Dems are gearing up to weaponize Trump's megabill
Some Democratic strategists are urging the party to capitalize on this momentum even more aggressively.
'We need to be doing early, paid communications on this — not just the same old cable buys, token digital buys in swing districts and press conferences,' said Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who served as the DCCC's political director in 2014 and 2016. 'Democrats need to take some risks here, mobilize early, spend money they may not have because voters' views harden over time, and this is when we can shape it.'
In 2024, Democrats failed to break through with their message after President Joe Biden dug the party into a hole with voters on the economy. Trump successfully cast himself as focused on bringing down costs while painting Kamala Harris as overly obsessed with social issues like protecting transgender people. Harris, for her part, ran a scatter-shot, three-month messaging blitz that jumped from cost-of-living to abortion rights to Trump's threats to democracy, which ultimately didn't move voters.
Republicans, for their part, plan to emphasize the megabill's tax cuts, especially those on tips and overtime, and increased funding for border security. On Medicaid cuts, they hope to neutralize Democrats' attacks by casting them as reforms: tightened work requirements and efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, a pair of Medicaid-related changes that generally polls well among voters.
'This vote cemented House Democrats' image as elitist, disconnected, snobby, unconcerned with the problems Americans face in their daily lives, and most of all — out of touch,' said NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella in a statement. 'House Republicans will be relentless in making this vote the defining issue of 2026, and we will use every tool to show voters that Republicans stood with them while House Democrats sold them out.'
But as Republicans look to sell their bill, public polling on it is bleak. Most Americans disapprove of it, in some polls by a two-to-one margin, according to surveys conducted by Quinnipiac University , The Washington Post , Pew Research and Fox News .
Meanwhile a pair of Democratic groups, Priorities USA and Navigator Research, released surveys this week showing majorities of voters aren't fully aware of the megabill. Nearly half of Americans said they hadn't heard anything about the bill, according to Priorities USA, a major Democratic super PAC. Of those who had heard about it, only 8 percent said they knew Medicaid cuts were included in the legislation.
Two-thirds of survey respondents who self-identified as passive or avoidant news consumers, the kinds of tuned out and low-information voters Democrats failed to win in 2024, said they knew nothing about the bill.
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27 minutes ago
LGBTQ, legal groups slam UPenn for 'caving' to Trump's trans athlete ban
The University of Pennsylvania's decision to ban transgender female athletes from competing in women's sports to resolve a civil rights complaint by the Department of Education is being slammed by LGBTQ activists and legal experts as unconstitutional. The Trump administration announced this week that the Ivy League school has agreed to follow the Department of Education's interpretation of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. The administration had previously suspended $175 million in federal contracts awarded to Penn, citing the participation of openly transgender athlete Lia Thomas on the women's swimming team during the 2021-2022 season. "It's embarrassing, dangerous and ill-advised. I think they made a very big mistake that they will come to regret," Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told ABC News. "It's bizarre behavior, and it just seems humiliating that such a powerful, respected university is just caving in to these cruel and gratuitously hurtful positions." Minter added, "I think extortion is a very good metaphor for what's going on here. It is the federal government threatening to withhold funding if the university doesn't agree to take a position." 'Legally it makes no sense' As part of the agreement, Penn will adhere to two of President Donald Trump's executive orders that the White House says defend women from "gender ideology extremism." The university is also required to strip Thomas of her swimming awards, including her win in the 500 freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Division I Swimming & Diving Championships, and send a letter of apology to female swimmers who competed against Thomas. The school also agreed to keep student-athlete bathrooms and locker room access strictly separate on the basis of sex. "Legally, it makes no sense," Minter said. "I mean, the position of the Trump administration is that Penn somehow did something wrong by following the law that was recognized to be the law by federal courts and by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice at the relevant time, and they were complying with NCAA policy. So, to punish them after the fact because the administration now has taken a different position on what they think the law should be, is pretty outlandish." When asked for comment, the university directed ABC News to a letter to the school community by University of Pennsylvania President