Planned Parenthood Gets Huge Win Against Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”

A federal judge on Monday blocked components of the “big, beautiful bill” that would effectively defund Planned Parenthood.

The new order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani states that the federal government must continue to reimburse Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the country, despite federal efforts to nix the health care provider’s funding via recent legislation. The decision expands on a preliminary injunction, issued last week, that narrowly applied to affiliates in states where abortion was legal and where services did not exceed an $800,000 revenue threshold.

“Patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable,” Talwani wrote in her Monday order, rejecting the language of the bill on the grounds of the First Amendment. “In particular, restricting Members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.”

The order gives the green light to patients using Medicaid to continue to seek services at Planned Parenthood.

Talwani specified that the court was not intervening in the federal government’s capacity to regulate abortion and was not ordering the public funding of elective abortion services. Instead, the order blocks the federal government from excluding specific groups from Medicaid reimbursements when they are legally entitled to them, and when their lawsuit has an overwhelming likelihood of success.

Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider, but that’s not the only service it offers. The nonprofit additionally provides critical services such as physicals, cancer screenings, STI testing, and birth control access, and it does not use public funds to provide abortion care.

Donald Trump’s tax bill will gut $880 billion from Medicaid and other crucial social programs—a detail so little favored by Americans that conservative lawmakers stopped holding town halls due to their constituents’ staunch opposition to the line item. But neither that nor the fact that the legislation is estimated to add upward of $6 trillion to the debt stopped Republicans from passing it through Congress, ushering Trump’s key agenda item to his desk.

Shortly after Trump signed the tax bill into law, Planned Parenthood filed suit, arguing that the conservative initiative had specifically targeted its practice in hopes of punishing Americans who either provide or seek abortion care.

“The prohibition specifically targets Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its member health care providers in order to punish them for lawful activity, namely advocating for and providing legal abortion access wholly outside the Medicaid program and without using any federal funds,” Planned Parenthood wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed in Boston federal court last week.

Reacting to Talwani’s most recent order, Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon told The Hill that the Trump administration “strongly disagrees” with the court’s decision.

“States should not be forced to fund organizations that have chosen political advocacy over patient care,” Nixon said in a statement. “This ruling undermines state flexibility and disregards longstanding concerns about accountability.”

Paul Dans, the architect of the far-right plan Project 2025, will primary Republican Senator Linsdey Graham in South Carolina next year. Dans’s campaign muddies the ideological waters of MAGA, as he admonishes Graham for being a “swamp critter” while President Trump has already given Graham his endorsement.

Yet Dans and his campaign are parroting Trump-aligend talking points while running against the guy who Trump backs.

“What we’ve done with Project 2025 is really change the game in terms of closing the door on the progressive era,” Dans told The Associated Press. ”If you look at where the chokepoint is, it’s the United States Senate. That’s the headwaters of the swamp.”

“I want to run for our children,” he said Monday to NBC News. “I want to run to stop World War III. I want to run to make the American dream affordable for the next generation, but really to keep this great country in shape for another 250 years. This time, the patriots stood up and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We need to have a government of, by, and for the people again. Not by swamp critters like Lindsey Graham.”

Dans also called Graham a “warmonger,” an increasingly common dealbreaker for MAGA Republicans, who want an “end to endless wars” (and have gotten nowhere with that thus far).

Dans left the Heritage Foundation last year after backlash to Project 2025 grew too overwhelming for him to bear and Trump unconvincingly washed his hands of Project 2025. Now he wants to join the Senate to be the Trump ally that he doesn’t think Graham truly is.

“There is no amount of lipstick that you can put on Lindsey to make MAGA fall for him, OK? That show is over. The jig is up. And it’s essentially ‘Sunset Boulevard’ for Lindsey at this stage,” Dans told The Post and Courier, referring to Graham being booed on stage in his home state in 2023 during a Trump rally.

Graham’s campaign doesn’t seem to feel threatened by Dans.

“After being unceremoniously dumped in 2024 while trying to torpedo Donald Trump’s historic campaign, Paul Dans has parachuted himself into the state of South Carolina in direct opposition to President Trump’s longtime friend and ally in the Senate Lindsey Graham,” Graham’s senior adviser (and former Trump senior adviser) Chris LaCivita said to NBC. “Like everything Paul Dans starts, this too will end prematurely.”

Donald Trump dodged an easy question Monday about his rift with alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

During a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, the president was asked to explain what caused the “breach” between the president and his Palm Beach neighbor. Trump’s answer only skimmed the surface.

“That’s such old history. Very easy to explain, but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it,” Trump said.

“But for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, I wouldn’t talk, because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump said.

“He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place,” Trump continued. “Persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it. I’m glad I did, to tell you the truth.”

Trump’s supposedly “easy” answer isn’t all that easy to understand.

Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, has said she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to become Epstein’s traveling masseuse while she was working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in 2000. She was 16 at the time.

