Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Is Hitting Republican States Hard

President Donald Trump’s behemoth spending bill is forcing Republican lawmakers to consider dramatic budget cuts in many states.

Lost tax revenue from Trump’s tax cuts and added costs for new requirements for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are costing Republican-led states as much as $450 million per year, Politico reported Wednesday.

Many Republican-led states were already working with budgets that were stretched thin. But H.R. 1, Trump’s signature “Big Beautiful Bill,” required states to pay a larger share of SNAP and expand resources to handle new Medicaid work requirements, costing states as much as $50 million per year, according to Politico.

In Idaho, Trump’s federal tax cuts will cost the state an estimated $155 million in 2026, and $175 million in 2027, according to the governor’s office.

“We’re stealing from Peter to pay Paul,” Idaho State Representative Jordan Redman said. “It’s put us in a predicament where now we’re trying to figure out, ‘Ok, what programs do we keep? What programs do we cut?’”

Idaho State Senator Jim Guthrie told Politico that his constituents weren’t convinced that the short-term benefits of Trump’s tax cuts outweighed the cost of services stripped by shrinking budgets.

“The feedback I’m hearing from citizens is that extra few bucks on their [return] at the end of the year, because of the taxes they didn’t have to pay, comes secondary to wanting us to take care of the things that government needs to be invested in,” Guthrie said. “Which is your infrastructure and your roads and bridges and schools and also your Medicaid population.”

In Iowa, Trump’s tax cuts have gutted an additional $350 million from a state that was already facing a $1 billion hole in its budget, the Iowa Legislative Services Agency told Politico.

In Indiana, federal tax cuts on tips and overtime will cost the state an estimated $251 million in tax revenue in 2026. In Arizona, taking on the full federal tax code could cost an estimated $381 million in 2026. In Missouri, Republican House Budget Committee Chair Dirk Deaton proposed an approximately $51.5 million reduction to childcare subsidies. “We’re faced with hard decisions,” he said during a hearing earlier this month. “It is what it is.”

Trump’s federal spending bill is sapping state services’ budgets at the same time as the president’s disastrous, and increasingly expensive, war in Iran has driven prices up where they will likely stay.

Donald Trump announced his “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology” on Wednesday, in what can only be described as a nightmare blunt rotation.

The group, chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, consists of 13 individuals, most notably:

Marc Andreessen, the egghead, Twitter-obsessed co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. His net worth is estimated at $1.9 billion. Interestingly, Andreessen generally voted Democrat until 2024, when he concluded that Joe Biden’s administration “flat-out tried to kill us”—by which he meant they were attempting to regulate crypto and AI. Andreessen promptly donated $2.5 million to one of Trump’s super PACs. He has since criticized diversity initiatives and immigration, and fought against the construction of multifamily housing near his secluded California mansion, despite previously advocating for an increased supply of housing in California. The hypocrisy makes some sense when one considers that Andreessen hates introspection and apparently never tries to consider his own thoughts.

Larry Ellison, the billionaire of the moment. Worth roughly $191.6 billion, the Oracle co-founder was briefly the richest man in the world back in 2025. Ellison funded the merger between Skydance Media and Paramount (owned by his son David), which involved Paramount essentially handing Trump a $16 million bribe in July to ensure the FCC would approve the deal. Ellison participated in a 2020 conference call in which a cabal of powerful figures brainstormed ways to overturn the election results, has personal ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and sports some of the most disgusting facial hair around.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (sorry, Meta) and original tech bro. Net worth: $205.8 billion, even more than Ellison. Once a dewy-eyed darling of Silicon Valley, Zuck took a turn around 2024 and became, if not full MAGA, at least more tolerant of Trumpian politics. He has reportedly discouraged his employees from political activism, and even donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. But Zuckerberg’s true sin is aiding the surveillance state through Facebook’s incessant, sometimes unauthorized data collection. Happily, he also has made some terrible business decisions that have come back to bite his beloved Meta in recent weeks.

Others on the council will include:

• Sergey Brin
• Safra Catz
• Michael Dell
• Jacob DeWitte
• Fred Ehrsam
• David Friedberg
• Jensen Huang
• John Martinis
• Bob Mumgaard
• Lisa Su

This story has been updated.

