After hours of frenzied negotiations — and a record-long speech by Hakeem Jeffries — the U.S. House approved the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Thursday in a 218-214 vote, along party lines except for two Republican defections. The measure now heads to President Trump, who is poised to sign it at a ceremony at 5 p.m. ET today.

Let’s look at the measure from three angles…

The substance: Most importantly, a word on what the 870-page bill will do. The package is a sweeping piece of legislation that will cut taxes for about 85% of American households, including by making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. It will make the biggest cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the history of the two programs, resulting in an estimated 11.8 million Americans losing health insurance and 3 million losing food assistance. It will make good on some of Trump’s key campaign promises, allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay from their federal income taxes. It will supercharge ICE’s funding, making it the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. It will slash the clean energy tax credits approved during the Biden administration, while favoring oil, gas, and coal projects. It will enact the first national school voucher plan and impose new caps on certain student loans. And it will add an estimated $3.3 trillion to the federal deficit, while raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

The politics: At least in the short term, the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill is a major victory for Trump. As I’ve written previously, Trump has mostly opted to go around Congress when taking action during his presidency, figuring it to be an easier route to enact change. In reality, though, longer-lasting change can only happen through legislation, which means this bill (his first major legislative push since returning to office) constitutes some of the most consequential policy moves of the second Trump term — and, frankly, in the end, it wasn’t really all that difficult.

All things considered, when taking into account the deep divides within the party, Trump and Republican congressional leaders were able to get this bill passed without swallowing much pain. (Sure, there was a delay here or there, but think of his 2017 attempt to repeal Obamacare, or the year-long Democratic effort to “Build Back Better.” In comparison, this was a walk in the park.) That’s a credit to Trump’s complete dominance over the GOP, which will only be reinforced now that the party has fallen in line to deliver his top legislative ask by his requested deadline.

In terms of raw power, the bill is a major flex for Trump. In terms of the policy, though, the bill also shows the ways in which the party has taken over Trump, not just how Trump has taken over the party. There isn’t much in the legislation that reflects Trump’s much-heralded realignment or his supposed populist coalition: instead, much of the package is pretty standard Republican fare, cutting taxes and entitlements. Trump may have remade the party but stylistically — as evidenced by the bill’s name, and the YMCA dance Republican leaders did after approving the bill — but, on substance, the package is something of a throwback.

The problem for the GOP is that cutting entitlement programs isn’t particularly popular, which means, in the long term, the bill could end up doing the party more harm than good. As notes over at Strength in Numbers, the Big Beautiful Bill is the second most unpopular major piece of legislation since 1990, outpaced only by the Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017. Democrats are confident that the package provides their path back to power in 2026.

However, one important note that could scramble the politics on the bill: Republicans cleverly made it so that the popular parts of the legislation (the new tax cuts) start this year. Meanwhile, the least popular parts, including changes to Medicaid and food stamps, largely don’t take effect until after the 2026 midterms. It could be difficult for Democrats to message against the bill if some of its most dramatic impacts haven’t yet been felt.

The process: “This is the legislative process,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday night, as the Big Beautiful Bill crept towards passage. “This is exactly how the Framers intended for it to work.”

Well, not exactly. As I’ve been writing throughout the drafting of the GOP megabill, it’s worth taking a step back to consider how far our legislative process has traveled from how it was originally envisioned, to the point where majority parties can’t enact many of their top priorities because of the Senate filibuster, but also they get approximately one chance a year where they can ignore the filibuster and do a bunch of stuff by majority vote anyways, but also there are opaque and difficult-to-understand limits to what they can do, which are largely left up to interpretation by a little-known, unelected official.

The uneasy marriage of the filibuster (which prevents too much sudden policy change from happening every four years) and reconciliation (which allows some sudden policy change to happen, to ensure that majorities aren’t doing nothing) may well be the right equilibrium for Washington policymaking, but that doesn’t make it any less strange.

It should also be noted that the boundaries of this combination keep getting stretched, most notably this year by Republicans adopting a current policy baseline to assert (without asking for advice from the parliamentarian) that $3.8 trillion in extended tax cuts actually cost $0. Just like how Trump was able to remake the federal judiciary because Democrats blew up the filibuster for nominations, this takes us one step closer to the effective end of the legislative filibuster — and sets a precedent that the opposition party will eventually benefit from, as it now widens the range of the fiscal impact Democrats could make with future reconciliation bills.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the One Big Beautiful Bill as the dust settles in the next few days. As always, I want to hear your questions, so I can know what parts of the package you’re interested in learning more about. Leave your questions in the comments — I’ll do an OBBA-themed mailbag edition in the coming days, so let me know what you’re curious about, on any of these three themes (policy, politics, or process).

Until then: Happy Fourth. Have a great holiday weekend!

Here’s a quick timeline of the last day or so in the U.S. House of Representatives:

Wednesday, 2:08 PM to 9:31 PM: The House held a procedural vote to amend the rules resolution for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the GOP plan to cut taxes, slash the social safety net, and boost border security and defense spending.

Remember: Any time the House passes a piece of legislation by majority vote, the chamber first must pass a “rule” outlining the terms of floor consideration for the measure. In this case, though, an extra step was needed first tweaking the rule that passed out of the Rules Committee, because House Republicans left out several features that could have potentially made the process more painful for them.

As far as anyone can tell, these mistakes in the rules resolutions were first flagged by @ringwiss, the congressional procedural expert who I profiled in Politico Magazine last year, revealing him to be a university student in the UK.

This process vote was ultimately held open for seven hours and 24 minutes, longer than any vote in U.S. House history, as Republicans corralled their members back to Washington and slowly persuaded members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus to approve the fix. “Iconic that because of a mistake some guy on Twitter with a profile pic of Homer Simpson found we now have a new record for longest vote ever in the House,” a House Democratic staffer wrote.

The vote eventually succeeded along party lines, 220-212.

Wednesday, 9:34 PM, to Thursday, 3:23 AM: Then it was time for the House to vote on the rules resolution itself, once that it had been amended. This vote stayed open for 5 hours and 49 minutes, almost as long as the previous one. (No, there is no maximum for how long the majority party can keep a vote open in the House.)

At one point, five House Republicans were voting “nay,” which would have been enough to sink the rule and block the One Big Beautiful Bill from advancing to a final vote: conservative Reps. Andrew Clyde (GA), Thomas Massie (KY), Keith Self (TX), and Victoria Spartz (IN), plus moderate Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA). At the same time, other Freedom Caucus members, like Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), refused to vote.

Ultimately, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was able to whittle those five “nays” down to one, passing the rule 219-213, with Fitzpatrick the lone GOP dissenter.

Thursday, 4:53 AM to present: The House then moved to debating the GOP legislative package. According to the rule, there was only supposed to be one hour of debate — but House leaders are able to speak for as much time as they want, something known as a “magic minute.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has been taking advantage of this ability, speaking since just before 5 a.m., the third major delay the bill has faced since yesterday. Ultimately, though, like the other ones, the delay will only be temporary: eventually Jeffries will stop speaking, and the measure will be virtually assured to pass.

The record for longest “magic minute” belongs to former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who spoke for eight hours and 32 minutes when he was House Minority Leader railing against a different BBB — the Democrats’ ill-fated Build Back Better Act — in November 2021. Jeffries would have to speak until around 1:30 p.m. to break that record.

After all that sound and fury, if you’re wondering what changed about the One Big Beautiful Bill that one won over conservatives after the two hours-long procedural delays, the answer is nothing.

Once Jeffries is finished speaking, the House is now poised to approve the package exactly as it passed the Senate, a major victory for GOP leaders, as it means the bill can go straight from the House to the president’s desk, fulfilling his July 4th target.

Just a few days, ago Rep. Massie called the Senate-passed megabill a “lobotomized” piece of legislation, railing against the estimated $3.4 trillion deficit impact. Just yesterday, Rep. Self called it “morally and fiscally bankrupt.” Rep. Roy wrote on Tuesday that “we must fix” the Senate bill’s treatment of clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, which conservatives felt were slated to be phased out too slowly.

But, in the end, none of the changes they sought were made, and each of these lawmakers ended up voting to advance the package. (Technically, the package itself will still be able to pass if three House Republicans vote against it, so some or all of these members might cast “nay” votes in the end. But it will have been their “yea” votes on the rules resolution that made a final vote on the bill possible.)

All it took to change their minds, according to The Hill, was a 1 a.m. phone call with President Trump, plus undefined “commitments from the White House on a variety of topics, especially on how the megabill is implemented,” per Politico. Through all their hours of obstinance, they didn’t succeed in changing the text of the package one iota.

The whole process was a reminder — yet again — of Trump’s enduring power over the congressional GOP, even over the Freedom Caucus types who have spent years making life difficult for Republican leaders. As has been the case all year, there might be some hemming and hawing about fiscal responsibility, but at the end of the day, when Trump sets a deadline, the GOP meets it. And when he calls, they fall in line.

What else you should know…

• The U.S. economy added 147,000 jobs last month, outperforming expectations. (Read more)

• A federal judge ruled that President Trump exceeded his authority by setting strict restrictions on asylum-seeking at the southern border. (Read more)

• Kilmar Abrego Garcia said in a court filing that he and other migrants deported by the U.S. — without due process — to a notorious El Salvador prison were kicked and beaten by guards and subjected to severe sleep deprivation. (Read more)

Galen and I talked about: the political impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill, the early jockeying for the 2028 nominations, whether there are any issues AOC (!) would ever plausibly move right on, why the 2017 New York City Pride Parade will be a historical document for our times, and much more.

Read Galen’s NYT op-ed, “Why Democrats Need Their Own Trump,” here. Subscribe to his podcast here. You won’t regret it!

And click above to watch our conversation if you missed it.

Are there other Substackers you want to see me going live with? Let me know in the comments.

We’ll talk about the GOP megabill, the NYC election, and Galen’s op-ed on why Democrats need their own Trump. You’ll get an email when we start. Join us, and bring questions!

President Trump’s top legislative priority, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, moved closer to the finish line on Tuesday after the Senate narrowly approved the package.

The chamber split 51-50, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Rand Paul (KY), and Thom Tillis (NC) opposing the package and Vice President JD Vance providing the tie-breaking vote.

As a quick reminder, the 870-page megabill would:

• Permanently extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

• Remove taxes on tips and overtime pay through 2028.

• Impose new work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps, while also passing some of the cost of food stamps onto the states.

• Roll back the clean energy tax credits from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.

• Boost border security funding, allowing for further construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents.

• Increase defense spending, including for the development of a Golden Dome missile defense system.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the package would increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The non-partisan agency has also forecasted that 11.8 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the next decade due to the bill’s changes to Medicaid and Obamacare, while most Americans will see continued decreases to their tax bills.

In all, per the Yale Budget Lab, the poorest 20% of U.S. households (those with an annual income below $13,350) will see their income reduced by an average of 2.9% under the package, after taking into account both the tax and social safety net changes. The income of the next 20% of households (those with an annual income between $13,350 and $36,475) would remain flat. The top 60% of households will all benefit, especially the richest 20%.

The Senate made a number of last-minute changes to the bill, including dropping a new tax on solar and wind energy that had been mysteriously added to the package, creating carveouts to ease the impact of food stamp changes on Alaska in order to win the support of swing vote Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and creating a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals as a way to partially offset the impact of reductions to Medicaid.

An amendment (approved in a 99-1 vote) removed the moratorium on state regulations of AI. And a number of other key provisions, including changes that would have made it harder for judges to hold the Trump administration in contempt, were removed by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that they didn’t comport with the Byrd Rule, which governs the reconciliation process that Republicans used to advance the package.

The Big Beautiful Bill — well, technically, it’s now called “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14” after Democrats struck the original title as non-compliant with the Byrd Rule — now moves back to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is hoping to approve the Senate-passed version as early as today.

But he has his work cut out for him.

According to a whip count maintained by Punchbowl News, more than 30 House Republicans have serious objections to the package. Johnson can only afford to lose three GOP votes and still pass the bill.

Last night, two conservatives — Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ralph Norman (R-SC) — voted against the bill in the House Rules Committee. Two others — Reps. Warren Davidson (R-NC) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) — voted against a previous version of the package when it was before the House in May. Opposition from just those four would be enough to sink the bill, or at least to force changes to it (which would require yet another Senate vote).

As usual, Johnson has to deal with both sides of his fractious conference: the aforementioned members, and their allies, want more spending cuts to reduce the deficit impact of the package; meanwhile, a corresponding group of moderates believe the package cuts too much.

Luckily for the speaker, at nearly every turn in Trump’s second term, when the president has made a request of House Republicans, they’ve eventually fallen in line. We’ll see if that pattern repeats itself.

Johnson is also dealing with flight delays as members struggle to return to Washington, D.C. (I can relate: after a series of delays, I didn’t get back to my apartment until 2:15 a.m. this morning.)

As a general matter, as Republicans creep closer to achieving the first major legislative package of 2025, the lack of enthusiasm from members across the party’s ideological spectrum is striking.

“Do I like this bill? No,” the moderate Murkowski said minutes after voting for it, as she urged the House to change the package she had signed off on (just as House Republicans hoped the Senate would change the version of package they had voted for).

“The Senate has done some serious damage to President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill,” conservative Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) wrote yesterday, calling the package a “swamp creation.”

Even top Republicans are admitting their discomfort. “I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product,” Johnson told reporters, even as he plans to push the House to accept the upper chamber’s version. Vance, who provided the tie-breaking vote for the bill (as his potential 2028 rivals are already noting), argued for the package recently by promoting the immigration spending and saying that everything else is “immaterial” in comparison, not exactly a rousing defense of the bill’s less popular provisions.