Dr. J. Larry Jameson. In the letter, Jameson said the university's "commitment to ensuring a respectful and welcoming environment for all of our students is unwavering." The letter added: "At the same time, we must comply with federal requirements, including executive orders, and NCAA eligibility rules, so our teams and student-athletes may engage in competitive intercollegiate sports." White House: 'Common-sense' victory U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon applauded Penn's decision as a "common-sense" victory for women and girls. "Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women's sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes," McMahon said in a statement. During his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to get "transgender insanity the hell out of our schools" and "keep men out of women's sports." "This Administration does not just pay lip service to women's equality: it vigorously insists on that equality being upheld," Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer who tied with Thomas for fifth place in the 200 freestyle at the 2022 NCAA championships, said in a statement about the UPenn decision. Gaines said she hoped Penn's decision would prompt other educational institutions to refrain from violating women's civil rights, and "renews hope in every female athlete that their country's highest leadership will not relent until they have the dignity, safety, and fairness they deserve." In a 2022 interview with ABC's "Good Morning America," Thomas, who originally competed on Penn's men's swim team, denied she had an unfair advantage over swimmers who were born female. "There's a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do and the biggest change for me is that I'm happy, and sophomore year, where I had my best times competing with the men, I was miserable," Thomas told GMA. "So, having that be lifted is incredibly relieving and allows me to put my all into training, into racing. Trans people don't transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves." Minter said it was "shocking" that Penn would agree retroactively to punishment for something lawful at the time. "In my view, it's still lawful. The only thing that has changed is the administration has taken a different view," Minter said. "This is just classic intimidation, bullying and harassment. It's really sad to see a university like Penn just knuckle under, I'm sure in hopes that they will not be further targeted if they do so. It's a shameful day for the university, for our country." Minter said he believes Penn's agreement is opening the university up to "all kinds of liability" moving forward. "They have now stated publicly that they were violating the law, and so what's to stop all kinds of other third parties from coming back and suing them now and saying, 'Well, you've admitted that what you were doing is unlawful.' I mean, it wasn't, but they've now said it was and so they're creating liability for themselves," Minter said. Supreme Court to hear trans athlete case Naiymah Sanchez, senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, told ABC News that she fears other universities that are subject to the Department of Education's civil rights investigation will follow in Penn's footsteps. "The anti-trans movement is allowing the building of power amongst people who are ignorant because they don't know and people who feel like if only we can remove these folks, we will have a better life," said Sanchez. "There's nothing that the University of Pennsylvania did that was unlawful. It followed standard guidelines." State bans on transgender students participating in girls' and women's sports have become flashpoints across the country. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear appeals from two states seeking to uphold such laws. The cases from West Virginia and Idaho -- which will be scheduled for argument next term in the fall -- will decide whether the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act prohibit the bans based on an athlete's sex assigned at birth. Lower courts in those cases sided with the student athletes in finding the state laws violated either the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause or Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. The decision to hear the cases follows a decision by the court's conservative majority last month upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Chief Justice John Roberts said the laws did not violate the 14th Amendment or discriminate on the basis of sex, even though the same medical treatments are widely available to cisgender minors. Sanchez noted that in 2024, then-NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that out of more than 500,000 student athletes competing at the college level, fewer than 10 were transgender. "As a trans person, we try not to get too emotionally attached to the issues that are happening, even if we're not the ones who are being denied the right," Sanchez said. "But the reality is that a new administration came in and they set their targets to a certain thing. They're going after the easiest fruit on the tree. But it's not just about picking the easiest fruit on the three, it's about uprooting the entire tree."
Time Magazine
32 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
What to the Immigrant is the 4th of July?
