Trump "Winning"? Well...

Plus all the links.

Quick points after passage of the megabill:

• A lot of the mainstream coverage is, not surprisingly, all about Trump “winning.” This is how legislation gets covered; it’s not a Trump-specific thing, although Trump makes it easier since he mainly talks about passing the thing, not what it does. As always, this framing ignores other important players in the process, and conflates the president with the party and others. Most – not all! – of the megabill is either the pre-Trump consensus GOP agenda or represents the victory of pre-Trump factions over other portions of the party. But some, including important parts of the bill, should fairly be attributed to Trump.

• Yes, it would be better if media coverage included a lot more on policy substance. For better or worse, that’s unlikely to change. It’s a real media bias, probably driven more than anything else by consumer preferences.

• As far as Trump’s role in getting the thing passed? The big choice was to put everything in one bill, including the must-pass debt limit increase and tax cut extensions. That wound up being Trump’s position, but only after Congress made the choice. Trump’s major contributions were (1) setting a July 4 deadline, which appears to have helped quite a bit, and (2) his absolute conviction that passing very unpopular stuff just doesn’t matter, which he successfully transmitted to the rest of the party. That’s not nothing…but whether it’s actually an achievement hinges on what comes next.

• Part of the continuing story will be whether Democrats succeed in tying lots of unpopular outcomes to Trump, Republicans in Congress, and the megabill. They’re certainly going to try, and I think the media will be open to those storylines.

• On the other hand, while the media tends to cover “Is this bad thing a consequence of presidential action?” stories, what they tend not to pay much attention to is policy implementation. That’s a huge, important story here, with key complex processes happening in multiple federal, state, and local settings across many different policy domains. With a lot at stake.

• And one more. This bill was assembled hastily, and often by non-experts whose only concern was getting the thing over the finish line. Those watching closely may recall that at one point House Republicans totally messed up the “rule” for consideration of the bill and had to go back and amend it. It’s very likely there will turn out to be drafting errors in the bill itself, and perhaps stuff that was deliberately stuffed in there that leaders didn’t even know about. It’s all law now. I strongly suspect there are multiple stories to be told; we’ll see whether media outlets put the resources in to tell them.

On to the good stuff:

1. Scott Lemieux is entirely correct about the House radicals, and I agree that there are no GOP moderates in the House, although there are ranges of how conservative - and how radical - they are. The idea that the HFC radicals “folded” is entirely wrong; this bill is full of stuff they love and as far as I can tell has nothing they dislike. They fought to the end to get even more, but this was a huge win for them.

2. Dan Drezner on Iran 2025 and Iraq 2003. All good, but for me the key is where he turns to the structural problems with the Trump WH - and how organizing the presidency to suppress information is so dangerous to the president, the nation, and the world.

3. Elizabeth Saunders and a whole bunch of other Brookings folks on the Iran attacks.

4. Theda Skocpol on all that money for ICE.

5. Don Moynihan on the megabill.

6. Miranda Yaver on Medicaid, health care, and the megabill.

7. Natalie Jackson on public opinion and the least conservative Republicans in Congress (I don’t call them “moderates” – they’re very conservative! Just not as radical as others).

8. John Sides at Good Authority on affective polarization.

9. Seth Masket on civility.

10. And a good one from Norm Ornstein on where we are now.