Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me.
Noah: It’s the biggest cut there’s ever been to Medicaid. It’s about an 18 percent cut. And of course, the Republicans are running around saying it’s not a cut at all, which is one of many lies they’re telling about this bill. The Congressional Budget Office would beg to differ. They say that they’re cutting close to $1 trillion dollars out of Medicaid and that there will be drastic reduction in those enrolled.
Noah: Right. They don’t actually give a damn whether anybody actually gets a job. They just want to get people off the rolls, and throwing sand in the gears is a time-honored way to do it, specifically with work requirements. It works pretty well when you do it to food stamps too. And the budget analysts know this, so they they make their calculations accordingly.
Noah: Yeah, well, there are a million ways that they’re scamming themselves on this. Josh Hawley is a counterexample to Tillis. Last month, he published an op-ed in The New York Times saying Republicans are committing suicide if they’re going to do these kinds of cuts to Medicaid. But over the weekend, he quietly signed off on the cuts and signed off on the legislation by allowing the bill to move forward. So yeah, I don’t think it’s any great secrets to Trump or anybody else that they are cutting the hell out of both Medicaid and food stamps—which they’re cutting 20 percent, the largest cut ever made to food stamps as well. And it’s kind of a neat trick. They are committing unprecedented cuts to the social safety net and at the same time more than doubling the deficit. That’s hard to do at the same time.
Noah: Yes. And they are pretending that.… They’ve even changed their accounting method. In effect, they are saying, Whenever we Republicans tell you that a tax cut is temporary, it’s not temporary. It’s permanent.
Noah: Right. He was saying those aren’t cuts. He was simultaneously arguing that the work requirements aren’t cuts. And he was saying that because they poll well, although they tend not to poll well if the people conducting the poll explain that the majority of people on Medicaid already have jobs.
Noah: Yeah, they’re counting on a certain amount of false positives and in the procedure of verifying that people work. It’s going to get gummed up. It’s going to be done badly. They’re not going to give enough funding to the bureaucrats who are supposed to enforce these new provisions, so it’ll be done badly. Thomas Frank wrote a book—I don’t know, about 20 years ago, maybe less—called The Wrecking Crew. Basically, its argument was the Republican game plan is you make government [as] inefficient as you can—and that way, you can reduce funding for it.
Noah: Because they’re afraid. They’re afraid of Trump. They’re more afraid of Trump than they are of their voters. But they should be afraid of their voters, because Hawley was right last month in The New York Times. This is political suicide. I wrote a piece a few weeks back explaining how Medicaid has over the decades joined Medicare and Social Security as a third rail of American politics. It didn’t used to be. In fact, way back in the beginning, if you wanted to go on Medicaid, you couldn’t have a job. The only people who were eligible for Medicaid were on welfare. But eligibility expanded over the years, and now there are more people on Medicaid than there are on Medicare—slightly more. So it’s a huge program. It’s a program that reaches into the working class. As Steve Bannon has pointed out, there are a lot of MAGA voters who are on Medicaid, and they are in for a very rude shock. The Republicans are just trying to wish this away. Maybe they can con people enough to pass the bill, but they’re not going to be able to con people when the cuts come.
Noah: Because he’s playing both sides as usual and is also afraid of alienating Trump. If he were to be really thoroughly denounced by Trump, he would be at risk of losing much of his audience. So he will tell the truth up to a point and then he’ll fall in line.
Noah: Right.
Noah: With a few more excommunications like this, the Democrats could hugely increase their chances of winning back the Senate in 2026. And The Wall Street Journal is already starting to worry about that. I’m curious, What are your thoughts about the Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate?
Noah: Yeah, the Journal is bitter because they really want that tax cut. People are always talking about how smart Trump is politically, and I’ve never thought he was especially smart. I think he has certain kind of animal instincts about how to rile the crowd in the moment, but he has no capability as a long-term strategist. None.
Noah: I think the bill will pass. And I think it will be suicide for the Republicans, just like Hawley wrote in The New York Times. I wrote it before Hawley did. It’s insane. It is so self-destructive. Again, another way of describing the magnitude of this accomplishment is that they are alienating both MAGA voters and the bond markets because they are also.… The bond markets aren’t going to be fooled by the funky accounting that the Republicans have adopted for this. The bond markets will recognize that they are talking about more than doubling the current deficit, which the bond markets are already apoplectic about.
Noah: I think it could. And if it’s big enough, we might start to talk about the possibility of Trump being removed from office. Because by the end of his first week in office, he’d already committed enough impeachable offenses to be removed. But it takes a Democratic Congress to get the job done, and they need a lot of votes in the Senate to convict. But the way he’s going alienating members of his own party, I don’t rule anything out.
Noah: It’s hard.
Noah: Things turned fast. It was also true of George H.W. Bush, where after the Persian Gulf War, he was absolutely unbeatable. I remember I was working at The Wall Street Journal at the time and Al Hunt, the bureau chief, had a meeting where he called all the political reporters together and apologized to us that we were going to have this boring assignment of covering the 1992 election because it was obvious that George H.W. Bush was going to win a second term.
Noah: Yeah. I thought from the beginning that Trump is on a path of self-destruction, and the Republican Party is on a path of self-destruction. I don’t know exactly how it plays out, but he is alienating everybody, including his own base. He just has, again, no sense of strategy—and he also has no impulse control. When you look at the Republicans in Congress, how many of those guys can stand the sight of Trump really? They all pretend to love him now, but his support among Republicans is a quarter inch deep. So all of these things could work out in interesting ways. I have not given up hope that Trump will be, one way or another, ousted from office within four years.
Noah: Yes, absolutely. And Trump has never been able to transfer his popularity to his flunkies, and I think Vance will demonstrate that. And who knows what Vance is going to be in four years? This is a guy who has changed his identity—literally changed his name two or three times, right? And [he] has changed his political identity at least a couple of times. He’s an opportunist. He will do the opportunistic thing. And we can’t know right now what that will be.
Noah: Thank you, Greg.
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