Democrats react with fury as Trump's Bill passes
have erupted in a storm of outrage over the passage of
Donald Trump
's budget bill, delivering scathing critiques that offered signs of the attack lines the party could wield against Republicans in next year's midterm elections.
Party leaders released a wave of statements after the sweeping tax and spending Bill's passage on Thursday.
'Today, Donald Trump and the Republican Party sent a message to America: if you are not a billionaire, we don't give a damn about you,' said Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chair.
'While the GOP continues to cash their billionaire donors' checks, their constituents will starve, lose critical medical care, lose their jobs – and yes, some will die as a result of this Bill. Democrats are mobilising and will fight back to make sure everybody knows exactly who is responsible for one of the worst bills in our nation's history.'
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The Bill's narrow passage in the House of Representatives on Thursday, with no Democratic support and only two no votes from Republicans – which came from Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania – is 'not normal', wrote congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
While the GOP continues to cash their billionaire donors' checks, their constituents will starve, lose critical medical care, lose their jobs
—
Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chair
Ms Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the contradictions in the Bill that Democrats can be expected to campaign on over the next two years, pitting its spending on immigration enforcement against the loss of social benefits for working-class Americans. She noted that Republicans voted for permanent tax breaks for billionaires while allowing a tax break on tips for people earning less than $25,000 a year to 'sunset' in three years.
She also noted that cuts to Medicaid expansion will remove tipped employees from eligibility and remove subsidies for insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and reduce Snap food assistance benefits.
'I don't think anyone is prepared for what they just did with Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],' Ms Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Bluesky. 'This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making Ice bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, [the] DEA and others combined. It is setting up to make what's happening now look like child's play. And people are disappearing.'
Many critics referred to choice remarks made by Republicans in the run-up to the Bill's passage that displayed an indifference to their voters' concerns.
Senator Mitch McConnell was reported by Punchbowl News to have said to other Republicans in a closed-door meeting last week: 'I know a lot of us are hearing from people back home about Medicaid. But they'll get over it.'
And Republican senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, speaking at a combative town hall in Parkersburg in late May, responded to someone in the audience shouting that people will die without coverage by saying, 'People are not ... well, we all are going to die' – a response that drew groans.
Cuts to the Medicaid health programme feature prominently in Democratic reaction to the Bill.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib described the Bill as 'disgusting' and 'an act of violence against our communities'.
She said: 'Republicans should be ashamed for saying, 'Just get over it' because 'We're all going to die'. They are responsible for the 50,000 people who will die unnecessarily every year because of this deadly budget.'
Budget hawks on the left and the right have taken issue with the effects the Bill will have on the already considerable national debt.
'In a massive fiscal capitulation, Congress has passed the single most expensive, dishonest, and reckless budget reconciliation bill ever – and, it comes amidst an already alarming fiscal situation,' wrote Maya MacGuineas, the president of the oversight organisation Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
'Never before has a piece of legislation been jammed through with such disregard for our fiscal outlook, the budget process, and the impact it will have on the wellbeing of the country and future generations.' – Guardian
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Irish Times
9 hours ago
- Irish Times
Maureen Dowd: CBS and other media outlets caving to Trump is sickening. At least South Park will still hold people accountable
We haven't heard this much talk about the presidential anatomy since the other guy in the Jeffrey Epstein files was in the Oval. President Donald Trump , a master at minimising others, is now being literally minimised on South Park by the crass and fearless creators of the cartoon. I could have told Trump that it's best not to provoke brilliant satirists. I learned that lesson the hard way 20 years ago. When I wrote Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk, about the tangled father and son saga that led to the invasion of Iraq , I wanted Pat Oliphant, a lacerating political cartoonist, to do the book's cover. READ MORE I wheedled until that acerbic Aussie finally agreed. When the drawing came back, it was dazzling: a tiny, jangly-eyed George W Bush under a big cowboy hat, his hands braced at the guns on his holster. He was walking down the driveway of an overgrown haunted version of the White House with a gargoyle hanging from the trees. Oliphant had given the president the body of a bug. Even though the book was harshly critical of W Bush and his scheming advisers, I was worried that the sketch might be a bit too disrespectful to the president. The cartoonist was a firm believer