This is the nature of megabills: they are hard to control, as provisions get tucked in by a variety of factions and interests (sometimes without anyone even noticing), intended to please everyone — but sometimes pleasing no one. These sorts of legislative packages, without any single animating theme, become hard to promote politically (as Democrats discovered in the 2024 election), although that also means they can be difficult to message against.

Recent polls have shown between 49% and 55% of Americans opposed to the package — although surveys also show few have heard much about the bill. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, only 39% of voters said the had heard “a lot” about the bill. Focusing attention on a piece of legislation with so many varied goals is another challenge for both supporters and opponents of the package.

As of this writing, the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post are both taken up with news of Diddy’s trial, while Politico and the Wall Street Journal are highlighting the major legislative package that passed the Senate just yesterday.

Speaking of other news…

• CNN: Paramount settles Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit with $16 million payout and no apology

• AP: Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban

• NBC: Pentagon halts weapons shipment to Ukraine amid concerns over U.S. stockpile

• WaPo: Judge blocks Trump from ending temporary protected status for Haitians

• NYT: Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback.

In this morning’s mailbag:

• How would things be different if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election?

• What does Zohran Mamdani’s election tell us about politics nationally?

• What exactly is a filibuster?

• Where are we with Trump’s rescissions package?

• Who picks the Senate Parliamentarian?

• How big a change would it be if Lisa Murkowski switched parties?

Let’s get to the answers!

Q: What if Trump had won in 2020, and before the Supreme Court Presidential Immunity decision was made during that 2nd Term - how different (if any in your opinion) would a continuation of Trump 1 have been vs. the current Trump 2 version? Policies, Staff, Appointments, Federal staff and program cuts, his dealing with inflation, Covid, Ukraine, etc. Thanks.

Obviously, a political party should never try not to win a presidential race. But, in retrospect, the Democratic Party almost certainly would be better off today if they had lost the 2020 election.

Read more

As I previewed a few weeks back, I’ll be spending the next few days at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I’ve been named a Gwen Ifill Journalism Fellow by the Aspen Institute.

I just got in last night. It’s beautiful here! This was the view just from the airport:

I’m excited to meet interesting people and soak in as many ideas as I can, which will hopefully help deepen the coverage that I bring back to you.

However, because the festival is crammed with events all day, I will be taking (another) short pause from the newsletter. That means there won’t be issues today, Monday, or Tuesday. There will still be a Sunday mailbag issue (feel free to drop questions in the comments if you have them), so you’ll see me in your inbox for that, and then again on Wednesday.

I really hate to be taking time off again so soon, but this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up and I want to take full advantage of it. Afterwards, I promise I’ll be back for the whole rest of the summer and beyond!

And, if it’s any consolation, everything I’ll be hearing and seeing over the next few days will be on the record — which means I’ll have my reporter’s notebook out the whole time, and I’ll be ready to share any insights I gleaned on the flip side.

Thanks so much for your understanding. Talk again soon!

— Gabe

And the answer is: Republicans are advancing the measure through the budget reconciliation process, which allows the GOP to pass the bill along party lines (as opposed to most bills, which require 60 votes to end debate in the Senate). There simply isn’t much of a role for Democrats to play in the process; Republicans don’t need their votes to get the bill across the finish line.

But there’s one exception.

In order to be able to use the reconciliation process, Republicans have to follow a narrow set of restrictions, including the infamous Byrd Rule, which was written by the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and a well-known stickler for the chamber’s rules. The Byrd Rule has several prongs: it forbids reconciliation bills from touching Social Security, for example, or from increasing the deficit outside of a 10-year window.

The most important thing the Byrd Rule says is that if the Senate is going to use the budget reconciliation process, the underlying bill actually has to involve the budget, i.e. it has to either change how much money the government takes in (through taxes) or how much it spits out (through spending). And the budgetary change can’t just be “merely incidental” to the provision, the rule says: you can’t use reconciliation to sneak in a policy change that just so happens to impact spending or revenue if those changes aren’t core to what the provision is trying to do.

And here’s where the Democrats come in.

Before the One Big Beautiful Bill goes to the Senate floor (potentially as soon as tomorrow), the two parties have to fight out whether the measure conforms with the Byrd Rule, a process that requires them to press their case to Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, the non-partisan official charged with enforcing the chamber’s rules.

That process has been playing out over the last week — and Democrats have succeeded in convincing MacDonough to strip out many of the megabill’s highest-profile provisions. So far, MacDonough has ruled against provisions that would have:

• Sold more than 2 million acres of federal lands

• Made it harder for judges to hold the Trump administration in contempt

• Pushed some of the costs of food stamps onto the states and prevented non-citizens from receiving food stamps

• Gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

• Allowed states to conduct immigration enforcement

• Exempt offshore oil and gas projects from environmental review processes

• Chipped away at civil service protections for federal workers

• Forced the Postal Service to sell its electric vehicles

• Eased the way for the Trump administration to reorganize the executive branch

Then, this morning, MacDonough made some of her most consequential rulings yet, striking out parts of the package that would have:

• Reduced the amount of federal money available to states for Medicaid

• Lowered federal Obamacare subsidies and prevented subsidies from going to health care plans that cover abortion services

• Prevented non-citizens from receiving certain student aid, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits

• Prevented Medicaid funding from going to gender-affirming medical care

Those are some *big* decisions, because they strike out some of the reductions to the social safety net that Republicans are counting on to (partially) pay for the costs of extending tax cuts. Republicans can try to rework any of the above provisions in order to make them Byrd-compliant — but that will eat up precious time, making it harder for the GOP to meet their self-imposed July 4th deadline for passing the bill, now only eight days away.

The Byrd Rule gives Democrats really their only opportunity to mold the GOP package, and they’ve largely succeeded in doing so, by persuading MacDonough — the parliamentarian — to strip out several key parts of the bill.

But who is Elizabeth MacDonough, and how does she make these behind-the-scenes decisions that have shaped some of the highest-profile bills of the 21st century, from Obamacare to the 2017 tax cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act? The Byrd Rule process is pretty opaque, so I turned to two former Senate staffers — one Democrat, one Republican — who are experts on the federal budget (and know MacDonough personally) to help explain.

Let’s start by walking through the process.

It all starts with the majority party putting together a reconciliation package, as Republicans have done with the One Big Beautiful Bill. Then, the minority party goes through the package with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that might violate the Byrd Rule. At this stage, both parties can start meeting with MacDonough and her deputies informally.

“It’s kind of like office hours,” Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Democratic staffer, told me. The two parties meet separately with MacDonough, trying to get her initial assessment of their arguments as they plan for how best to make their case to her.

Then, the big event. After MacDonough has given her preliminary feedback, both parties sit down together to try to persuade her that a provision does or doesn’t violate the Byrd Rule.

Sometimes, this takes place in a fancy conference room, set up almost “like a court of appeals,” former Republican aide Rohit Kumar said, with the parliamentarian playing the role of judge and Senate staffers from either party as the litigants.

But, just as often, it plays out in a much less formal setting.

“You literally go to the parliamentarian office on the first floor of the Capitol,” Kumar explained. “It is not a huge space. It’s not the kind of space that is pandemic-friendly. Like you’re sitting on top of each other, right? You are breathing somebody else’s breath.”

“So you just pile around” the parliamentarian’s desk, with books and binders cluttered about, Kumar continued. “You’re standing around. If you’re lucky, you get a seat. But probably not. And you just hash it out, like it’s a mini oral argument.”

Then, a few days later, both parties receive an email with the parliamentarian’s ruling.

In Washington, this process of sitting down with the parliamentarian is known as a “Byrd bath.” Provisions stricken out of a package are known as “Byrd droppings.” (Yes, you are governed by children.) And because the obscure reconciliation process is now one of the primary ways public policy is made in this country, these informal meetings around MacDonough’s desk — which “can get heated,” Kumar admitted — end up shaping some of Congress’ most consequential pieces of legislation.

The whole thing involves a heavy dose of secrecy. Kumar compared the sessions to arguing before a court, but noted that — unlike in legal proceedings — the precedents MacDonough relies on aren’t publicly available. You can’t go online and search up previous rulings of the parliamentarian.

However, Kogan let me in on some of the “heuristics” that MacDonough is known to use to make her decisions.

“Elizabeth doesn’t like if you have a provision that literally only affects one entity in the entire country,” he told me. “Even if it has a budgetary effect, she’s like, that’s my proof that you’re doing policy and you’re not doing budgetary impact.” (Provisions in the GOP megabill defunding Planned Parenthood — which MacDonough has yet to rule on — could be implicated by this rule of thumb.)

“She also doesn’t want you to shoehorn something in with a budgetary effect that would otherwise not be allowed,” Kogan added. (He gave the example of trying to slip in a minimum wage increase not by outright mandating companies raise wages, but by imposing a higher tax on companies that decline to raise wages to a certain amount. That would obviously impact government revenue, but MacDonough would say the revenue increase is “merely incidental” to what the policy is trying to do: raise the minimum wage.)

“You have to understand her thinking,” Kogan said. “You make arguments that are meaningful to her, you absolutely tailor it. But unlike the Supreme Court, where you have nine people to work through, here it’s her and her staff.”

Depending on which party she is ruling against at any given time, MacDonough is often the subject of intense criticism. In 2021, when she ruled that a minimum wage increase was “merely incidental” to the federal budget, some Democratic lawmakers called for her to be fired (which has happened to parliamentarians before). This morning, after she struck out key provisions of the GOP package, Marjorie Taylor Greene said she was one of the “UN-ELECTED Deep State bureaucrats” trying to “destroy President Trump and THE PEOPLE’S agenda.”

Another Republican lawmaker called on Vice President JD Vance to overrule her (which no VP has done since 1975; more on that in a bit).

Both Kogan and Kumar have been on the losing side of her rulings in the past, but they both expressed admiration for MacDonough, a former Justice Department trial attorney who has worked in the Senate for 25 years, the last 13 as parliamentarian. “She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Kumar.

“Elizabeth takes her job really, really, really seriously and cares deeply about what she’s doing, and is not a hack,” said Kogan. “There are lots of Democrats who have decided she’s a secret Republican. Lots of Republicans have decided she’s a secret Democrat. Elizabeth is a straight shooter.”

“I don’t know better than a coin toss what party she is, if she’s registered with a party at all, or how she votes,” Kumar echoed. “I have no idea.”

The job also isn’t easy, both party hands noted, requiring MacDonough to parse very vague guidelines under pressure. “Like, what the fuck does ‘merely incidental’ mean? That’s not spelled out,” said Kogan. “It’s an impossible task.”

It remains unclear whether Republicans will extend MacDonough the same grace. Technically, MacDonough only has power because the Senate gives her power, in that they almost always listen to what she says. But they don’t have to. Her “rulings” are really just the advice of an unelected functionary. If a senator or the vice president moves to overrule her, the chamber can ultimately do so by majority vote.

Still, Senate Majority Leader John Thune pledged earlier this month that Republicans would heed MacDonough’s guidance, suggesting that the traditional power of the parliamentarian will be preserved.

The late Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) — the only person who served in Congress longer than Byrd himself — used to say, “I'll let you write the substance. You let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.”

In going through the Byrd Bath process, Democrats aren’t writing the procedures, of course. But they are using their knowledge of the procedures to take advantage of the one avenue they have to shape the substance of the bill, or at least slow it down and make it harder for Republicans to meet their deadline (or to rush the bill through without more public attention and debate).

“Republicans are going at breakneck speed,” Kogan said, which means they’re blazing through the steps of getting early advice from MacDonough to hone their arguments — to their detriment. “Another issue for [Republicans] is just that their staff are less good at this,” Kogan claimed.

He said he could “100% guarantee” that there are parts of the package that will be stricken out that didn’t need to be, because Republicans aren’t taking the time to make careful arguments or — with their July 4th deadline looming — aren’t going back to make changes to provisions that might make it through a second Byrd Bath with minimal tweaks.

As a result, with each passing day, the One Big Beautiful Bill is getting smaller.

And MacDonough’s job only gets harder. It’s wild to consider, when you step back, that every few years — because the Senate has a weird rule called the filibuster, and also a weird process called reconciliation that lets parties circumvent it, but also a weird thing called the Byrd Rule that limits how they can do that — this confluence of random factors combines to thrust this low-profile official into the spotlight and ask her to make decisions that end up impacting wages, and health care, and the global economy.

As Kogan said, it’s kind of like the Supreme Court, but instead of nine justices: it’s just her.

So my main question about MacDonough was: how does she carry herself? Does all of this go to her head? After all, you could argue that we all sort of live in an Elizabeth MacDonoughocracy.

The staffers who had worked (and tangled) with her with on several major issues said she doesn’t act that way. “There’s no hubris or holier-than-thou-ness or whatever you want to call it,” Kumar told me. “She’s a nice, normal human being that, episodically when parties are doing reconciliation bills, gets put in this position.”

NYC uses ranked-choice voting in its municipal elections, which requires candidates (over multiple rounds of tabulation, if necessary) to receive majority support to win. With 93% of first-round choices counted, Mamdani — a New York state assemblyman who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor — has 43.5% of the vote. Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in 2021 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, has 36.4% of the vote.

We won’t know for sure until July 1, when the rest of the ranked-choice tabulation will be released, but Mamdani’s lead is likely too large for Cuomo to make up the difference from second-choice votes, something even Cuomo himself acknowledged.

“Tonight was not our night,” Cuomo told his supporters Tuesday evening, announcing that he had conceded the campaign. “Tonight was Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s night.”

Mamdani’s victory is a striking rejection of the Democratic Party establishment, after centrist figures like former President Bill Clinton, former House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lined up behind Cuomo in a bid to stop Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chosen candidate.