On July 5, 1852, over a decade before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass delivered a keynote address at an Independence Day event. 'What, to the American slave, is the Fourth of July?' Douglass asked. 'A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.' Enslaved Americans and their descendants, of course, did not voluntarily come to America. It was a forced migration in shackles, one drenched in blood—a painful history that, nearly 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, has not been fully reconciled with. On this Independence Day holiday weekend, amid increasingly aggressive, reckless immigration raids; in the aftermath of the Supreme Court inviting chaos and confusion into settled constitutional birthright citizenship law, and the Senate voting to give ICE a budget larger than the Marines; as Florida constructs a massive 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention center and its governor talks of deputizing National Guardsmen as immigration judges; and as everyday Americans look at each other with doubt and wonder if their neighbors are truly 'American,' we must ask: What, to the immigrant—particularly to the undocumented immigrant—is our Fourth of July? In Southern California, ICE has been quietly tearing apart Asian immigrant communities, with detainments often happening out of public sight, and detainees not being told in their language what is happening to them or where they are. Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees whose deportation orders have been on indefinite hold for years are being detained after showing up for routine check-ins at ICE offices. Ethnic hubs like Little India are receiving noticeably less foot traffic as even legal residents avoid potential run-ins with federal agents. In Texas, Jermaine Thomas, a 38-year-old Black man born on an army base in Germany to a U.S. citizen father, was deported to his father's birth country of Jamaica, a place he'd never been. After propagating a dehumanizing lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio eat pets, President Donald Trump terminated Temporary Protected Status for around half a million Haitian refugees, with no plan in place for their U.S. citizen children. Several predominantly Latino communities have canceled or postponed Independence Day events. Trump's efforts to 'Make America Great Again' have perversely scared Americans into not celebrating America's greatness at all. Unfortunately, the challenges facing immigrant communities are not new. Thirteen years ago, myself and several other undocumented immigrants spoke out about America's broken immigration system on the cover of TIME. 'The Republican Party can go one of two ways. It will either make room for its moderate voices to craft a compromise; after all, John McCain, to name just one, was a supporter of the Dream Act,' I wrote. 'Or the party will pursue a hard-line approach, further isolating not just Latinos, the largest minority group in the U.S., but also a growing multiethnic America that's adapting to the inevitable demographic and cultural shifts. In 21st century politics, diversity is destiny.' Now, the three branches of government are under Republican control, enabled and empowered by a fact-free MAGA narrative in which the rhetoric around immigration is synonymous with violent criminality. Messaging that undocumented immigrants are a massive criminal monolith helped fuel Trump to the American presidency—twice. But almost half of the people currently in ICE custody, data shows, have neither been convicted of nor charged with any crime. Despite the picture painted by the president, just 6% of known undocumented murderers and 11% of known undocumented sexual offenders have been detained. The most common categories of crimes committed by detainees are immigration and traffic offenses. The truth is that most undocumented immigrants want to make America great. We love America. We want to be here and follow the law. We want to work, and we find ways to do so, despite only 19 U.S. states allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver licenses. We are eager to contribute. In fact, we contribute nearly $100 billion each year in taxes—income, property, sales, etc. We subsidize social services like Social Security and Medicare without being able to benefit from them. Ironic from a country born out of revolting against taxation without representation. We strive to be proud of a country that is not proud of us. Not long after I discovered that I didn't have the proper documents to live in America, I was watching Rob Reiner's film The American President, and toward the end of the film, Michael Douglas, as the president, says: "America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight." I was 17, lost and disoriented, and hearing those words helped me realize that I had to fight—that being an American had to be earned. When you are an undocumented immigrant, celebrating the Fourth of July is to resist being defined by fear and panic. What it means to be an American is less about who you are than what you are about—how you live your life, how you contribute to this country, how you pledge allegiance to a flag hoping and praying it will make room for you. It means insisting that we are more than our labor, and that our dignity lies in our agency—that the most American thing about us, in fact, is what connects us to every human being who's ever had to fight their way to be included in the American experiment. What it means to be an American is in the hearts of the people who, in their struggles and heartaches, in their joys and triumphs, fight for America and fight to be American every day. And it's in the hearts of local U.S. citizens who welcome us despite our status, who date us, hire us, and fight for our humanity. 'The visual echo between today's ICE raiders and yesterday's slave catchers is eerie: the ambushing, the snatching off the streets, the chasing through fields and forests, the carting off to far away cages,' writes journalist Charles Blow. 'The context is different, obviously, but the terror is kindred.' And as Bernice A. King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and CEO of the King Center writes: 'It would help tremendously not to refer to human beings as 'illegals.' Because language matters. Because labels often dehumanize. Because no person is an 'illegal.'' As much as we talk about 'illegal aliens' as problems, we rarely discuss possible solutions outside of arresting or jailing them. So I'm heartened by a recent Quinnipiac poll that finds support for a path to legalization for most undocumented immigrants has risen to 64%. Only 31% want most of them deported. That's a 14-point net swing for legalization since Trump took office in January. I'm also encouraged by seeing communities protest ICE—including in traditionally red states and counties. Trump baselessly claimed that these demonstrations were part of a 'foreign invasion.' No, it was Americans standing up for their neighbors—and for the values America represents. This Independence Day, I choose to celebrate progress toward these values. I choose to hope that undocumented immigrants will no longer be used as pawns in an endless political game. In fireworks, I see beacons of public embrace. In communities across our country, I see groups of Americans, from all backgrounds, giving proof that our flag is still there.