But Trump and Epstein reportedly didn’t have their falling out until four years later, when they fought over an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that they both wanted to purchase—with Trump ultimately winning out at auction, according to The Washington Post. Four months later, a woman filed a police report alleging that Epstein had paid her 15-year-old stepdaughter $300 to massage him while partially undressed.

Trump later claimed he’d banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for misconduct, calling him a “real creep,” former Trump aide Sam Nunberg said in 2019.

During the press conference Monday, Trump weirdly said he’d “never had the privilege of going to [Epstein’s] island,” and that he’d turned down the offer in one of his “good moments.”

Trump’s defense of his friendship with Epstein has only gotten increasingly baffling since the Justice Department claimed at the beginning of the month that Epstein kept no client list—after previously promising to release such a list. In the intervening time, evidence has continued to mount that Trump and Epstein had a close relationship, as the president has maintained he was not involved in the sex offender’s alleged sex-trafficking ring.

But perhaps Trump’s defense isn’t as “easy” as he’s made it out to be.

In 2023, Epstein’s brother Mark said that he’d seen an unaired interview between Jeffrey and Steve Bannon, in which the disgraced financier claimed he’d “stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”

And this is far from the first inconsistency. In 2016, Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten claimed that the two had no relationship: “They were not friends and did not socialize together,” he said of his boss and Epstein. But in August 2017, Epstein described himself as the president’s “closest friend” during an interview with biographer Michael Wolff.

Donald Trump on Monday suggested that he turned down invitations to travel to the late notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s island. “I never had the privilege of going to his island,” he told reporters.

During a press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump continued his ongoing efforts to deflect attention from his past relationship with Epstein, as his administration faces criticism for its lack of transparency about the case of the disgraced financier.

“By the way, I never went to the island,” Trump said, while noting alleged trips by notable figures such as former President Bill Clinton.

“And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them. I never had the privilege of going to his island,” the president said. “And I did turn it down. But a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island.”

Observers on social media were swift to question Trump’s characterization of such trips as a “privilege.” The seemingly sarcastic but extraordinarily tactless choice of words comes as Trump frantically tries to escape the mounting Epstein scandal—yet, with each public remark, only becomes further mired in it.

Moments earlier, for instance, the president offered details about his falling out with Epstein in the mid-2000s, which culminated in the financier being banned from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. However, the president’s story cut against his administration’s recent insistence that Trump booted his former friend “for being a creep.”

Instead, Trump claimed that the relationship soured because Epstein repeatedly poached Trump’s employees. “He did something that was inappropriate,” Trump said. “He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place.” (Past reports, meanwhile, indicate that they had split over an oceanfront property in Palm Beach for which Trump outbid Epstein.)

Then there are the president’s comments about convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell—who has met Trump’s deputy attorney general in much-scrutinized closed-door meetings last week. Trump conspicuously refuses to rule out pardoning Maxwell, simply telling reporters that he is “allowed” to do so, which he reiterated on Monday.

Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell is an option that’s apparently still on the table.

Donald Trump refused Monday to shut down speculation that he might legally forgive the convicted associate and longtime girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, telling reporters at his Scottish golf club that no one had formally “approached” him yet about the controversial idea.

“Would you completely rule out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell?” asked a reporter. “Is that something you would ever consider?”

“Well I’m allowed to give her a pardon,” Trump said. “But nobody’s approached me with it, nobody’s asked me about it. It’s in the news, about that. That aspect of it. But right now it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. As president, Trump can dole out pardons for anyone convicted of a federal offense. But why he would choose to extend one to Maxwell prods at a more unsettling possibility.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—met with Maxwell late last week, reportedly peeling 100 names from her in a potential pardon quid pro quo. After her second day with Blanche, Maxwell’s team laid their cards on the table: They wanted a pardon from the president.

The interview followed weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for the release of more documents from the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of the pedophile’s supposed client list.

In a last-ditch effort to quell the bubbling discontent and make the forthcoming Maxwell alliance more palatable, conservatives and Trump allies have attempted to make a martyr out of Maxwell, suggesting that the well-documented sex criminal could have been wrongly convicted and was unduly serving the sentence warranted to a deceased Epstein (Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding in the victimization of hundreds of girls).

“She deserves to be out,” Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer, told Newsmax last week.

Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly disturbed by Trump’s handling of the entire fiasco. A poll published by Emerson College Polling on Friday found that just 16 percent of Americans approved of the way Trump was managing the Epstein scandal, while more than half of polled Americans—51 percent—disapproved.

The spin is particularly humiliating for MAGA Republicans, especially those invested in QAnon. After years of their heralding Trump as a supposed messiah, believing that he would dish the dirt on a secretive, international web of sex traffickers, the administration now seems hell-bent on covering up its own ties to Epstein’s island and the crimes committed there.