It is also just a remarkable political story. Before Election Night, nearly every available poll showed Cuomo, the presumed frontrunner, trouncing Mamdani, often quite comfortably. In fact, only a few months ago, Mamdani was polling at 1%, commanding a tiny fraction of the name recognition of a rival whose family has dominated New York politics for two generations.

“In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done,” Mamdani said in a speech last night celebrating his upset victory. “My friends, we have done it.”

Here at Wake Up To Politics, we always hesitate to draw over-broad conclusions from limited results, which is definitely a good policy to keep to when talking about an off-year, summertime primary conducted in an already liberal-leaning city.

I’m already seeing a lot of commentators making sweeping predictions about what last night’s results portend for the 2028 presidential contest or a future primary challenge against Chuck Schumer, and I’m just not convinced that this race is transferable to those. Ocasio-Cortez (who was the presumed beneficiary in both the predictions linked above) is herself a great example of a unique phenomenon of a candidate who triumphed against a uniquely weak opponent but largely failed to turn the momentum of her victory into wins for other like-minded candidates in successive election cycles.

In this race, what comes next is also quite unique: Mamdani is headed for a three-way general election, against Republican Curtis Sliwa and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (who is running as an Independent), which could become a four-way contest if Cuomo decides to launch an Independent bid well (something that he teased before last night, but seems less likely now that the primary wasn’t particularly close).

All that said, I do have two quick thoughts on Mamdani’s stunning victory I’d like to share: one pertaining to the politics of it and one to the governing implications.

The Fun Factor

There’s a poll result I often think back to from the 2024 Republican primary. That contest ended up being a non-event, of course; this New York Times/Siena survey from July 2023 helps explain why. The pollsters threw out several characteristics, and asked respondents whether each one better described Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, his chief rival.

Trump won on most scores, but somewhat surprisingly (considering the primary’s end result), DeSantis actually pulled out a few wins too, including on qualities like “likable” (DeSantis 45%-Trump 43%) and “moral” (DeSantis 45%-Trump 37%). But there was another characteristic where Trump just creamed DeSantis: 54% of GOP primary voters said the former president was the more “fun” candidate. Only 16% said the same about DeSantis. Even with apparent concerns about Trump’s morality, that gap was enough to help vault Trump’s path to re-nomination.

We like to think of political campaigns as serious contests of ideas, but voters are also humans, which means other factors inevitably slip into the mix. And one of them is whether a candidate is fun.

Mamdani fueled his campaign with videos on X and TikTok where he was reliably grinning and having fun — whether he was walking across Manhattan, making light of his proclivity for talking with his hands, or bantering with a rival he was cross-endorsing. A good number of these videos end with a scene of Mamdani laughing.

@zohran_k_mamdaniThis election is in your hands. But only if you’re registered to vote in New York City. Deadline is Saturday. Go to zohranfornyc.com/vote now

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Cuomo, meanwhile, barely cracked a smile at many of his events. In fact, he barely held many events. “A grim and joyless campaign, as befits a battle for a prize never wanted, one long viewed with disdain and contempt as a trifle that only lesser men would debase themselves to seek,” Howard Glaser, a Cuomo aide turned critic, described it.

“Fun” won’t always beat “grim and joyless,” but it’s often a better bet. That’s especially true in today’s media environment, which asks more of political hopeful than previous eras, when mastery of a single medium (like radio or TV) was often sufficient to succeed.

Today, a successful politician must excel at delivering scripted rally speeches. And engaging in unscripted moments. And making funny, short-form videos. And sitting for thoughtful, long-form podcast interviews. And, of course, it always helps to know a thing or two about matters of public policy.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are candidates who performed well in scripted and unscripted settings. Donald Trump does well off script, including in video and podcast, but often sounds stilted on script. Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton could give scripted rally speeches, but faltered off the cuff. Joe Biden was often shaky at both, struggling with a Teleprompter and in the sort of TikTok videos and podcast interviews that are a modern expectation.

Mamdani scored well with all of the above, running a thoroughly modern campaign.

These sorts of skills don’t code for any particular ideology — Clinton endorsed against Mamdani, proof enough that they come from different factions of the Democratic Party — but they do tend to reward candidates with a consistent and authentic message, whatever that might be. Some politicians might be good actors, but if they are promoting a message they don’t believe in or can’t explain, it will inevitably start to show in the 40th minute of a podcast video or in the 100th TikTok.

It’ll seem like they’re acting. And it’ll be clear they aren’t having any fun.

In Mamdani’s case, his ideology was firmly rooted in the American left and his message was squarely focused on affordability. I don’t think his success guarantees that the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will share either. But, looking back, it’s a bit strange that Democrats have run three consecutive candidates who struggled in unscripted interviews and social media posts, even as those skills became more important and even as Republicans were running a candidate who was a master of both.

“Fun” doesn’t win elections by itself: candidates who try to claim that mantle can be bogged down (Harris running while serving in a deeply unpopular administration) or boosted (Mamdani running against a scandal-plagued opponent) by other factors. But without it, it’s increasingly hard to compete in the media where elections are now run.

Filtration Theory

In his book “Indispensable,” the leadership expert Gautam Mukunda proposes something he calls Leader Filtration Theory: the idea that any leader — in business, politics, etc. — can be measured by how “filtered” they were, i.e. how much of a role elites had in shaping and selecting them.

Mukunda’s theory is that highly filtered leaders end up being the most mediocre. Having come up through the organization they now lead, they tend to be more functionaries than visionaries. The highest-impact leaders, he argues, are the ones who haven’t been filtered — although this impact can be positive or negative.

He extends this argument to presidential politics in his book “Picking Presidents,” taking rankings of the presidents and showing that highly filtered leaders (John Quincy Adams, George H.W. Bush) fall in the middle while low-filtered leaders take up the high (Abraham Lincoln) and low (Franklin Pierce) ends. Politicians who aren’t filtered are the ones who cause a jolt, but it’s a coin-toss whether the jolt will be for good or not.

Zohran Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, has spent only four years in political office, and was opposed by most of the political establishment, is as unfiltered as it gets. If he wins the mayoralty, Mukunda’s theory would predict that it will be an extremely high-impact term. We just don’t know in which direction that impact will go.

There are plenty of examples of unfiltered, progressive political leaders who sweep into office and quickly become unpopular: just take a look at Brandon Johnson in Chicago. In his Substack, progressive strategist Waleed Shahid draws a comparison between Mamdani and Fiorella La Guardia, another unfiltered socialist (and a Republican socialist, at that) who is now remembered as one of the more transformative mayors in New York City history. (“First they call you radical. Then they name an airport after you,” Shahid writes.)

One of La Guardia’s strengths was building a broad coalition of voters, cutting across ethnic and party lines (being a Republican socialist will do that to you). If Mamdani is elected, his governing success will likely rely on building bridges outside of his natural ideological home, something Shahid’s former boss Ocasio-Cortez has done, for example, but other members of “The Squad” have not.

Already, during his campaign, Mamdani made efforts to reach into other Democratic Party factions, something the ranked-choice voting system also incentivizes. As an unfiltered leader, those sorts of alliances will be instrumental if he is to navigate the complex world of city politics without a deep web of pre-existing relationships. If the Filtration Theory is correct, his tenure would likely be memorable — but that can skew in two very different ways.

We haven’t done a Sunday mailbag issue in a while, so I wanted to send out an email now asking for questions.

There’s a lot I’m tracking this week:

• The Israel/Iran/U.S. conflict (read this morning’s newsletter)

• The New York City mayoral primary, which is being held today

• The Republican efforts to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill by July 4th

• The NATO summit, now getting underway in the Netherlands

And more!

What questions do you have, on those topics or anything else in politics, government, and media? Leave a comment on this post to send in your question, and it might get answered in Sunday’s newsletter.

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As a reminder: anyone can ask questions, but only paid subscribers can see the full mailbag newsletters. If you’re already a paid subscriber: thank you! If you aren’t: what a great time to join!

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Either way, I’m excited to see your questions and try my hand at answering them!

— Gabe

At around 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Iran attacked an American air base in Qatar, in retaliation for the historic U.S. bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend.

Al Udeid Air Base, which Iran attacked, is home to 10,000 U.S. troops. It’s the largest American military presence in the Middle East and the regional headquarters of the U.S. Central Command. Only a few weeks ago, President Trump himself was at the base (ironically, using his speech to tout diplomatic efforts with Iran that yesterday morning seemed on ice).

So how did we get to a place, by 4 p.m., where Trump was thanking Iran for the attack? (I bet that’s a sentence you didn’t think you’d read a week ago.) And, by 6 p.m., where he was announcing an Israel-Iran ceasefire?

In short, because war is often performative. (Battles are literally fought in military “theaters,” after all.) In this case, everyone played their roles for their respective audiences, and now — after some kicking and screaming — they seem to have returned to their corners.

The first clue that Iran’s attack was designed to ratchet tensions lower, not higher, was the target they selected: Qatar is one of the Middle Eastern countries friendlier to Iran, a sign that the assault would be one intended more to send a message than to inflict actual damage. The next clue was the number of missiles used: 14, a carefully selected amount (as the Iranian government explained) meant to match the number of “bunker-buster” bombs used by the U.S. on Saturday. That showed that the attack was calibrated to match the American bombing, not go beyond it.

As more details came out, the symbolic nature of the Iranian attack became even clearer.

Iran reportedly gave advance notice to Qatar before launching the missiles — and even, through two diplomatic channels, to the Great Satan itself, the U.S. government. That allowed enough time for Qatar to close its airspace and for America to make preparations at its base, ensuring that no U.S. troops were killed or injured during the attack.

Although air sirens rang out in Bahrain and Kuwait amid rumors of potential attacks, the zero-casualty missile strike in Qatar ended up being the sum total of the Iranian response.

To use the escalation ladder designed by the Cold War-era strategist Herman Kahn (the real-life “Dr. Strangelove”), the U.S. bombing had brought the conflict with Iran to Rung #9 (“Dramatic Military Confrontation”), right on the edge of where Kahn believed nuclear war starts to become thinkable. The Iranian response seemed to be climbing down the ladder, to Rung #8 (“Harassing Acts of Violence”), a sign of de-escalation under pressure.

What’s the point of launching a missile strike that everyone knows was coordinated in advance to cause the minimum amount of damage?

Well, not everyone knows.

The Iranian government has implemented a near-complete internet blackout throughout its war with Israel, leaving its citizens with few information sources beyond the state-run television and radio stations. Conveniently, those same outlets reported that the Iranian attack had “destroyed” the U.S. base in Qatar, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Presumably, there was no mention of the notification given to the Americans through diplomatic channels.)

Those reports had their intended effect; Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the attack on a U.S. base, as captured in this photo published by Reuters:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, followed the missile strike by posting a provocative image on his Farsi-language X account of a burning American flag, clearly intended (like the attack itself) for domestic consumption. On his English-language account, no such image appeared; instead, all he posted there was a brief message saying the “the Iranian nation isn’t a nation that surrenders” (although, by all appearances, it had).

And so, everyone could walk away a winner (at least in their own telling). Israel had significantly hobbled an enemy state. The U.S. had pulled off a long-threatened show of force. And Iran was able to telegraph to its audience at home that it had stood up for itself with a (supposedly) fearsome attack.

Per CNN, after the Iranian strike, Trump called the emir of Qatar to ask for help winding down the conflict. Trump would work on the Israelis, he said; the president asked Qatar to work on the Iranians. Within a handful of hours, Trump announced on Truth Social that the two countries had agreed to a ceasefire.

Ever the master brander, Trump even shared that he had come up with a name for the conflict: “THE 12 DAY WAR.” A Republican lawmaker promptly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, one of those establishment honors (like gracing the cover of Time magazine) that this anti-establishment figure has long coveted.

“CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Trump posted.

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The congratulations ended up being a tad premature.

Just as the ceasefire was about to take effect last night, Israel accused Iran of violating the agreement with a last-minute missile strike that killed at least four people. Iran denied violating the terms of the deal, but Israel threatened to retaliate.

Trump, speaking to reporters this morning, seemed frustrated that his hard-won truce appeared to be in question. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he said. (You can watch that somewhat rare use of presidential profanity for yourself at 5:24 in the video below.)

“ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, where he has narrated much of the conflict. He reportedly echoed that message in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ended up launching a mostly symbolic response of his own, attacking a radar system outside Tehran. Under pressure from the president, Netanyahu agreed to scale back his initial retaliation plan, which had been to strike a larger number of targets, including inside the Iranian capital.

Clearly, then, the peace is fragile but — for the moment — it seems to be holding. (It will be up to future historians to decide whether the conflict will have to be called the “13-day war,” against Trump’s wishes, to account for the extra hours of hostilities.) Many questions remain, including around the future of Iran’s nuclear program and of Israel’s war in Gaza.

But, even while acknowledging that developments could quickly shift, it’s worth taking a step back and taking stock of the last 72 hours.

Each of the last four presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and first-term Donald Trump — contemplated striking the exact Iranian nuclear sites that Trump attacked last weekend, but ultimately pulled back, partially out of fear that an aggressive Iranian response would spiral into a broader regional conflict.

In fairness, those presidents weren’t dealing with an Iran as hobbled as Trump is now, after an onslaught of Israeli attacks that picked off many of its top commanders and eliminated its air defenses over the last two weeks, while also significantly weakening the militia groups in its “Axis of Resistance” — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen — over the last two years.

But, still, as long as the fragile ceasefire holds (no sure thing), the fact remains: Trump took a gamble that each of his predecessors declined to take, and has so far paid only a superficial price for it, in the form of the symbolic strike on the Qatar base. (If that can even be called a price.) Iran had long promised that a U.S. bombing on its territory would be met with harsh retaliation. Trump called the ayatollah’s bluff.

