The GOP Is Starting to Crack Over Trump’s Signature Policies

By Jacob Weindling  |  June 17, 2025 | 4:12pm
Photo by The White House
Trump Administration Donald Trump
The GOP Is Starting to Crack Over Trump’s Signature Policies

War with Iran. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that will kill people so the rich can gain even more wealth. Mass deportations and the loss of civil liberties for millions of Americans including powerful Democratic politicians. These are the biggest stories in America right now, all with stunningly grave implications for the world. This is the capital-H History you read about in textbooks, and it is also ground zero for GOP infighting right now.

Josh Hawley already wrote an op-ed slamming the degree of Medicaid cuts in the House bill (not because he cares about taking health care away from people, but because he rightly sees them as a massive political vulnerability), and the Senate just made them even more depraved. Elon Musk pretended to hate Trump for a day as he has echoed the business community’s criticism of the largest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in history, because the wealth being transferred to them comes with a huge blowout in an already alarming deficit, threatening to unleash chaos in the most important market in the world. Tucker Carlson and Trump are firing salvos at each other in public over American support for Israel’s war in Iran, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is publicly backing Carlson’s anti-war stance.

The question of whether and to what extent the US should support Israel’s attack on Iran is fracturing the MAGA coalition. Exhibit A: Tucker Carlson. 1/

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— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 9:13 AM

Braindead popularists claim that mass deportations are Trump’s best issue, but the Wall Street Journal has published two big reports this week that got front page treatment detailing how Trump’s deportation agenda is crushing economic growth. Farmers and hotel interests convinced Trump late last week to pause raids on their businesses who employ a lot of undocumented immigrants, and Trump even admitted that deportations are hurting the economy. Then this week Stephen Miller got ICE to reverse that guidance and get back to his depraved Nazi vision for this country where he is our darkest skinned citizen with his own personal gestapo and GDP is crawling along at 0.1 percent. There are fights taking place both out in the open, and behind closed doors over the most important items on the GOP agenda right now. As Dave Levitan noted today, even their climate policies aren’t popular with Republicans. Plenty of polls are showing that nobody wants this.

If the Stephen Miller freakshow is too much even for Ron Johnson (!) it’s probably worth confronting Republicans with the ugly truth: they aren’t being bullied into supporting “the MAGA agenda.” They’re being bullied into helping a sadistic degenerate get his fix. www.offmessage.net/p/the-greedy…

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— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 6:00 PM

Harry Enten on Trump’s bill: “The amount of disapproval for this bill — holy cow, my goodness gracious! We’re talking about 29 points underwater … we’re talking about a negative 41 net favorability rating among independents. You rarely ever see proposed pieces of legislation as unpopular”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 17, 2025 at 6:54 AM

Big brands like Coca-Cola depend heavily on Latino consumers, and company executives said part of why its sales volume in North America fell three percent in the first quarter is because of the pullback by these shoppers being terrorized by ICE. Coke is far from alone, as the WSJ notes that “Colgate-Palmolive, Modelo brewer Constellation Brands and restaurant chains including Wingstop and El Pollo Loco over the past few months have told investors that a decrease in Hispanic spending is hurting their sales.” To put a number to how big this deportation-centric economic hit is, the other WSJ story from this week details a raid at Glenn Valley Foods in Nebraska where ICE arrested 75 workers and “the following day, the plant was operating at about 15% of capacity.” Trump and Stephen Miller’s racist deportation agenda is a huge economic shock to a country where one in five people are Hispanic.

ICE is already running out of money, which gives you an idea why their jackbooted thugs are so desperate to get the GOP’s bill passed so these brownshirts can get their massive handout and get back to their passion of terrorizing American communities. The problem the GOP is running into in their big, beautiful deficit exploding bill is that they are trying to serve conflicting constituencies, and if they were to bend to the bond market’s wishes and try to pass a bill that doesn’t set the stage for fiscal calamity, someone would have to lose some goodies. That the Senate came back and cut Medicaid even more tells you how much the tax cut-centric and deportation wings of the GOP are willing to budge. The bill as currently constituted would still blow out the deficit, and long-term bond yields are currently bubbling just beneath the magic TACO number of five percent where they remind everyone that the Illuminati are real. War with Iran would only exacerbate the stagflationary dynamic Trump’s policies are unleashing on the world right now.

CBO releases a “dynamic” score of the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, finding that it would add $2.77 trillion to the debt. That’s worse than the static score of $2.4 trillion in new debt. The reason? Economic growth revenue is outweighed by higher interest payments.

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— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) June 17, 2025 at 12:19 PM

A coalition united by resentment and hatred of your own countrymen can only go so far, and eventually politics is about rewarding your supporters. Trump has assembled a group of constituencies whose interests are not totally aligned on Trump’s most important policies, and we are starting to watch them clash in public. Given the dynamics it has unleashed and the inability of the GOP to ever moderate their views or admit defeat, there is plenty of reason to believe that tensions should only rise as Trump pursues his policies designed to crash the economy in a multitude of ways, plenty of which will harm his own supporters, and many of them know it.

 
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