in 'stirring up the beast', as he called it, taking a torch to the lies and hypocrisy of the powerful. So, naturally, he was contemptuous when I suggested that we make W Bush less buglike. But, faced with more wheedling, he reluctantly agreed to take another crack at it. I waited nervously. When the new illustration came in, W Bush no longer looked like a bug. Oliphant had made the president look more like a monkey. And he was even smaller. It was a valuable lesson. Don't mess with satirists. They'll always have the last say, and it will be blistering. Even though jesters had more leeway in ancient courts to speak truth to monarchs, rulers could order up an axe or a noose if the truth cut too close to the bone. [ 'I will not be intimidated': But has Rupert Murdoch met his nemesis in Donald Trump? Opens in new window ] As the Fool says to Lear: 'I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are: They'll have me whipped for speaking true, thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace.' Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturge at Washington's Shakespeare Theater Company, told me: 'Queen Elizabeth I passed a series of 'Vagabond Acts' making it illegal to be a travelling player, unless you had an aristocratic patron. Freelance actors were regarded as homeless people unless they wore the livery of a lord. It was the 16th-century version of yanking Stephen Colbert off the air , censoring the broadcast of views that the ruler didn't want performed without their say-so.' Recently, Colbert scorched Paramount , CBS' parent company, for caving to Trump with a $16 million (€13.6 million) settlement over his 60 Minutes lawsuit, hoping to get the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to favour its merger with Skydance. 'I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles,' the comedian said. 'It's big, fat bribe.' A few days later, news broke that CBS, which has cratered from the Tiffany network to the Trump-fealty network, had cancelled the top-rated broadcast show for financial reasons. But who can believe that's the whole story? If it were just about money, there were a lot of better ways to handle Colbert, a big talent and valuable brand. CBS could have cut costs, or it could have transitioned him over the next five years into some combination of streaming or podcasting within the Paramount family. 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Irish Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Trump posts OJ Simpson meme of him and 'fat face' JD Vance as cops chasing Obama
Donald Trump has been accused of trying to deflect from his ties to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein by posting a bizarre meme of him and "fat face JD Vance" chasing Barack Obama in police cars. Trump shared a photoshopped version of an image from the infamous O.J Simpson high-speed pursuit, which brought Los Angeles to a standstill in 1994 as the former NFL star and his pal led cops on a two-hour chase across Southern California in a white Ford Bronco. The US president posted the odd photo - which also included Vice President JD Vance with a bloated face, a meme dubbed "fat face JD Vance" which went viral earlier this year - with no context or caption. It comes after Trump - rocked by claims that he sent a handwritten birthday message to disgraced financier Epstein - bizarrely accused former president Obama of "treason", claiming he plotted to sabotage his first presidency by linking him to alleged Russian election meddling. Trump claimed Obama had sought to undermine his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton as he faced questions from reporters about the late well-connected sex offender Epstein, who killed himself in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial. The image shared by President Donald Trump (Image: @realDonaldTrump/X) The president's administration has been under pressure to release more information about his contact list, but Trump snapped: "The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold. It's time to go after people, Obama's been caught directly. He's guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of." However, social media users said Trump - currently in the UK as he visits his golf clubs in Scotland - was desperately trying to distract from his links to the dead paedophile. Republicans against Trump tweeted: "Trump just posted a meme photo of him and JD Vance chasing down Obama in police cars. Anything to distract from Jeffrey Epstein. Bold choice by Trump to go with that JD Vance face." The image of JD Vance used in the photograph (Image: @realDonaldTrump/X) One social media user replied: "A President who makes a mockery of the office and this country." Another said: "Trump's meme game is as weak as his loyalty to allies, but at least he's consistent in dodging accountability." A third said: "Trump would sell his own grandma if it meant he could distract from the Epstein thing." Another person added: "Meanwhile the rest of us realize how deep the Epstein scandal goes." An image of the infamous police chase involving OJ Simpson (Image: Getty Images) It was previously reported how social media wags had edited photos of Vance with a face full of baby fat, calling him 'childish' and an 'annoying' man-child after a car-crash press conference in which he rudely cut off Ukraine's wartime leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump's bizarre choice of photo to edit also raised eyebrows as it depicted police cruisers following a white Ford Bronco driven by A.C. Cowlings on a Los Angeles freeway in 1994. O.J. Simpson was in the back of the vehicle, reportedly holding a gun to his own head and threatening suicide following an investigation into the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.