And not for the first time: in 2020, after Trump ordered the assassination of the top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s response strikes against U.S. bases were also viewed as relatively muted and similarly included giving advance notice to the country hosting the Americans. (That assassination, as a sidenote, also helped pave the way for Tehran’s current weakness: Iran’s proxy forces, which Soleimani oversaw, “never fully recovered from his loss,” as the New York Times reported.)

The political gamble Trump took this time was even larger, not just because the action in question was more dramatic — bombing Iranian territory for the first time in U.S. history, a step beyond the 2020 attack, a drone strike while Soleimani was in Iraq — but also because Trump, to an even greater degree than in 2016, campaigned so heavily in 2024 on the idea that he would avoid foreign conflict.

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” Trump said about his second term in his January inaugural address. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier.”

Trump’s move on Saturday can be understood as (so far, successfully) risking his claim to those labels — but if you were confused because you thought those descriptors were the sum total of Trump’s governing philosophy, you haven’t been paying attention.

Instead, the best way to understand Trump’s impulses came this morning, in a comment that has been mostly overshadowed by the presidential F-bomb that came a few minutes later. “All I do is play both sides,” he told reporters.

Reliably, Trump’s biggest asset in political and diplomatic negotiations is his lack of enduring commitments. (Whether that betrays a lack of principles, or merely a refusal to cling to dogma, is in the eye of the beholder.) Over the last 72 hours, Trump showed this in at least two ways, which allowed him to seemingly pull off a long-feared gamble with both his political coalition and global stability intact.

Domestically, Trump threw a bone both to the war hawks and isolationists in his party, by executing a dramatic military strike and then immediately pivoting to ceasefire talks. That ought to quiet down the unusually-critical-of-late Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world, while also pleasing the Mark Levins. (Although it was amusing to watch the combatants on both sides of the MAGA civil war carry on the fighting, like the Japanese soldiers who fought World War II into the ’70s. Lindsey Graham, for example, tweeted minutes after the Iranian strike in Qatar: “Mr. President: It’s time to end this madness in Iran.” Apparently, he didn’t get the message that Trump’s hawkish phase had ended and the dovish phase had begun.)

And, internationally, Trump betrayed unusual (for a U.S. president) willingness to make concessions to an American adversary while also exerting pressure on an American ally, signaling a willingness to negotiate with Iran and a need for Israel to wrap up its attacks immediately. Joe Biden may have used profanity to talk about Netanyahu behind the scenes, but it’s hard to imagine any other president dropping an F-bomb to express frustration with America’s top ally in the Middle East in public, just as it’s hard to imagine another president who’d be willing to write “God bless Iran” on social media. (In fairness, Trump’s political situation — specifically, the enormous amount of leeway given to him by the American right — allows him to say things about Israel, and Iran, that would have led to Biden being pummeled with criticism.)

Just like Iran with its strike on Monday, Trump put on a show for his intended audiences, trying to please them all at once. A president who wouldn’t (or couldn’t, for ideological or electoral reasons) exercise such dexterity might have been locking themselves into a larger conflict after the initial bombing. By playing both sides — willing to use military force, but also to negotiate; to bolster Israeli ambitions, but also to constrain them — Trump’s flexibility has once again allowed him to dance into a situation that other presidents didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole, and then to wriggle out of it.

For now. It’s early days yet, of course. Trump’s gamble seems to be paying off in the short term, but — as he learned himself this morning — in the Middle East, even seeming victories have ways of quickly growing complicated.

What happened on Saturday night?

The United States bombed Iran for the first time in its history, adding to an ongoing series of attacks Israel had been carrying out for the past week. The U.S. targeted three Iranian nuclear facilities, using B-2 stealth bomber planes to drop 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on the Fordo and Natanz facilities and a submarine to fire Tomahawk missiles at the Natanz and Isfahan sites.

The mission was codenamed “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

Was the attack successful?

President Trump says it was. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” he boasted on Saturday, adding last night on Truth Social that “Monumental Damage” was done to all three nuclear sites. “The white structure shown is deeply imbedded into the rock, with even its roof well below ground level, and completely shielded from flame,” he wrote. “The biggest damage took place far below ground level. Bullseye!!!”

Here are satellite images from the Washington Post showing the damage at Fordo, Iran’s top nuclear enrichment facility, which is buried deep under a mountain:

When assessing legal claims by the Trump administration, it can often be beneficial to listen to what Justice Department lawyers are saying in court filings, as opposed to the more aggressive (and sometimes exaggerated) rhetoric by the president and his advisers. Similarly, here, it is helpful to listen to the more careful language of Defense Department officials.

Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, said at a Sunday press conference that the three sites sustained “extremely severe damage,” but stopped short of saying they had been fully destroyed (or “completely and totally obliterated,” as Trump put it). It would take time, Caine added, to assess whether Iran still possessed nuclear capabilities.

According to the New York Times, the initial analyses of the U.S. and Israeli militaries is that the Fordo site was damaged but not entirely destroyed, although neither country has made any final conclusions.

One key question that remains is whether Iran moved its stockpile of uranium from the targeted sites before the attacks, which would allow the country to continue its nuclear program elsewhere.

But hadn’t Trump set a two-week deadline on deciding to strike Iran?

That appears to have been misdirection, according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other news outlets. “It was a headfake,” one Trump adviser told Axios.

According to these reports, even when Trump said last Thursday that he would make his decision “within the next two weeks,” his mind was largely already made up and plans were forming to carry out the strikes.

What happens now?

President Trump and his allies have framed the U.S. strike as an isolated event that won’t lead to a larger conflict. “This is not the start of a forever war,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jim Risch (R-ID) wrote, describing the attack as a “precise, limited strike.”

But whether that proves to be the case won’t be decided only by the Trump administration. As always, the enemy also gets a vote.

Iran has yet to retaliate against the U.S., although it has pledged to do so. One of the most immediate concerns is that Iran (or its proxy militia groups) could attack any of the 40,000 U.S. troops stationed across the Middle East. According to the New York Times, American officials have detected signs that Iran-backed militias are preparing to attack U.S. bases in Iraq and possibly Syria, although Iraqi officials are reportedly “working hard” to dissuade the groups from taking such action.

The Iranian parliament has also taken moves to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which would have an enormous economic impact: about 20 million barrels of oil, accounting for one-fifth of daily global production, flow through the straight each day.

Per NBC, Iran has privately threatened to respond by “unleashing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil carried out by sleeper cells operating inside the country.” The White House has said it is monitoring that possibility.

The scope of Iran’s retaliation will likely dictate the scope of the U.S.’ own response, which will help determine whether a broader conflict is in the offing. Vice President JD Vance said Sunday morning that “we don’t want a regime change,” but his boss seemed to be singing a different tune just hours later. “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Trump posted later Sunday.

In his Saturday night speech, the president said that if Iran did not respond to the bombing by returning to the negotiating table, further attacks would be in store. “There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days,” he said.

In the meantime, Israel has continued its bombing campaign against Iran, including targeting Iran’s top prison for housing political detainees, an apparent attempt to free political prisoners and potentially further destabilize the ruling Iranian regime. Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Iran’s supreme leader, is reportedly sheltering in a bunker with a list of possible successors already picked out.

Wait, does Congress play any role in this?

According to Article I of the Constitution, Congress is the branch of government with the power “to declare War,” but presidents of both parties been looking past that tiny detail to unilaterally take military action for decades. A partial list from the New York Times:

President Harry S. Truman sent U.S. forces into Korea. President Ronald Reagan ordered military action in Libya, Grenada and Lebanon; President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama; President Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of mostly Serbian targets during the Kosovo War; President Barack Obama joined a 2011 NATO bombing campaign against the government of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and led a military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Presidents often cite their own competing power under Article II, which establishes that “the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” as authorization to use force when they deem necessary.

Congress does have something of a backstop to prevent Trump from taking additional unilateral action against Iran, although it would require much larger bipartisan opposition to his bombing than currently exists. Under the War Power Resolution of 1973, “at any time that United States Armed Forces are engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its possessions and territories without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.”

Individual senators and representatives are able to force votes on resolutions under that provision; Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) has authored a proposal that would prevent Trump from taking unauthorized action against Iran (except to defend the U.S. from an “imminent attack”), which could receive a Senate vote as early as this week. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has endorsed the resolution.

A companion resolution in the House has been introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

But here’s the catch: even if the Massie/Kaine proposals were to pass in both the House and Senate (which does not currently seem likely), concurrent resolutions are subject to a presidential veto, which means the measure would need two-thirds support to overcome Trump’s inevitable veto. The resolution is very unlikely to reach that high bar of support.

How has the public responded to the bombing?

Before the attack, a deep split had emerged within the MAGA coalition over U.S. involvement in the Israel/Iran conflict, with figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson appealing to Trump’s promise of being an anti-war president in urging him to refrain from jumping in.

After Trump opted against taking their advice, some figures within the party have criticized the move — including Reps. Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — but the GOP has largely fallen in line behind Trump.

A YouGov poll last week found that just 23% of Republicans supported U.S. involvement in the conflict, compared to 53% who were opposed. But a follow-up survey after the bombing found that 68% of Republicans supported Trump’s decision, while only 13% expressed opposition.

Meanwhile, 70% of Democrats said they were opposed to the bombing, while 16% were in support.

Overall, including Independents as well, 35% of U.S. adults said they approved of the attack, 46% said they disapproved, and 19% weren’t sure.

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What else I’m watching

• A new poll shows democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani narrowly beating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Tuesday’s New York City mayoral primary.

• Kamala Harris is “leaning toward entering the California gubernatorial race,” per The Hill.

• A Tennessee judge ruled that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be released from jail as he awaits trial, although ICE is expected to detain him if the Justice Department lets him go.

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune says that the Senate will remain in session until it passes President Trump’s “one big beautiful bill.” The chamber’s rules referee has been stripping out parts of the package for violating the rules of the reconciliation process, including a provision that would have made it harder to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court.

• President Trump will meet with his national security team … The Senate will hold a procedural vote on a Defense Department nominee … The House will vote on up to 20 pieces of legislation.

One week ago today, Donald Trump and Elon Musk appeared together in the Oval Office as Musk prepared to leave the government. They laughed. They smiled. Trump handed Musk a ceremonial key to the White House.

“Elon’s service to America has been without comparison in modern history,” Trump said. “I expect to remain a friend and an adviser and certainly if there’s anything the president wants me to do, I’m at the president’s service,” Musk responded.

That was last week.

Yesterday, the relationship between the president and the world’s richest man — which defined the early stretch of Trump’s second term, but has been closely watched for cracks for months — imploded in a manner with few parallels in modern politics.

Tensions had already been forming behind the scenes: Trump was irritated that Musk almost received a top-secret China briefing at the Pentagon; Musk was unhappy that a close ally’s nomination to lead NASA was withdrawn. After exiting the White House, Musk began leading a drumbeat against Trump’s signature legislative package, the One Big Beautiful Act.

But it was on Thursday that their public rhetoric about each other went from 0 to 100, a complete reversal from their chummy joint appearance last week.

The morning started with Musk posting on social media, flagging a pair of posts Trump had sent during the Obama era about the national debt, suggesting that he was being hypocritical by championing the deficit-busting “beautiful bill.”

“I’m very disappointed in Elon. I’ve helped Elon a lot,” Trump responded in the afternoon, intimating to reporters that Musk was only criticizing the Republican megabill because it would end tax credits for electric vehicles, hurting Musk’s company Tesla.

Minutes later, Musk responded on X, which he also owns. “Whatever,” he wrote. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.”

And, with that, the gloves were off. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk wrote. “Such ingratitude.”

“Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Trump responded on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns.

Over the course of the next three hours, Musk called for Trump to be impeached, predicted that his tariffs would cause a recession, and tied him to sex trafficking by suggesting that investigative documents related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t been released because the president is mentioned in them.

Trump replied by threatening to terminate the government subsidies and contracts for Musk’s companies.

The most anticipated breakup in Washington had finally occurred. And, befitting its two participants, it took place in the most dramatic fashion possible, playing out for all to see on social media, which both men have long used as a refuge to stoke feuds and vent their feelings.

In retrospect, the Trump-Musk split was inevitable not just because they are both unwilling to share a spotlight, accustomed to hoovering up all the attention in their orbits. They are also two men who have strikingly similar styles of processing disagreements (even small ones), which is to say, both of them are famously unable to do so calmly.

And, as it turned out, there was a lot they disagreed on this whole time. And not just small things: they disagreed on two of the biggest initiatives — tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill — of Trump’s presidency, disputes that struck directly at the heart of Musk’s business interests and Trump’s political legacy. So this was never going to end well.

What happens now?

Musk is positioning himself as a rival for the MAGA throne, threatening to back challenges against any Republican lawmakers who support the megabill, musing about creating his own political party, and suggesting that he will outlast Trump as a political force.

“Some food for thought as they ponder this question,” Musk replied to a tweet asking which side of the feud Republican politicians would choose. “Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years…”

But the last decade of the Republican Party is littered with people who thought they were stronger than Donald Trump — and soon learned otherwise.

Of course, there are obvious examples like Liz Cheney, who was Wyoming political royalty until she voted to impeach Trump and then lost her next primary by 37 percentage points.

But I think it’s better to look at people who were Trump’s ideological allies, not just uneasy members of his coalition. Take Jeff Sessions, a longtime immigration hawk who was the first senator to endorse Trump’s first campaign. He was Trump before Trump. Sessions was sent to the Senate four times by Alabama voters, coasting to victory each time. And then he joined Trump’s Cabinet and got crosswise with the president by recusing himself from the Trump-Russia investigation. (Not even leading it, mind you, just removing himself from it.)

