MAGA Rep Admits Trump Scammed People With Budget Bill

Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is on its way to his desk thanks to a 218–214 vote in the House.

MAGA representatives, however, could hardly wait after the vote was over to reveal that some of their biggest advertising points on the bill to working-class America were actually complete duds.

Speaking with Fox News, New York Representative Mike Lawler confirmed that the bill’s “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” provisions would expire just before Trump’s term was out.

“This bill starts to make significant savings across the entirety of the federal government so that we can actually reduce spending and bring down the cost of living for Americans,” Lawler said. “This is a big win for Americans across the country; you look at the tax provisions, the doubling of the standard deduction, the enhanced child tax credit, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime—”

But the Fox reporter interjected to correct him: “Those expire in 2028, correct?”

“Sure, within the tax code, but that’s normal,” Lawler said. “The objective here is to provide real and immediate relief to Americans all across the country.”

But the bill is not expected to save the government any money. Instead, Trump’s key legislative victory—which will slice taxes on the ultrawealthy and corporations—is expected to add upward of $6 trillion to the debt, according to a projection from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scorched the “no tax on tips” provision during a heated floor speech Tuesday, telling lawmakers that, “as one of the only people in this body who has lived off of tips,” the promise was little more than a “scam.”

“The cap on that is $25,000,” she said, “while you’re jacking up taxes on people who make less than $50,000 across the United States, while taking away their [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance] program, while take taking away their Medicaid, while kicking them off of the [Affordable Care Act] and their health care extensions.”

The “big, beautiful bill” will also gut $880 billion from Medicaid and other crucial social programs, a detail so ill-favored by Americans that conservative lawmakers stopped holding town halls after the line item was announced due to staunch opposition from their constituents.

But Lawler wasn’t concerned that passing Trump’s glorious budget agenda could have ramifications on their own elections come midterms.

“Do you think that this could come back to bite Republicans next November by any chance?” Fox asked him.

“No, once the American people understand everything that is in the bill as opposed to what the Democrats have told them is in the bill, they are going to support the largest tax cut they have seen. Had we not passed this bill, you would have had the largest tax increase in history,” Lawler said.

That’s by design: Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 arranged for individual provisions to expire at the end of 2025, effectively forcing a tax increase for the majority of Americans by 2026.

Ocasio-Cortez, in turn, slammed the New York conservative, writing that “it’s not normal.”

“Lawler voted to make the tax breaks on billionaires PERMANENT while making the no tax on tips (just for those making less than $25k) EXPIRE in just 3 years,” she posted in response to Lawler’s interview. “He’s also kicking tipped employees off Medicaid, ACA, and clawing back their SNAP.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is being delusional as ever about the exorbitant cost of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”

During an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Thursday, Bessent did his best to defend his title as a “fiscal hawk” despite the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office that say Trump’s behemoth budget bill will add trillions to the national deficit.

“I don’t believe in the CBO forecast,” Bessent said. The latest estimate from the CBO found that the legislation bill will add nearly $4 trillion to the national deficit over the next 10 years. An analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute think tank projected the budget bill could add upward of $6 trillion.

Bessent pushed back on the CBO’s prediction that the bill will have only modest effects on long-term economic growth.

“If you turn up the growth projections to something like 2.8, 3 percent, which was achieved during President Trump’s first term, then the debt disappears,” Bessent said. “The other thing too is, are we growing the GDP faster than we’re growing the debt? Which I am sure will happen over the remainder of the president’s term.”

In January, the CBO had predicted that growth would cool to 1.9 percent in 2025 and 1.8 in 2026, down from 2.3 percent in 2024. The agency estimated that real GDP would then grow by 1.8 percent per year, on average, through 2035. Under Trump’s budget bill, the CBO estimated the real GDP would increase by an additional 0.5 percent on average through the 2025-2034 period, putting the yearly increase at roughly 2.4 percent—not anywhere near the 3 percent Bessent wants to offset the deficit.

As it turns out, you can’t just adjust projections based on what’s convenient for a political agenda. Still, House Republicans voted later Thursday to pass Trump’s sweeping, 887-page budget bill, a wildly unpopular piece of legislation poised to further enrich the wealthiest and tatter the social safety net.

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.