Business Insider
33 minutes ago
- Business Insider
These 4 charts show where the hedge fund industry is midway through 2025
That optimism did not last long, however, as the President's tariff policies disrupted global trade and sent markets into a frenzy. Big-name managers such as Bill Ackman, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, each of whom voted for Trump, were critical of the tariffs, but the administration used one of the industry's own — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former macro investor who worked for George Soros — to sell the policies at the Milken conference and on TV. Tariff negotiations are still ongoing, but the administration's 90-day pause is set to end Wednesday. Meanwhile, choppy markets and the rise of artificial intelligence renewed interest in long-short equity managers, as hedge fund backers sought investors who can pick winners and losers in the new world order. The first quarter of this year was one of the sector's best fundraising stretches in a long time. Markets have since settled down, and June was a strong month for stocks. One hedge fund founder, BoothBay's Ari Glass, told investors after the first quarter that the portfolio managers and firms his fund backs believe "it is beginning to feel like sentiment is similar to the second quarter of 2020 and we know that while history does not repeat itself, it can rhyme." While the pandemic slammed stocks in March 2020, many hedge funds had a stellar year by betting on a quick and significant recovery. Still, there's the possibility of more macro tremors shaking global markets. Trump is still pursuing his tariff agenda. He will sign his "Big Beautiful Bill," which contains about $4.5 billion in tax cuts and is estimated to add billions to federal deficits, into legislation on Friday. And the potential for a broader conflict in the Middle East has investors on edge. According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs' prime brokerage desk, the week the US bombed Iranian nuclear sites was the second-largest net selling of energy stocks by hedge funds in the last 10 years, with many American funds now shorting energy stocks. Multistrategy giants hitting their peak? The biggest hedge funds still dominate the conversation as managers like Millennium, Citadel, Point72, and Balyasny continue their long-running war over talent that has sent compensation costs skyrocketing. Many multistrategy funds, even smaller peers without the track record of the so-called big four, can only afford these payouts to coveted personnel thanks to pass-through fees, which leaves limited partners holding the bag for all the costs of running the business. A Goldman Sachs survey of multi-manager firms running a combined $300 billion from earlier this year found that 61% have changed their terms by adding either pass-through fees or "more onerous" liquidity terms. End investors have been pushing back for years and finally broke through last year, getting managers as large as Michael Gelband's ExodusPoint to agree to a cash hurdle that requires a fund to outperform Treasury bonds to earn performance fees. Another Goldman report found that close to half of allocators are now looking for managers they back to adopt hurdles. In other words, after years of explosive asset growth, multi-strategy funds might finally be plateauing. According to Nasdaq's eVestment, the sector had net outflows of $1.2 billionin the first quarter. Managers with tens of billions in assets like Citadel, Point72, and D.E. Shaw even returned capital to start the year. Other mega-funds, especially Millennium, have focused increasingly on allocating to external managers via separately managed accounts, which has warped the emerging manager space. SMAs often allow allocators more transparency and customization into a fund's operations and trading, though the independence of these new managers from their behemoth backers is in question. JPMorgan expects 58% of new launches over the next year to be SMAs, despite, as Goldman wrote, the "lines are now more blurred between platform hedge funds vs fund of hedge funds, proprietary vs external." The shift has meant seed investors feel they can push for even greater transparency into managers' books. According to law firm Seward & Kissel, close to half of those who backed new launches last year required the new funds to provide daily trading reports.
