uncertain about the bill—which would gut social programs and tilt taxes to benefit the wealthy—“walked out with signed merchandise, photos in the Oval Office and, by some accounts, a newfound appreciation for the bill.”

After Representative Tim Burchett met with the president, he posted a video in which he, walking with a gaggle of fellow House Republicans, heaped praise on the president.

“The president was wonderful, as always—informative, funny. He told me he likes seeing me on TV, which was kind of cool,” Burchett said.

From out of frame, Representative Byron Donald asked, “Did you show them what he signed for you?” to which Burchett, almost blushingly, replied, “Yeah, he signed a bunch of stuff. It’s cool.”

In response, Democrats such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have derided their Republican colleagues for being so easily swayed in favor of the bill.

Meanwhile, Trump is seemingly unaware of the content of the legislation he’s so vigorously pushing. According to NOTUS, during one meeting where he sought to court House Republicans, he impressed upon those in attendance that future electoral victories will require leaving social programs like Medicaid untouched.

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member of Congress replied. (The bill’s changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are estimated to strip at least 17 million Americans of their health insurance by 2034.)

If the bill passes as is expected, and social program cuts are the political loser Trump (wisely) says they are, then the MAGA merch with which he lavished lawmakers may be worth little within a couple election cycles.