That was all it took: Trump breaking with him and then endorsing his opponent. The next time Sessions ran for his old Senate seat, in 2020, he was creamed in the GOP primary by 21 percentage points. Two decades of easily winning Republican primaries paled in comparison to one dispute with Donald Trump.

Or Steve Bannon, whose populist cred also predates Trump’s. It’s hard to remember now, but there was a brief period where Bannon left the first Trump White House and the two were sniping at each other. (“Sloppy Steve,” Trump called him.) Bannon started musing about running for president himself. “I have power,” he told Vanity Fair shortly after leaving the White House. “I can actually drive things in a certain direction.”

But he forgot that, in today’s Republican Party, his power — anyone’s power — is derivative of Donald Trump’s, not independent from it. It didn’t take long before Bannon was trying to work his way back into Trump’s orbit. Ron DeSantis, too, caught a whiff of MAGA fame and thought he could harness it against the movement’s leader. We all know how that turned out.

Each of these figures made the same mistake: thinking that their careers in Republican politics were strong enough to stand on their own, that they commanded enough support to survive outside Trump’s orbit. Instead, the minute they left the climate-controlled confines of Trumpworld, their sources of energy quickly shriveled up.

True, Musk comes to his Trump feud with an advantage that Sessions, and Bannon, and DeSantis lacked: namely, a $420 billion net worth. Which means, of course, his life will be fine (more than fine!) even if he and Trump never bury the hatchet.

But to the extent he wants to remain a force in politics, his spectacular wealth will only take him so far, because money can’t buy the most important thing he lacks: any hint of a political constituency to rival Trump’s.

Musk appears convinced that he boasts more support than Trump among the GOP: he shared a post that claimed (without evidence) that “the majority of republican *voters* strongly agree with Elon and want the BBB trimmed down,” referring to the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

A recent YouGov poll found that’s flatly false: 76% of Republicans support the package. (Do they know about the issues with the bill that Musk is raising? Maybe not. But all it takes to get a positive answer from many Republicans is to say something is “Trump’s proposal,” which says it all right there.) The same poll also found that Trump’s favorability among Republicans (87%) is higher than Musk’s (76%), and that there are few demographic groups among which the Tesla CEO is more popular than the president, giving Musk little room with which to build a rival coalition. Musk brought money to the MAGA movement, but unlike someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he didn’t bring much of an identifiable political constituency, beyond maybe a few Silicon Valley or crypto types.

But Musk and his tech compatriots, wealthy as they may be, don’t quite have their finger on the pulse of the American public. In 2020, Musk told an interviewer that he’s “socially very liberal” and “economically right of center,” which tracks with his public statements over the last few days, supporting climate policy while also championing fiscal responsibility.

The Republican polling firm Echelon Insights has found that socially liberal, economically conservative voters are by far the smallest segment of the electorate, comprising just 4% of voters.1

So that leaves Musk — like other prominent anti-Trump Republicans — without much of a natural political home. If he wants to remain in politics, he’ll have to compete for influence among the same slice of voters that Trump commands.

The first test of that influence will be the fight for the Big Beautiful Bill, which Musk is frantically campaigning against. Musk is betting that Republican voters and lawmakers won’t support a bill simply because it’s fiscally irresponsible — but he seems to have missed the last several decades of American politics, when the U.S. ran up deficits under Reagan, Trump, and both Bushes even as they promised to balance the budget.2

DeSantis already tried to make a fiscal responsibility case to Republican voters in the 2024 primaries. Trump’s personal popularity won out then, and it will now, too.3

Back in December, Musk was able to rally his X followers to jam Republican phone lines, successfully killing a major piece of legislation. But that was when he was in Trump’s corner, and his main opponent was Speaker Mike Johnson (and Republican voters love hating on their House speakers.) Now that his fight is against Trump, it looks different: once again, he’s told his followers to call their congressmen. But this time, Republican offices say they’re hearing crickets.

The Big Beautiful Bill will undergo some changes in the next few weeks, but there are no signs Musk has imperiled it; no groundswell of lawmakers have followed his lead and come out against it, as they did in December. MAGA influencers and politicians from Charlie Kirk to Marjorie Taylor Greene have made clear their loyalties lie with Trump.4

“Nobody elected Elon Musk, and a whole lot of people don’t even like him, to be honest with you, even on both sides,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) told Axios. “We’re getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) said. “Every tweet that goes out, people are more lockstep behind President Trump and [Musk is] losing favor.”

Even assuming that Republican voters are as animated by the deficit as Musk is hoping, first they would have to believe that the Big Beautiful Bill will increase the deficit to take his side. According to the YouGov poll, only 21% do. That’s not surprising when you consider that Trump is (falsely) insisting that it won’t, and 71% of Trump voters say they trust information coming from the president — more than the percentage that say they trust information from their friends, or family, or religious leaders.

Good luck competing with that.

At the end of the day, Trump simply has more leverage over Musk than Musk has over him — both politically and otherwise. The New York Times helpfully laid out four ways that each man could make life worse for the other. Musk, the Times wrote, could “wield his billions against Mr. Trump, his allies and his agenda,” which is true, of course, except for the fact that Trump never has to run for office again, so campaign donations don’t mean much to him.5

Other than that, Musk can “use social media as an irritant” (shrug), “drag Mr. Trump into controversy” (because Trump hates controversies?), and “use his companies to inconvenience the administration” (which we’ll return to).

Trump, on the other hand, could “cut contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies” (which are a significant amount of his business), “investigate Mr. Musk’s immigration status and drug use” (or his companies, which were facing several high-profile probes before Trump took office), “revoke Mr. Musk’s security clearance” (which could complicate SpaceX contracts), and generally “wield the power of the presidency against him.”

Doesn’t exactly sound like a fair fight.

And Tesla shareholders seem to agree. Here, per Bloomberg, is the company’s stock price throughout Thursday. Not hard to see who they think has the upper hand.

Maybe that’s why Musk already seems to be backing down: the one threat he’s made to “use his companies to inconvenience the administration” — by decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which NASA uses to take astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station — he already took back. According to Trump’s team, Musk is trying to schedule a call with the president to patch things up.

Trump dialed reporters at ABC, CBS, and CNN this morning to tell them he’s not interested. (“I won’t be speaking to him for a while, I guess, but I wish him well,” Trump said.) Per Fox, the president plans to either give away or sell the Tesla that’s been parked outside the White House since he publicly bought it from Musk in March.

I wouldn’t count out a rapprochement, though. Trump is generally more forgiving than you might think — though always on his terms, of course. Bannon is a great example of someone who Trump welcomed back after a time away (now, if you’re wondering, he’s calling on Trump to deport Musk). “I have never believed in having permanent enemies,” Trump said last month. He was talking about foreign affairs, but everyone from JD Vance to Marco Rubio could testify to the fact that that policy also holds up domestically.

If Musk wants to tend to his fortune and simply remain in the world of business, he might not need to grovel to Trump and try to mend fences (unless Trump starts targeting his companies, of course). But if Musk wants to remain a political force, that’s probably his only hope. A third party modeled off his ideology would command single-digit support, at best. He’s already burned all his bridges with Democrats in the last year.

And, in today’s Republican Party, you’re either with Donald Trump — or you’re irrelevant.

Today is Day 136 of Donald Trump’s second term, and if you thought the constant churn of executive actions was slowing down: think again. Here’s a breakdown of major actions from the administration in the last 24 hours:

Travel ban. Trump signed a proclamation banning travel to the U.S. by citizens of 12 countries (Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen) and restricting travel by citizens of seven more (Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela).

The directive, which is set to go into effect on Monday, revives a controversial policy from Trump’s first term, which was twice blocked by the courts and then revised. Ultimately, a third version was upheld by the Supreme Court. In a video, Trump said that the necessity of a travel ban was “underscored” by last weekend’s attack in Boulder, Colorado on a group calling for the release of the Israeli hostages. The suspect in that attack was an Egyptian man who overstayed a tourist visa.

Egypt is not one of the countries impacted by Wednesday’s proclamation, although it did instruct officials to review the “screening and vetting” procedures for Egyptian nationals. This could be an attempt to withstand legal scrutiny: one of the factors that doomed Trump’s first two travel bans was a lack of adequate procedure. On the first day of his second term, Trump ordered officials to report on countries that might warrant a travel ban; it is possible that the administration wants a paper trail to prove that due diligence was done concerning each country on the list, and such a review had not yet been carried out concerning Egypt.

Harvard visas. Trump signed a separate proclamation that would effectively block foreign students from attending Harvard, by suspending entry into the U.S. for at least six months for foreign nationals seeking visas to study at the university. The Department of Homeland Security had already attempted a similar move, which was blocked by a federal judge; having the order come from Trump himself allows the administration to invoke the same legal authority as the travel ban, Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to “impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

Columbia accreditation. The Education Department announced that it had notified Columbia University’s accreditor that the school was no longer meeting its standards for accreditation due to its “violation of federal antidiscrimination laws” stemming from “indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus.”

The ultimate decision to accredit Columbia belongs to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the non-profit organization to whom the Trump administration sent its Wednesday missive. Under federal regulations, the commission is required to notify Columbia that the government has determined it is not in compliance with the law; if the university then fails to enact a plan to come into compliance, the commission can revoke the school’s accreditation. Without accreditation, a university cannot receive federal student aid (which almost half of Columbia’s students receive).

Texas lawsuit. The Justice Department sued Texas on Wednesday to block its law offering in-state tuition at public universities to undocumented students who reside in the state. Within hours, Texas had sided with the federal government in court and a federal judge had issued an order blocking the state law as unconstitutional.

Some commentators compared the sudden series of events to a “sue-and-settle” practice, in which a government allows itself to be sued by an outside interest group and refuses to defend itself, negotiating a settlement that both sides prefer anyway (but potentially could not have achieved on their own: an effort to repeal the Texas law has stalled in the state legislature). The state law dates back to 2001, when it was championed by then-Gov. Rick Perry.

Biden probe. Finally, Trump signed a memorandum directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Counsel David Warrington to investigate whether officials in the Biden administration “conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state” and to carry out executive actions in his name, including by using an autopen to sign executive orders without his knowledge.

The memorandum alleges that Biden “suffered from serious cognitive decline” during his term and claims that “there are serious doubts” about whether Biden was aware of the executive actions being implemented towards the end of his administration. There is no evidence that Biden’s aides were approving major actions without his consent.

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What else you should know…

• In a 69-page order that begins with references to Kafka, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration must facilitate a hearing process for the nearly 140 Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act without an opportunity to challenge their removals. The Supreme Court has ruled, since those deportations, that other migrants removed under the Alien Enemies Act must receive due process; this order would extend that right to the migrants who were removed under the law before that ruling. Boasberg directed the administration to inform the court by June 11 how they plan to offer due process to the migrants, who are currently being housed in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.

• In other legal losses for the administration: A federal judge in New York temporarily blocked Trump from eliminating the Job Corps, a federal job training program. A federal judge in Colorado halted the administration’s attempt to quickly deport the wife and children of the Egyptian man accused of carrying out the attack in Boulder. And a federal appeals court declined to lift a ruling blocking the administration from dismantling the Education Department.

• And another notable development: The Guatemalan man known in court as “O.C.G.”, one of the migrants I wrote about last week that the administration had been accused of wrongfully deporting, is back in the U.S. after Trump officials complied with a judicial ruling ordering them to “facilitate” his return.

• NYT: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Endorses Zohran Mamdani as Top Choice for Mayor

• WSJ: Trump Is Losing Patience With Musk’s Outbursts Over Megabill

• NBC: Former Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says she is leaving the Democratic Party

• Reuters: FEMA staff baffled after head said he was unaware of US hurricane season, sources say

One of the most dramatic bureaucratic clashes of the second Trump term took place outside the headquarters of an obscure think tank called the U.S. Institute of Peace. The organization, tasked with promoting conflict resolution across the globe, was founded by law in 1984 and receives its funding from Congress, but otherwise operates mostly as an independent nonprofit.

In a February executive order, President Trump declared the institute “unnecessary” and called for it to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The next month, a team of officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), reporting at the time to Elon Musk, tried to enter the institute’s headquarters in Washington; they were rebuffed and told by the nonprofit’s leaders that the government had no right to be there.

A standoff ensued; eventually, the DOGE team called in D.C. police and the FBI as backup. With law enforcement on their side, Musk’s underlings successfully marched into the building and began evicting the institute officials, making plans to shut down the think tank and sell its $500 million headquarters.

That is, until a federal judge ruled last month that DOGE could do no such thing. Accusing the Trump administration of using “brute force” to enter and then “dissemble” the institute, Judge Beryl Howell wrote in a 102-page opinion that the administration’s actions were “unlawful” for having “second-guessed the judgment of Congress,” which had decided to appropriate $55 million to the institute as recently as this fiscal year.

The U.S. Institute of Peace saga is just one example of Trump attempting to assert his executive-centric theory of government, which Musk and DOGE were most famously charged with carrying out, that suggests the president doesn’t need Congress to effect lasting policy change, and can simply carry out his wishes via executive action. I argued last week that this theory had mostly backfired, due to judicial rulings like the one from Judge Howell blocking the institute takeover.

Yesterday, the Trump administration all but admitted that the theory hasn’t worked. They didn’t say that, of course, when they submitted their long-awaited rescissions package — a legal tool to codify cuts DOGE has purportedly already made — but you only have to look at Page 20 of the proposal to see that it’s the case:

The rescissions process, you see, is a legal way for the president to ask Congress to cancel funds that lawmakers have previously appropriated. It was created by the Impoundment Control Act, ironically the same Nixon-era statute that says the president can’t unilaterally refuse to spend appropriated funds, which Trump has repeatedly been accused of violating (and which his allies have argued is unconstitutional).

