The Less Discussed but Very Important Measure in Trump’s Terrible Bill

The journalist Michael Kinsley once defined a political gaffe as when a politician inadvertently speaks the truth. On Tuesday morning, Vice President JD Vance posted a classic of the form on X, part of an attempt during an all-night effort to get the Senate, a chamber his party controls by a comfortable margin, to pass President Trump’s misbegotten domestic policy agenda.

“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” Vance wrote. “The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass.”

“Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he continued.

The bill contains about $45 billion for new immigrant detention centers and nearly $30 billion to supercharge ICE, whose masked agents have been hunting down unauthorized immigrants, sometimes suiting up in tactical gear fit for an assault on Falluja to round up day laborers in hardware store parking lots.

In truth, that $75 billion is small beer compared with the true heart of the bill: extending roughly $3.8 trillion of tax cuts enacted in 2017 with some changes, in an overall package that would overwhelmingly benefit wealthy Americans. This bonanza comes at the cost of slashing Medicaid and food stamps for the poorest Americans. The latest Congressional Budget Office score found that the bill would cause “7.6 million more Americans to be uninsured at the end of a decade, while reducing federal spending on health care by more than $800 billion,” my newsroom colleagues reported, a relative drop in the bucket compared with the overall price tag of the tax cuts. The latest C.B.O. estimate found that the bill would still add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Trump ran on and won the 2024 election with a pledge to round up and deport unauthorized immigrants accused of serious crimes. This proposition, according to some polls, still commands majority support. But as his vast program of deportation has ensnared people who have no criminal records, shredded due process to expel people to foreign prisons, seen the temporary detainment of U.S. citizens and begun constructing a prison camp in the fetid Everglades to disappear still more, support for the deportation regime has slumped. More than half of Americans said ICE has “gone too far” in one recent poll. In another, 61 percent opposed the $45 billion for detention centers.

So here comes Vance with a new proposition: You can only have more of these deportations you may not even want if you sell out your neighbors’ health care and food stamps to keep giving the plutocrats a tax break.

The bill has already been stripped of pretty much all its supposedly populist economic elements. Tiny bits of populist tinsel cling to this superannuated Christmas tree — as far as I can tell, that consists mainly of tax-free tips for some workers — but its main ornament is what Republicans have long pressed on an unwilling citizenry: extending huge, deficit-exploding tax cuts for the richest Americans and the companies that feed their wealth.

Indeed, Vance’s statement illuminated the real truth of Kinsey’s quip. A true Washington gaffe is always a confession, and Vance’s is this: Trumpist populism offers its adherents nothing but the demonization and expulsion of immigrants. In return, generations of Americans will be left sicker and deeper in debt.

What can individual federal courts immediately do when the president issues a blatantly unconstitutional order? The Supreme Court gave its answer on Friday morning: Not much.

In an astonishing act of deference to the executive branch, the Supreme Court essentially said that district judges cannot stop an illegal presidential order from going into effect nationwide. A judge can stop an order from affecting a given plaintiff or state, if one has the wherewithal to file a lawsuit. But if there’s no lawsuit in the next state over, the president can get away with virtually anything he wants.

The executive order at issue in this case was one issued by President Trump on his first day back in office, depriving citizenship to babies born in the United States to undocumented parents or even temporary residents, and it is as unconstitutional as they come, violating the clear wording of the 14th Amendment. Three federal judges, supported by three courts of appeals, have already ruled that it is illegal to end birthright citizenship.

But that didn’t matter to the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices, who said the lower courts had exceeded their power. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion, said the judiciary does not have “unbridled authority to enforce” the executive’s obligation to follow the law, because doing so would create an “imperial judiciary.”

But if the courts can’t stop illegal activity in the White House on a national basis, what good are they? That was the point made by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in two of the most fervent dissents in recent memory. Both were clearly incredulous that the majority was willing to stand back and let Trump undermine a fundamental principle of citizenship in place for 157 years. Sotomayor, joined by Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan, said the Trump administration knows it can’t win a decision that its order is constitutional, so it is instead playing a devious game: applying the order to as many people as possible who don’t file a lawsuit. “Shamefully,” she wrote, “this court plays along.”

Those without resources to sue, Jackson wrote in a separate dissent, are disproportionately “the poor, the uneducated and the unpopular,” and so they will be subject to Trump’s whims. “This is yet another crack in the foundation of the rule of law,” she wrote, “which requires equality and justice in its application.” It creates two zones, she said: one where the rule of law prevails, and one “zone of lawlessness” where “all bets are off.” And that’s anathema to the universality of law that the Constitution’s authors envisioned. (The majority opinion didn’t leave out the possibility of class-action lawsuits, but those can be difficult and costly to assemble. States might also be allowed to demand nationwide injunctions, though that process was left unclear.)

The court didn’t rule on the legality of Trump’s order, but it didn’t have to. Instead, by default, it created what would, in 30 days when the order is supposed to go into effect, be an intolerable situation where some babies born to undocumented parents in the United States are legal citizens, and some are not. And the ramifications of the court’s earthshaking abandonment of the universal rule of law go far beyond that; Trump immediately held a news conference where he said the opinion would allow many of his other policies that have been put on hold. As Sotomayor wrote: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates.”

Happy birthday wishes. Royal invitations. Breathless excitement at meeting a television celebrity. A Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Flattery has become the gold standard for world leaders conducting business with President Trump. The strategy was on full display here at the two-day annual meeting of NATO leaders, which ended Wednesday.

“Dear Donald,” the alliance’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, called him in public remarks on Wednesday, praising Trump for inducing NATO’s other members to promise to increase military spending. (Trump had threatened not to come to the aid of underpaying nations in the event of an attack, at times even questioning the U.S. commitment to NATO.) Rutte lauded him for the American attack on Iran’s nuclear sites and the cease-fire reached between Iran and Israel: “You are a man of strength, but you are also a man of peace.”

Other leaders before their main meeting on Wednesday morning added to the praise fest for Trump’s role in forcing an increase in European and Canadian military spending.

“Without the leadership of Donald Trump, it would be impossible,” President Andrzej Duda of Poland said. Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nauseda, chimed in: “I would like to send my gratitude to President Donald Trump.”

A reporter at a news conference after the summit asked the secretary general, a polished Dutch former politician, if his remarks about Trump weren’t, well, somewhat “demeaning.” No, Rutte said. “It’s a bit of a question of taste,” he said. Trump was a “good friend” and deserved the praise.

Trump’s sympathy for President Vladimir Putin of Russia and his lukewarm support for the nation it has invaded, Ukraine, has raised worries among the allies that he would back away from NATO’s strong support for the besieged victim of Putin’s aggression on Europe’s doorstep. Over the years, he has also blown hot and cold on Article 5, the clause in NATO’s founding treaty that promises collective defense, defined as “an attack on one is an attack on all.”

So did the flattery work? It didn’t hurt.

The NATO partners agreed on a five-paragraph statement with a bland reaffirmation of their “commitment to NATO” and to Article 5. They agreed to something Trump wanted, specifically a higher level of military spending as a percentage of total economic output — from 2 percent to 3.5 percent, plus another 1.5 percent on security-related infrastructure. Crucially, they also named Russia a “profound security threat” and restated the alliance’s commitment to helping Ukraine defend itself.

Trump’s contact with the national leaders even induced him to show some warmth for NATO. “They want to protect their country, and they need the United States,” he said.

He added, “They were so respectful of me, because I’m the head of the United States.”