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 upwards 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.
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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 ultra-wealthy 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 dollars 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.
More on this awful budget:
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 cochair 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 been used to assess a person’s intelligence, however, 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.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to coax wary House Republicans off the fence to support his “big, beautiful bill” have seemingly succeeded, as GOP leaders say the president’s centerpiece legislation will likely pass by Friday.
Trump pulled out all the stops to achieve this outcome, including turning to what he does best, or at least most unrelentingly: merchandise.
The president has commoditized his image and the office of the president like no other, constantly hawking Trump-branded products, from his trademark MAGA hats to more peculiar products, like cryptocurrency, cell phones, shoes, Bibles, guitars, watches—and, most recently, a fragrance.
Given Trump’s penchant for merchandising, it’s perhaps no surprise he made lavishing Republican holdouts with awful merch a central prong of his “charm offensive” to garner support for the bill, per The New York Times.
The Times reports that, on Wednesday, GOP lawmakers who entered the White House uncertain about the bill—which would gut social programs and tilt taxes to benefit the wealthy—“walked out with signed merchandise, photos in the Oval Office and, by some accounts, a newfound appreciation for the bill.”
After Representative Tim Burchett met with the president, he posted a video in which he, walking with a gaggle of fellow House Republicans, heaped praise on the president.
“The president was wonderful, as always—informative, funny. He told me he likes seeing me on TV, which was kind of cool,” Burchett said.
From out of frame, Representative Byron Donald asked, “Did you show them what he signed for you?” to which Burchett, almost blushingly, replied, “Yeah, he signed a bunch of stuff. It’s cool.”
In response, Democrats such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have derided their Republican colleagues for being so easily swayed in favor of the bill.
Meanwhile, Trump is seemingly unaware of the content of the legislation he’s so vigorously pushing. According to NOTUS, during one meeting where he sought to court House Republicans, he impressed upon those in attendance that future electoral victories will require leaving social programs like Medicaid untouched.
“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member of Congress replied. (The bill’s changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are estimated to strip at least 17 million Americans of their health insurance by 2034.)
If the bill passes as is expected, and social program cuts are the political loser Trump (wisely) says they are, then the MAGA merch with which he lavished lawmakers may be worth little within a couple election cycles.
