The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate
About this episode
With the Senate having passed Trump's 'big, beautiful bill,' Klein has Slow Boring's Matthew Yglesias walk through it: roughly $5 trillion in tax cuts extending 2017 provisions (plus estate-tax cuts and no tax on tips), Medicaid cuts via provider-payment reductions and work requirements, and the scrapping of IRA clean-energy credits, while nuclear and geothermal credits survive. Yglesias argues the bill is pure fiscal irresponsibility — dynamic scoring shows it adds roughly $400 billion in debt-service costs — and exposes GOP coalition tensions, since Medicaid cuts land hardest on red states. He and Klein also dissect Democratic dysfunction: leaderlessness, a retreating Senate map, and an inability to tell a coherent story about Trump's broken cost-of-living promises, plus how media attention dynamics reward spectacle over policy substance.