Irish Times
2 days ago
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Epstein saga has exposed cracks in Maga movement which could fatally undermine Donald Trump
The second Trump administration has featured many scandals: his shameless corruption, his pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists, his pushing a Bill that strips millions from healthcare to give more money to those who need it the least, his backing for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and Israel's other reckless wars in the Middle East. All these things seem more important than whether his justice department relents and releases its files on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Yet, this is the one scandal from which Trump can't seem to escape, and the one that might prove the most damaging for him politically. No one is more aware of this than Trump himself. It is a sign of his desperation to move on from the Epstein story that on Wednesday – at a bizarre press conference with the president of the Philippines looking on – he ranted about Barack Obama's supposed corruption. READ MORE He claimed that Obama was guilty of 'treason' and that he tried to 'lead a coup' with faked intelligence about Russian interference in the election. It was a transparent effort to change the story. The embattled Trump even admitted as much: 'It's time to go after people.' In the past, he has had a brilliant knack for deflecting negative attention from himself to others. During the 2016 campaign, it seemed like he was finished when the Access Hollywood tapes emerged which captured him bragging about groping women. But before the next presidential debate, he assembled a press conference of several women who claimed to be victims of sexual harassment by Bill Clinton . It worked then; it allowed enough voters to come to the cynical conclusion that all politicians are equally corrupt. The tactic is unlikely to work this time. Attacking Obama is something of a reflex for Trump, who rose to prominence promoting the 'birther' conspiracy theory that Obama was born outside the US. Trump's run for the presidency was, people close to him has said, partly a desire for vengeance against Obama after the then-president mercilessly mocked him at the fateful 2011 White House correspondents' dinner (Obama's quips included: 'No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter–— like, did we fake the Moon landing'). But Obama is arguably the politician that the public would least expect to have anything to do with a sexual predator like Epstein. Bill Clinton was in fact friends with Epstein, but his presidency ended so long ago that attacking him just doesn't have much purchase any more. [ White House claims 'fake news' over reports Donald Trump named in Epstein files Opens in new window ] Donald Trump, Melania Knauss (later, Melania Trump), Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club in 2000. Photograph: Davidoff Studios/ Getty Images This time, Trump hasn't been able to shift the narrative. That is partly because, as Ciarán O'Connor wrote this week , once the flames of conspiracy theories have been fanned, they are difficult to extinguish. But it is also because it goes to the same open secret that was at the centre of the Access Hollywood scandal: Trump's serial pattern of sexual abuse makes the notion that he has something to hide more plausible. To paraphrase congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would have thought that electing a sexual offender would have complicated the release of the Epstein files? In 2023, a civil court ruled that Trump had sexually abused E Jean Carroll. By one count, at least 18 women have accused Trump of sexual assault or sexual harassment. The controversy over the release of the Epstein files has also resurfaced, leading to renewed attention on Trump's once close relationship with him. Epstein's brother has suggested that Trump was once Jeffrey Epstein's 'best friend'. The Wall Street Journal published a card that it claimed Trump sent Epstein on his 50th birthday with a lewd drawing of a woman and a reference to a 'wonderful secret'. Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over the report, which he vehemently denies. It's possible that there is nothing in the Epstein files that reveals damaging information about Trump. But that is now almost beside the point. The political significance of the Epstein controversy is that it has hurt Trump's standing among his own base, which was already upset about his breaking America First principles by joining Israel's war against Iran. Though Trump has been unpopular with many Americans for most of the last decade, his political strength has been the unshakeable support of his base, which has allowed him to dominate the Republican Party. [ Bill Clinton reportedly sent Jeffrey Epstein note for birthday album Opens in new window ] This time, Trump hasn't been able to shift the narrative. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/ Getty Images As he himself once boasted, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.' But it is symptomatic of his hubris that he promoted the conspiracy theory about Epstein, someone who was once a close associate. Under pressure from a disaffected Maga base, a significant number of Republican legislators broke with Trump for the first time in this second term. Rather than face a vote on whether to release the Epstein files that he was certain to lose, House Speaker Mike Johnson simply declared that they would break for summer early, even though that meant abandoning parts of the Republican agenda. But significantly, three Republicans on the ten-member House Committee on Oversight joined Democrats to subpoena the justice department for its Epstein files. Republicans Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Brian Jack of Georgia sided with Democrats. Democrats certainly don't consider the Epstein case to be the most significant issue facing the US – but they smell a rare political opportunity to exploit cracks in the Maga movement. They recognise that Trump is in a lose-lose situation. It seems unlikely he will release any information too damaging about himself. Yet, if he refuses to release files or releases them but there's nothing significant in them, many – and not only conspiracy theorists – will wonder if key information is being withheld. It's certainly possible that the Epstein controversy will blow over. Come September, when the US legislature reconvenes, we may all be talking about something else: a national or world crisis, quite possibly one of Trump's own making. And yet the cracks it has revealed in MAGA are potentially disastrous for Trump's power, dampening enthusiasm for Republican candidates at the next election, and undermining his tight control of the Republican Party.