But the 1974 law contains a gift for Trump as well: it allows the president to submit a proposal, known as a rescissions package, laying out all the appropriated funds he doesn’t want to spend. The measure then goes to Congress; if lawmakers approve the cuts within 45 days, the president doesn’t have to spend the money. (But if the cuts aren’t approved, he does.) Notably, during the 45-day period, the president is freed from the legal obligation to spend the funds in question; also notably, a rescissions package is immune from the Senate filibuster, which means Republicans (assuming they remain united) could pass the measure without a single Democratic vote.

Why does sending a rescissions package constitute an admission of failure?

Well, take the U.S. Institute of Peace. In court filings, the Trump administration has argued that it has carte blanche over the think tank because “negotiating for peace, international engagement, and diplomacy are quintessential executive functions”; it didn’t need congressional approval to assert its will over a group that performs such duties, the White House said.

Apparently not, because the administration is now asking for congressional approval to rescind the institute’s funding. I wrote back in March that the rescissions process was an “option waiting for [Trump] if he wants to make the DOGE cuts actually stick, in a way judges can’t overturn.” Now that judges have repeatedly foiled his attempts to block spending unilaterally, the president appears to have accepted the necessity of making these cuts according to a spelled-out process.

This makes it tempting, especially now that the initiative’s chief promoter has fled Washington, to say that DOGE was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That’s not quite the case, of course. Numerous government employees have been laid off; foreign aid has been slashed; research grants have been canceled. (However, ongoing lawsuits could overturn even some of these “successes.”)

But the agency undeniably fell short of its promise, which was that the executive branch could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget all by itself. By its own estimation, DOGE has only cut $180 billion so far — only around $70 billion of which they’ve actually identified (and the identified cuts contain several glaring errors). Revealingly, when the administration aimed to codify DOGE’s impact with the rescissions package, only $9.4 billion in proposed cuts were put forward.

In addition to the U.S. Institute of Peace, the other targets were the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds NPR and PBS, all agencies that DOGE has run into legal challenges trying to dismantle unilaterally. In the end, of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s $55 million budget, the administration only asked to cut $15 million; the controversial $500 million headquarters went unmentioned. (The administration has said future rescissions packages could follow.)

Even cutting $9.4 billion — which represents approximately 0.1% of the federal budget — may be hard to get through the Republican-controlled Congress, a useful reminder that nothing gets into a spending bill accidentally. Everything has a constituency, or an interest group, or a member of Congress pushing for it. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) has expressed skepticism about cutting the CPB. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has said she will not support the proposed cuts to PEPFAR, a USAID program credited with saving 26 million lives worldwide that would have been lost to AIDS. (During Trump’s last term, he proposed the first rescissions package since the Clinton era. It was rejected by the GOP-led Senate.)

Putting aside how the rescissions package will fare in Congress, it’s worth listening to how Republicans have started talking about DOGE, now that the Trump administration is attempting to use the legislative process to cut spending.

“We thank Elon Musk and his DOGE team for identifying a wide range of wasteful, duplicative, and outdated programs,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in a statement yesterday, “and House Republicans are eager to eliminate them.” DOGE: The Great Identifier? Not quite how the supposed slash-and-burn initiative was sold to the American people back in January.

“DOGE set the table, now the Republican trifecta will deliver,” the House Rules Committee wrote on X.

Elon Musk famously held up a chainsaw at a conservative event in February. But to hear Republicans tell it, perhaps he was really only wielding a placemat this whole time.

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At the same time as Johnson is moving to make his DOGE “cuts” real, Musk — who left the federal government last week — has reappeared to make the speaker’s life difficult.

The red ink of the rescissions package was still drying yesterday when the Tesla CEO took to X, which he also owns, to decry the deficit-busting Republican megabill which Congress is also currently advancing.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk wrote. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

And so we’ve arrived at the utterly predictable (and predicted) rupture in the Trump-Musk relationship, with Trump’s former “First Buddy” trashing the bill that contains most of the president’s legislative agenda, just days after the duo praised each other in the Oval Office.

Last night, Musk seemed to acknowledge the oppositional posture he was assuming, retweeting an article from the libertarian outlet Reason with a not-so-subtle headline: “It’s Rand Paul and Elon Musk vs. Donald Trump over the ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’”

The last time Musk tried to take down a major legislative package, it worked: he successfully defeated a government funding bill in December, in the weeks after his largesse helped secure Trump the White House. Then, Musk successfully rallied House Republicans against the measure, and Trump ultimately sided with Musk against Speaker Johnson.

This time, Trump is siding with Johnson against Musk. It’s an open question whether conservatives will turn against the package, which is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, although many in Washington are skeptical that GOP lawmakers will turn on Trump.

Musk’s best bet at sinking the package will be members of the House Freedom Caucus, who voted for the bill last month (some grudgingly) but could turn against it depending on what changes emerge from the Senate.

Notably, the same group of Republicans have started expressing frustration in recent weeks on a separate, but related, issue: growing angry that the GOP-led Congress isn’t doing more to turn Trump’s executive orders into laws.

“Codify President Trump’s EOs now,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) wrote on X last month. “It’s the least we could do,” Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) echoed. “Codify, codify, codify,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) chimed in.

This right-wing angst hasn’t gotten much attention — but, historically, when the Freedom Caucus gets frustrated, it causes problems for the rest of the party. Now, with Musk goading them on, their anger is coming to the fore at a sensitive time for Republican congressional leaders.

In a video yesterday, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) — who recently introduced bills to codify three of Trump’s executive orders — said that if the House doesn’t start working on rescissions or other codification efforts next week, “We’ll start stopping other legislation, because that’s all we can do.” If these lawmakers aren’t satiated, it’s not hard to imagine how rescissions could ultimately collide with reconciliation.

“If you do not put DOGE or Trump EO’s on the floor next week, I will be a NO on EVERY single rule, and I am positive I will not be alone,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) similarly wrote on X.

There are practical reasons for Republicans to be hesitant about placing these bills on the floor. Several federal judges have ruled that funding held up by DOGE must be spent by September 30, the end of the fiscal year; if the rescissions package were not to pass within 45 days, it would constitute even more legal confirmation that the funds must be spent by that deadline.

One judge who ruled that DOGE’s actions at USAID were “likely unconstitutional” included in his reasoning that Congress had rejected previous attempts to defund the agency, drawing on a Supreme Court precent to say that “failure to pass legislation introduced in Congress” can be considered “indicative of congressional will.” If Congress actively fails to pass the USAID rescissions — or bills introduced codifying other Trump orders — it could make it even harder for the administration to argue in court that such orders were in accordance with congressional intent.

But there’s also a psychological element at play here. They never say it, but the demands by Burchett, Luna, and the others to codify Trump’s directives are also an acknowledgement that the executive orders are less impactful than the president says, just as the rescissions package signals that DOGE hasn’t really been cutting what it claims.

Trump, initially flanked by Musk, set out in his second term to prove the strength of the executive branch, but each time a judge stopped him in his tracks and told him he’d have go to Congress, he ended up exposing many of the presidency’s fundamental weaknesses. Amid a wider rupture between the two men, Trump now appears to be wondering about how much Musk actually accomplished — and belatedly acknowledging that his cuts will only be made real with a congressional stamp of approval.

“Was it all bullshit?” Trump reportedly asked recently of DOGE, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps it was, Mr. President. Perhaps it was.

And he’s right! There’s a lot of misinformation floating around about the bill. But then Trump went on to make two false statements himself: “What nobody understands is that it’s the single biggest Spending Cut in History, by far! But there will be NO CUTS to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid,” he wrote, adding: “The only ‘cutting’ we will do is for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.”

To take those claims in order:

1) This package cuts about $1.5 trillion in government spending over the next 10 years, which does make it one of the largest spending cuts in history — but not the largest (and, therefore, obviously not the largest “by far”).

According to the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the GOP package is second place in terms of amount of spending cut in recent history (behind the Budget Control Act of 2011, which cut $2 trillion) and third place in terms of spending cut relative to the size of the economy at the time (with spending cuts equivalent to 0.5% of current GDP — behind the 2011 law, which cut 1% of GDP at the time, and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which cut 0.8% of GDP at the time).1

2) The package would not cut Social Security or Medicare, but it would reduce federal spending on Medicaid by about $600 billion over the next 10 years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). As the New York Times notes, most of the changes to Medicaid would not cut “waste, fraud, and abuse,” at least in terms of how those categories are defined by the federal government.

Instead, as the Times notes, the spending would be reduced by “targeting Medicaid expansion, limiting states’ ability to finance Medicaid, imposing red tape on beneficiaries, rolling back protections against medical debt, forcing states to drop coverage, and limiting access to care and long-term care.” The CBO estimates that these changes will lead to 10.3 million people losing their Medicaid coverage over the next decade.

Is there anything else that Americans — maybe even you! — are getting wrong about the One Big Beautiful Bill? To find out, let’s go to a recent poll by YouGov and The Economist, which asked a series of questions about voters think about the package. Then, we’ll compare their answers to reality.

The package does not raise anyone’s taxes

One of the most striking findings in the poll, also noted by Substacker , is that 40% of Americans think their taxes will go up under the One Big Beautiful Bill. This includes 39% of people making under $50,000 a year, 42% of people making between $50,000 and $100,000 a year, and 38% of people making more than $100,000 a year.

The reality is that none of these groups will see their tax bills increase if the package is enacted.

That’s according to both the right-leaning Tax Foundation and the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). If you take just the tax portions of the package into account, the Tax Foundation estimates that after-tax income would increase by 2.1% for the poorest 20% of Americans under the bill, by 4.2% for the richest 20%, and by 4.4%.-4.6% for everyone in between.

The CBPP, meanwhile, estimates that the tax provisions alone (not taking anything else from the package into consideration) would increase after-tax income by 0.6% for the poorest 20%, by 4.2% for the richest 10%, and by 1.5%-2.9% for everyone in between.2

Unsurprisingly, considering their ideological bents, these organizations take slightly different views of how the package will impact different groups of people, but the headline takeaway for our purposes is that no group will be paying more in taxes if the package is enacted, which is notable since 4-in-10 Americans think they will be.

It does not appear that the misperceptions on this score vary based on economic status: for group across the income scale, about 40% think their taxes will go up under the package, from the poorest to the wealthiest Americans. Instead, the variance is by party. 64% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents think their tax bill will increase, compared to only 18% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents.

The package’s overall impact will help the wealthiest and hurt the poorest

But the One Big Beautiful Bill is more than just a tax bill, of course. As noted, it also makes changes to Medicaid, as well as other social safety net programs like food stamps. So, if you’re calculating the overall impact of the package, you need to look at the whole thing, not just taxes.

When you ask Americans to guess how the package will impact them, you get roughly similar numbers. 20% think the bill will help them, 40% think the bill will hurt them, and 21% think the package won’t have much of an impact on them. (19% are not sure.)

There is some variance by income level, but not much (<$50K: 18% say the package will help them, 45% say it will hurt them; $50K-$100K: 20% say help, 40% say hurt; $100K+: 26% say help, 37% say hurt). Once again, the biggest split is by party (3% of Democrats say the package will help them, 72% say it will hurt; 44% of Republicans say the package will help them, 9% say it will hurt).

In reality, the package does not discriminate by party; its impact will, however, vary by income level.

Here, we’ll use estimates by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), a non-partisan outfit that is often cited by both Democrats and Republicans. According to the PWBM, if you take everything from the bill into account — the tax and spending changes — average after-tax income is projected to decline for the poorest 40% of Americans and increase for the richest 60%.

That’s using conventional metrics. The PWBM also uses dynamic distributional analysis, which is the standard in academic research, to try to project how much better or worse off, on average, each age and income group will be because of a policy change over their entire lifetime. (They also include children who aren’t yet born, but will one day be impacted by the package’s policies, which is represented by the negative age categories below.)

Here’s a look at that breakdown:

For the average 40-year-old in the poorest 20% of Americans, for example, this chart says that the GOP package is equivalent to losing $37,800 over their lifetime. For the average 40-year-old in the richest 20% of the country, the package is the equivalent to gaining $34,400 over their lifetime.

Overall, as you can see, the wealthiest 40% of Americans (the top two quintiles) will benefit from the package no matter their age. The poorest 20% of Americans (the lowest quintile) will be hurt by it no matter their age. In the second and third quintile, the lifetime impact is negative for those currently in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, but jumps around a bit at other ages.

The package will add to the deficit

Finally, the poll asked Americans about the deficit impact of the Big Beautiful Bill. (As a reminder, the federal deficit is the annual difference between how much money the government spends and how much money it takes in through taxes.) 37% said the deficit would increase because of the package, 21% said it would decrease, 16% said it will remain about the same, and 26% said they weren’t sure.

If your answer aligned with the 37%, you’d be correct.

As we’ve already covered, the package would cut a large amount of spending, while also cutting everyone’s taxes (though by varying amounts). If the amount the government would no longer be spending under the package was equal to the amount of lost tax revenue under the package, its deficit impact would be zero. If the amount of reduced spending was greater than the amount of reduced revenue, then the package would reduce the deficit.

But, instead, the amount of reduced revenue stemming from the package’s tax cuts is much greater than the amount of spending the package cuts, according to every independent analysis of the bill.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model says that the package would increase the deficit by $2.8 trillion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill would increase the deficit by $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Yale Budget Lab says the bill would increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over 10 years.

The spending cuts in the package do not come close to offsetting the loss in government revenue.