Every day for the last 25 days, President Donald Trump has sat comfortably in his office and watched a glorified highlight reel of his destruction in Iran.

The daily video compilation is about two minutes long and shows the largest and most pulverizing strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, NBC reported Wednesday.

Three U.S. officials and one former official told NBC the video update—which one described as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up”—is raising alarms among the president’s allies that he’s  not receiving a “full scope” of what’s happening in Iran, distorting his view of the nearly month-long conflict that’s wreaked havoc across the globe. 

Though he does receive other verbal updates from officials, the daily sizzle reel of bombs has also made Trump even more furious with the media’s negative coverage of the war, which, in his eyes, has apparently been a success. He’s questioned why the public narrative isn’t reflecting the highly curated, crowning moments of U.S. military power he’s seeing on-screen, the officials and former official told NBC.

That’s because what’s happening in Iran over the last month has been disastrous. More than 1,500 Iranians and 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed, gas prices have skyrocketed, Trump’s goal of reopening the Strait of Hormuz is looking increasingly fantastical, and public opinion of his handling of the war is at an all-time low. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that the president doesn’t have a total picture of the war. 

“That’s an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” she said in a statement to NBC. “Anyone who has been present for conversations with President Trump knows he actively seeks and solicits the opinions of everyone in the room and expects full throated honesty from all of his top advisors.” 

Full-throated honesty apparently means showing the president an edited montage of bombing another country over and over again.

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022 and found that the former president had stolen hundreds of classified documents from the White House, stashing them in the club’s closets and showers, one question stood out: Why? Was Trump coordinating with Russian intelligence? Hiding proof of aliens?

As it turns out, the answer was more self-serving: Former special counsel Jack Smith concluded that Trump took the documents to help advance his business interests, according to case records obtained by Democrats and reviewed by MS NOW.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests—establishing a motive for retaining them,” one memo from Smith’s office read. “We must have those documents.”

The documents Trump kept included a classified map he showed to passengers on his plane, and one document so sensitive that only six people were allowed to view it.

Following the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, Judge Aileen Cannon, who has a history of ruling in Trump’s favor, dismissed the federal lawsuit against him by arguing that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Cannon slapped a gag order on Smith and most of the documents related to the investigation. The special counsel resigned after Trump was reelected in 2024.

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, sent Attorney General Pam Bondi a letter Tuesday pressing her to investigate the president for his corruption and release all files relating to the case.

“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests,” Raskin wrote. “This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before Bondi does anything that hurts Trump. The White House sent a typically petulant response in a message to MS NOW: “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026. President Trump did nothing wrong.”

President Donald Trump has sent a peace plan to Iran—but is anyone actually reading it?

The United States transmitted a 15-point peace plan to Iran through Pakistan, betraying the president’s eagerness to build an off-ramp from the spiraling conflict he helped launch in the Middle East, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

But it wasn’t clear that the deal would be accepted, or even entertained, by Iran.

Iranian representatives have submitted their own conditions for a ceasefire deal, including demands for the closure of all American bases in the Gulf, lifting sanctions, and reparations for the war, according to The Wall Street Journal. The officials also demanded that Tehran be permitted to keep its missile program and be allowed to collect fees from ships that pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

While the exact details of Trump’s plan are unknown, it addressed Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs, the targets of much of Israel and America’s bombing campaign, as well as maritime routes, the officials told the Times.

Iranian officials have struggled to safely communicate or meet amid threats against their lives, U.S. officials told the Times. Iranian officials have previously flat-out ignored requests to negotiate with the United States, and denied having entered talks.

It also wasn’t clear whether Israel was on board with the proposal. The Israeli military announced Wednesday morning that it had launched a new series of strikes against Tehran. Israel said that it had fired more than 15,000 since the war started. Iran continued its retaliatory strikes against Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps demanded assurances that the war would not restart, and requested that Israel stop strikes against Hezbollah, the Iran-aligned Lebanese militia.

Despite Trump’s claim that U.S. officials have held productive conversations with Iran, the Pentagon is planning to deploy some 2,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Persian Gulf.