President Trump had this to say on Truth Social on Thursday:

The U.S. Court of International Trade incredibly ruled against the United States of America on desperately needed Tariffs but, fortunately, the full 11 Judge Panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Court has just stayed the order by the Manhattan-based Court of International Trade. Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of “TRUMP?” What other reason could it be?

I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real “sleazebag” named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions. He openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court — I hope that is not so, and don’t believe it is! In any event, Leo left The Federalist Society to do his own “thing.” I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!

With all of that being said, I am very proud of many of our picks, but very disappointed in others. They always must do what’s right for the Country! In this case, it is only because of my successful use of Tariffs that many Trillions of Dollars have already begun pouring into the U.S.A. from other Countries, money that, without these Tariffs, we would not be able to get. It is the difference between having a rich, prosperous, and successful United States of America, and quite the opposite. The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political! Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY. Backroom “hustlers” must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!

The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly. If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power — The Presidency would never be the same!

This decision is being hailed all over the World by every Country, other than the United States of America. Radical Left Judges, together with some very bad people, are destroying America. Under this decision, Trillions of Dollars would be lost by our Country, money that will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. It would be the harshest financial ruling ever leveled on us as a Sovereign Nation. The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

A few thoughts:

1. It is not a judge’s job to “do what’s right for the Country,” as narrowly construed by the policy outcomes of the decisions they hand down. That is the job of lawmakers and the president. It’s a judge’s job to make sure the lawmakers and the president are doing what they view as “right” within the legal bounds.

2. All of the reasons to impose tariffs that Trump is describing here — “Trillions of Dollars” pouring into the country; “having a rich, prosperous, and successful United States of America” — sound great! But that doesn’t mean they fit the legal reasoning that Trump is required to meet according to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law he used to invoke them. In fact, revealingly, Trump’s stated reasons in the social post were notably somewhat distinct from the rationale he laid out under the IEEPA, which was to respond to national emergencies caused (in his view) by drug trafficking and trade deficits. In this way, Trump is bashing the judges for supposedly acting politically — while also calling on them to make their decisions based on political and economic outcomes, rather than on reasoning based in the law.

3. The process that Trump mocks for approving tariffs (going through Congress) just so happens to be the exact process for approving tariffs outlined by the Constitution. “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,” says Article I, Section 8. It does not mention any exception for occasions when the legislative process might involve “hundreds of politicians” and a timespan of “weeks, and even months”; in fact, the Framers designed the legislative process to be exactly that deliberative, so that public policy would result from compromises between a multitude of elected representatives, instead of just the will of one individual.

4. Trump then adds that judges reviewing whether his tariffs under the IEEPA fit the legal bar set out by the IEEPA would “completely destroy Presidential Power — The Presidency would never be the same!” It seems unlikely that doing so would be such a grave threat to the norms of the presidency, since only one president (Trump) has ever imposed tariffs under the IEEPA.

5. “Radical Left Judges”? Of the three judges on the U.S. Court of International Trade who ruled against Trump’s tariffs, one was appointed by Barack Obama. One was appointed by Ronald Reagan. And one was appointed by Trump himself (this appointee was a Democrat, but presumably not a “Radical Left” one). Say what you will about the Federalist Society (and Trump had quite a bit to say in this post), it is not a “Radical Left” organization.

6. According to the Court of International Trade, the president of the United States is “allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.” Just not under IEEPA. Helpfully, the judges flagged for him an alternative law, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, he could use to impose tariffs in response to trade deficits. That law only sanctions tariffs up to 15%, which can only last up to 150 days. But that, according to the judges, is the only tool Congress gives the president to address trade deficits with tariffs.

II. Flip Flops

If the Supreme Court ultimately strikes down Trump’s tariffs, it will likely be celebrated by many Democrats, even though the justices will very possibly rely on two doctrines that were decried by Democrats in the Biden era: the Major Questions Doctrine (the idea that the executive branch should only be able to take actions with major national significance if it has clear congressional authorization) and the Nondelegation Doctrine (the idea that Congress can’t delegate away powers explicitly given to the legislative brach by the Constitution).

The U.S. Court of International Trade tariff ruling is also the latest decision in recent months to question a Trump action based on his invocation of an emergency or wartime power, even when judges have expressed skepticism about whether such an emergency exists. (Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, which can only be invoked in case of a war or invasion by a foreign power, is another such example.)

Once again, any Democrats who cheer anti-Trump rulings on this basis will be executing a 180-degree turn. The party didn’t seem to mind presidential invocations of emergency powers when it was President Biden who tried to use them to cancel student loans or block evictions, both of which the Supreme Court also prevented.

Perhaps the two parties’ experiences during the Biden and Trump eras — trying to expand executive power, being rejected by the courts, and decrying it when the other side tries to do the same — will lead to a bipartisan embrace of the separation of powers. Now that both parties have seen what it is like to be have to go court to block presidential policies, maybe they will call a truce, together embracing theories that empower Congress (where they both share power) as the primary policymaking branch, instead of the executive, an unreliable place for either to store their faith, since they will only control it half the time (and judges so frequently block the branch, anyway).

I’m not particularly optimistic.

On Friday, the Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status given to more than more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti.

This decision will cause enormous consequences for those migrants, who entered the U.S. with permission from the government, and for the American economy, but from a legal standpoint, the ruling essentially allowed one president (Trump) to reverse the policy of another (Biden).

Once again, this shows the faultiness of making policy through presidential fiat. It’s the exact reason — just switching the names — why I’ve said that Republicans will regret advancing so much of their agenda through executive orders: it will be vulnerable to reversal by a successor. That is the case whether it’s Trump imposing tariffs that the next Democratic president could reverse, or Biden protecting immigrants who the next Republican president could deport.

Top Democrats quickly condemned the Supreme Court decision, but, of course, they will use the same legal pathways to reverse Trump actions once they regain power. If this temporary status would have been granted to immigrants by Congress — instead of, once again, by invoking an emergency power that, in some cases, presidents have simply been repeatedly extending since 2001 — it would have been much more difficult to revoke. (“Hundreds of politicians” would have had to “sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months,” after all.)

But instead, the Biden administration went through executive action, and so, just as with the many Trump actions that will one day be fed to the wood chipper, the next president was able to undo an action by his predecessor.

Live by executive power, die by executive power. One day, surely one of the two parties will notice that this keeps happening; eventually, maybe, one of them will try to seek an actually permanent solution to the problems they decry.

Happy June, everyone! If it’s Sunday, it’s time to answer your questions.

This feature is only open to paid subscribers; if you’re on the fence about signing up, I hope you considering doing so, in order to access fun bonus features like these mailbag columns.

When you subscribe, you’re also supporting my ability to send Wake Up To Politics free for the other five days it goes out. Oftentimes, I’m answering reader questions all week — even if it isn’t advertised that way. For example, this week, the most popular topic when I asked for questions was about the provision in the GOP reconciliation package that deals with contempt of court.

So, instead of putting the answer behind a paywall, I dedicated Friday’s issue to answering that question for everyone. When you create a paid subscription, you’re ensuring I can keep answering civic-minded questions like that — informing readers about what our government is doing — and making as many of them as I can available to anyone who wants to know the answer.

Your support is the only thing that keeps that going, and I am so incredibly grateful.

With that, let’s get to this week’s questions:

• Would Donald Trump have an easier time of implementing his agenda if the U.S. was a parliamentary democracy?

• How were all these different provisions added to the One Big Beautiful Bill?

• Is there any recourse if the Senate overrules its parliamentarian and adds in a non-budgetary provision?

• Will the U.S. ever limit the president’s pardon powers?

• How can you find out how your member of Congress voted on a piece of legislation?

And more!

A thought experiment

Q: I’ve got a thought experiment for you: How would Trump’s theory of presidency play out if we were in a (say, British) parliamentary system where he’d control both the legislative and executive powers? Would that solve his institutional problems, or do you think his approach is failing due to personality and/or other constraints regardless of the system?

I love this question, which is in response to my Thursday piece arguing that Donald Trump’s theory of the presidency — ignore Congress and do everything by executive action — has mostly backfired, now that his most sweeping efforts have been hobbled by the courts.

In a parliamentary system, as the questioner notes, the legislative and executive powers are fused under one roof, which makes it a lot easier for a governing party to accomplish what Trump (in my argument) has mostly been failing at: executing a policy agenda. If a majority of parliament members want to do something, there are a lot fewer roadblocks in their way.

In that way, you might think that Prime Minister Trump would have an easier time doing the sorts of things that, as I wrote on Thursday, courts have been preventing him from doing: imposing tariffs, changing the definition of citizenship, dismantling Cabinet departments, etc.

But I’m not so sure things would be that different, at least as it relates to those especially ambitious actions.

Read more

This morning, I want to start off with a recent town hall that was hosted by Rep. Mike Flood, a Republican from Nebraska. You can watch the video below, but it is basically 90 minutes of his constituents lining up to criticize him. America: where you can sue to stop a presidential order and get in a room to yell at your congressman — and he’ll actually stand there and listen. What a beautiful country!

Here’s the very first question that Flood was asked (which starts at around 19:11 in the video):

Q: Can you please tell us why you voted to approve a budget bill that includes Section 70302, which effectively prohibits federal courts from enforcing contempt orders…which would then allow current and future administrations to ignore those contempt orders by removing the enforcement capabilities?

Flood responded by saying that he opposed the section in question. “This provision was unknown to me when I voted for the bill,” he admitted.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this provision, which is found on page 544 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Republican package to cut taxes, increase defense and border security spending, and reduce the social safety net. Some of those messages have correctly framed the provision. Other’s haven’t.

So, I wanted to write up an explainer this morning, in order to give you a better understanding of a provision you may have seen discussed in the news but might not have all the details of. Plus, as an added benefit, at the end of it, you’ll be able to say you know more about the issue than a U.S. congressman!

As always, let’s start by looking at the text of the provision, so you have a roadmap of where we’re going. Then we’ll take a step back and unpack what it means.

SEC. 70302. RESTRICTION ON ENFORCEMENT.

No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

OK, now let’s give some background. As you can see, this whole thing hinges on Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), itself an obscure provision that you probably haven’t heard of.

To understand 65(c), and why it matters here, I want to start by giving some context on the legal orders that judges have been using when they’ve blocked President Trump’s policies.

Almost all of the orders we’ve seen have not been final rulings on the legal merits of a particular executive action. Our legal system tries to be very thorough, which means it can take a long time to produce that sort of ruling.

But it’s also good to have a way for a judge to stop something from happening in the meantime, to prevent a defendant from taking a certain action while the litigation is ongoing (since sometimes, if the person were to take the action in question, it would be irreversible and the whole case would be rendered moot).

“If there’s a dispute over who owns a tree and somebody wants to cut down the tree,” Notre Dame law professor Samuel Bray told me by way of example, “the court may say, ‘Nobody’s allowed to cut down the tree. I’m going to enjoin you from cutting down the tree until I can decide the case.’ That makes sense, because once somebody cuts it down, it’s over.” (Orders temporarily blocking deportations, to give a higher-profile example, follow a similar logic. Once someone is deported, as we have seen, it can be hard to reverse it, so a court might prevent that from happening until all the legal questions are decided.)

The short-term version of this is called a “temporary restraining order,” or “TRO,” which can last for up to 14 days. After that time, a TRO can be extended — or it can be converted into a longer-term “preliminary injunction,” or “PI,” which does the same thing (temporarily prevent something from happening during litigation) but can last for months or even years.

Per Bloomberg, as of May 1, judges had issued 110 temporary restraining orders (presented below as “short-term blocks) and 63 preliminary injunctions (“long-term blocks”) to prevent various Trump administration actions.

The basic rulebook federal courts have to follow in civil cases is known as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. These are rules the courts set for themselves through the Judicial Conference (the policymaking body of the federal judiciary) and the Supreme Court, although Congress can veto any changes.

There are 87 rules. Rule 65 covers temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions. Here’s Rule 65(c):

The court may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained. The United States, its officers, and its agencies are not required to give security.

What does that mean? Essentially, if a plaintiff asks for a TRO or a PI, and a court grants it, the court is supposed to ask the plaintiff to put up a certain amount of money in the form of a bond. If it turns out that the TRO or PI was correct, and the action you were suing to stop was illegal, you get that money back. But if it turns out that the injunction was wrong, the defendant gets that money, in order to cover any costs they may have sustained during the period when they had to keep doing (or not do) something even though it turns out the law was on their side all along.

As an example, let’s say the government fires John, and he sues, because John believes he was fired wrongly. The court might grant John a temporary order blocking his firing, and then a month later, a higher court might say that, actually, it was fine to fire him. Should the government have to pay John’s salary for that month, when it turns out they were in the right to fire him? An injunction bond ensures that John, not the government, would be on the hook for that money if he asked for (and received) an injunction even though, in retrospect, he shouldn’t have gotten one.

(Note: Just like when someone posts a bail bond after being arrested, John himself won’t have put up the entire cost of his salary at the outset. He’ll pay something like 1-10% of the cost, and a bond company will pay the rest. Then, if it turns out the injunction was wrongly granted, he’ll have to pay the full amount to the bond company.)

At least, that’s how you would expect this to work from the plain text of Rule 65(c). In reality, courts don’t always ask for injunction bonds — and almost never do when someone is suing the federal government. According to Bray’s research, which examined a sample of 502 preliminary injunctions issued in 2023, only 18% required an injunction bond; in cases involving the government, that number went down to 4%.

“For indigent plaintiffs and for public interest work, especially that’s not well funded, you want to make sure that constitutional rights don’t come with a price tag, and you don’t price people out of being able to vindicate their rights,” Bray told me, “because to get a preliminary injunction, they have to post the bond, and they may not have money to do that.”

This has upset the Trump administration, which has been hit with a lot of these temporary orders, even for some actions which will probably end up proving legal, which means (without injunction bonds) it will have to bear the costs of temporarily paying certain salaries, or funding certain programs, even if final court rulings eventually say they were actually within their rights to try to cancel those expenditures.

Back in March, a presidential memorandum made it the policy of the U.S. government to always request that judges set injunction bonds when plaintiffs sue the Trump administration, in order to avoid this sort of thing from happening. But it’s up to a judge whether or not to set an injunction bond, and judges have mostly ignored the administration’s requests.

“This Court is not bound by the memorandum and declines to adopt any policy that would have the effect of blocking opponents of the government from the courts,” U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel wrote in a recent order temporarily blocking the Trump administration from canceling $31 million in environmental grants.

Gergel added: “The Court thus imposes a nominal bond of zero dollars.”

In other cases, judges have taken the Trump administration up on their requests for an injunction bond, but usually not for the sort of amount they’re seeking. In March, when Judge James Bredar ordered the administration to temporarily reinstate thousands of employees at 18 agencies, he also required the 19 states (plus D.C.) that sued to each pay a $100 injunction bond.

Here’s a photocopy of the actual $100 check that was submitted by the D.C. attorney general’s office:

Suffice it to say, the Trump administration did not feel that $2,000 was enough to cover “the costs and damages” of it having to pay the salaries of thousands of employees who a higher court might eventually say they were able to fire. (Indeed, the circuit court in this case paused Bredar’s order, ruling that the administration was likely to succeed on the merits). The administration made that case to Bredar, but he was not persuaded.

So: all of that context brings us up to the present day. There’s a requirement, Rule 65(c), that isn’t really being followed (whether for a good reason or not is up to you to decide). It’s costing the Trump administration money, and the administration is getting more and frustrated with judges as a result.

This is where the One Big Beautiful Bill comes in. Now that we understand Rule 65(c) and the controversy around it, let’s bring back the text of the proposed provision:

SEC. 70302. RESTRICTION ON ENFORCEMENT.

No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

Basically, this is an attempt to pressure judges to start actually asking for injunction bonds — and also to pressure plaintiffs to stop asking for nationwide injunctions, another Trump administration bugaboo, which allow an injunction to apply more broadly than to just the plaintiffs in the case. (A fired employee trying to be re-hired might be OK putting up part of their own salary as an injunction bond. But they might think twice before asking for a nationwide injunction, covering any of their ex-colleagues in a similar position, sine suddenly the injunction bond would get quite a bit more expensive.)

But here comes the catch.

If judges don’t issue an injunction bond for a specific order, under this provision, they wouldn’t be able to enforce a contempt citation connected to that order. Contempt citations are the main tool judges use to ensure compliance with their orders: if a judge finds a defendant isn’t following their rulings, they can hold the defendant in contempt, which can then come with a monetary fine or even jail time.

Without the ability to hold people in contempt, courts will have a much harder time enforcing punishments if people flout their orders (unless they start issuing injunction bonds).

Seeing as the provision also prevents contempt citations for injunctions issued without a bond in the past — and judges are examining whether the Trump administration violated such injunctions in at least two separate cases — this could end up having an impact on several live controversies involving the president.

But how much of an impact? Well, the first thing to know about this provision is there’s a pretty solid chance it won’t become law.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is advancing through what’s known as the reconciliation process, which allows majority parties to get around the filibuster, but only if they follow some very specific guidelines. According to the Byrd Rule, you can only use reconciliation for tax-and-spending legislation; you can’t sneak in regular policy changes, unless they have a fiscal component that is more than “merely incidental” to the core of the provision.

It’s an open question whether this provision would meet that bar: while you could certainly argue it would have a fiscal impact (as we’ve seen, whether or not a judge issues an injunction bond can have an impact on the government’s bottom line), you could also argue that the impact is incidental, and not really the focus of the provision.

The Senate parliamentarian gets a first pass at deciding what does and doesn’t comply with the Byrd Rule, but it’s up to a majority of senators to make the final call. (Senators have never overruled the parliamentarian during the reconciliation process, and Republicans have said they won’t this year, but they also sidestepped her advice on a separate matter just last week.)

For the moment, let’s say the provision does get signed into law. It’s difficult to say with certainty what its impact would look like, because the provision is fairly sloppily written. Three issues that have been raised:

1. The provision says that it apply to any “injunction or temporary restraining order” that didn’t come with a Rule 65(c) injunction bond, even though Rule 65(c) only applies to preliminary injunctions. As written, it would seem that the One Big Beautiful Bill is also preventing contempt citations for final injunctions that lack injunction bonds (which is all of them, since final injunctions are court orders blocking something on the merits once the litigation has come to an end, which obviates the need for a bond). Theoretically, this could wreak havoc on all sorts of old cases, preventing judges from holding parties in contempt for violating final injunctions that have been in place for years. Bray said that would be a likely unconstitutional “intrusion on core judicial power” to enforce their final orders.

2. There’s a pretty obvious workaround. This new provision says that courts have to issue injunction bonds, but there’s nothing say the injunction bond can’t just be $1 or some other minuscule amount.

3. The text doesn’t only apply to contempt citations for future injunctions — for which the $1 workaround could easily be imposed — but also to contempt citations for past injunctions for which a judge wouldn’t have known about this provision when they issued their injunction. This could cause some temporary confusion around active temporary injunctions that lacked injunction bonds, but Bray told me that a judge would likely be able to dissolve their existing injunction and issue a new one, just with an injunction bond this time (potentially of only $1), which means the impact would be muted for existing and future injunctions.

Dan Huff, who worked as a lawyer in the first Trump White House and who helped bring Rule 65(c) to the administration’s attention with a Fox News op-ed in February, expressed confidence to me that future drafts of the bill will be amended to solve for Issue #1, clarifying that the provision was only ever intended to address preliminary, not final, injunctions.

“I don’t think that was purposeful,” said Huff, who has been in touch with the White House and the authors of the provision throughout this process. (“Taking away the effect on permanent injunctions would remove the central constitutional problem with the bill as passed by the House,” Bray told me.)

Huff said that he hopes the $1 loophole is also removed, by adding language reinforcing the Rule 65(c) requirement that the injunction bond be an amount “proper to pay the costs and damages sustained.”

However, it would still presumably be up to judges to decide what constitutes a “proper” amount, so that loophole will be hard for Republicans to remove. “It is inevitably discretionary what the amount of the bond is,” Bray said. “I don’t see a way you can reduce that to rule.”

If the change to Issue #1 is made, and if we assume that Issue #3 could be removed by judges simply dissolving their injunctions and creating new ones with a nominal injunction bond, suddenly the impact of the provision would start to shrink.

It might end up pressuring judges to start asking for injunction bonds, which could price some plaintiffs out of temporary relief (though not impact their ability to win permanent relief) or encourage them not to seek such broad relief (perhaps asking on behalf of a more targeted group). But it’s not clear judges’ contempt powers would substantively change, since bonds could simply be set at a low amount (most likely even for existing preliminary injunctions which could be dissolved and re-issued with $1 bonds).

“It will just be a small logistical hurdle or hiccup for the district court judges, because they can just set the bond at $1 and then it will be business as usual,” Bray said.

To Bray, who shares the belief that Rule 65(c) should be used more often, the House provision is a “complete disaster” as written. He agrees that litigants should more often have skin in the game when asking for potentially flawed (and costly) temporary injunctions, but he said the above issues make this provision an ineffective (and potentially unconstitutional) answer to the problem.

“I don’t know of a way to do it specifically,” he said. “But I know this way is terrible.”

If this provision survives the Byrd Rule process (which remains an open question), we’ll see whether any changes are made to address these issues, which could either reduce the provision’s impact (if Issue #1 is fixed) or expand it (if a way around Issue #2 is discovered). Until then, it’s hard to say how much the provision will change in practice.

This morning’s newsletter was all about the legal setbacks Donald Trump is being dealt, and how his theory of his second term — that he would be able to achieve far-reaching policy outcomes by acting unilaterally — has been largely foiled by federal judges.

One of my key examples was last night’s ruling from the U.S. Court of International Trade striking down most of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Then, shortly after I clicked “send,” another ruling was handed down in a separate case that also blocked the tariffs.

“Since the Founding, the Constitution has vested the ‘Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises’ with Congress,” U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote. “The President has no independent discretion to impose or alter tariffs.” So you can add that to my list of examples.

Do you have any questions about that piece? Or about my broader analysis of Trump’s policy (and political) track record? Or about anything else? Now’s the time to ask them! Drop your questions in the comments and I’ll try to answer it in my Sunday mailbag column.

Leave a comment

Other recent topics we’ve covered that I’m happy to discuss:

• The Republican reconciliation package, which passed the House last week (more on that in tomorrow’s newsletter)

• My interview with “Original Sin” co-author Alex Thompson

• The prospect of a Senate without the filibuster, which was covered in the New York Times this morning (eight days after we covered it here 😉)

Or anything else that’s on your mind!

If you have questions, I want to answer them. Fire away.

Here is a partial list of the most aggressive actions Donald Trump has tried to take since being re-elected president:

• Dismantling an entire Cabinet department

• Redefining the meaning of U.S. citizenship

• Changing the requirements to vote in federal elections

• Upending America’s trade relationships

Those are big, huge projects. Each of them generated massive news coverage, and with good reason. If successful, they would represent an enormous flex of presidential power towards Trump’s desired policy ends. But have they been successful?

It’s important to cover these ambitious actions when they’re announced, but it’s also important to follow up a few weeks later and examine: How many of them are actually happening? I’m glad you asked. Here is the list of the above actions that are currently being implemented:

That wasn’t a typo. By next week, none of those flashy and dramatic policy announcements are slated to be policy accomplishments. In February, I wrote about the two paths Trump could choose from to try to achieve his objectives: the harder, more arduous path of seeking congressional approval or the tantalizing shortcut of going it alone and making policy by executive action. I said then that the gamble that he could get more done through the latter route “represents a flawed theory of the presidency,” built on incorrect assumptions about how presidents make change and achieve success.

Trump did not take my advice. (His loss!) Several months later, his flawed theory is now skating awfully close to becoming a failed theory, one which only looks less successful with each passing day.

Last night, when his beloved tariffs were struck down by a unanimous panel of judges, Trump’s theory of change sustained perhaps its most substantial blow yet.

Terry Cycling is a company that specializes in women’s cycling apparel, selling everything from biking shorts ($135) to water bottles ($19). It is based in Burlington, Vermont. It is family-owned. It has 16 employees.

According to its president Nikolaus Holm, the company — which imports goods from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Italy, and the Philippines — stands to lose an estimated $1.2 million if the tariff regime announced by Trump remains in effect next year.

“Tariffs will become the single largest line item operating expense on Terry Cycling’s Profit & Loss Statement,” Holm said. “It would be larger than payroll.”

In many countries, that financial reality notwithstanding, if the head of state decided that Terry Cycling would have to pay those tariffs, the company would have very little recourse. No more explanation would be needed besides the leader’s whims.

But here, Terry Cycling — along with 12 states and three other companies — filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade, an obscure tribunal that handles trade disputes. They alleged that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which Trump used to impose his sweeping tariffs, does not give a president the power to set tariff rates at all. The 1977 law allows presidents to “regulate…importation or exportation” in the case of a national emergency; Trump was the first president to read this provision as a grant of tariff powers.

A three-judge panel of the court considered arguments from both the administration and its challengers. Last night, they issued their decision. In a 49-page opinion, the judges said that they did not agree with the challengers that IEEPA could never be used by a president to impose tariffs. However, they did rule that the law does not “delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the president.” (Emphasis mine.) There are limits on the tariffs a president can impose unilaterally, the court said, and Trump did not respect them.

In the case of the so-called “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump announced on April 2, aka “Liberation Day” — the rates that swung wildly by country, depending on our trade deficit with them, and are currently paused (except for China) until July — the court found that Trump was entirely setting his own tariff rates without any congressional input, going beyond the narrow, temporary changes that would be allowed under IEEPA.

Further, if the 1977 law was intended to allow the president to “impose whatever tariff rates he deems desirable” — and the judges said they did not see evidence that was the intention — that would have been unconstitutional anyway, they added. The Constitution gives Congress power over tariffs; one branch of government can delegate some of their powers to another, but to completely fork over tariff authority to the president “would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power” to the executive.

Under the Constitution, a president cannot declare war without Congress. Per this ruling, they can’t singlehandedly declare a trade war, either.

The judges also took up the 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico, and 20% tariffs against China, that Trump imposed earlier in his presidency, which also used IEEPA but in response to a national emergency Trump declared around drug trafficking from those countries. (The national emergency in the “Liberation Day” tariffs was trade deficits.)

The exact wording of IEEPA states that the authorities granted by the law “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared.” The judges found that this second round of tariffs was not permissible because they do not “deal with” drug trafficking in any discernible way.

They wrote:

“Deal with” connotes a direct link between an act and the problem it purports to address. A tax deals with a budget deficit by raising revenue. A dam deals with flooding by holding back a river. But there is no such association between the act of imposing a tariff and the “unusual and extraordinary threat[s]” that the Trafficking Orders purport to combat.

Customs’s collection of tariffs on lawful imports does not evidently relate to foreign governments’ efforts “to arrest, seize, detain, or otherwise intercept” bad actors within their respective jurisdictions.

Under the Trump administration’s logic, the judges said, a president could impose tariffs as a way to exert leverage on another country to produce any concession they desired, no matter if it was connected to the national emergency he declared. “Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers ‘may not be exercised for any other purpose’ than to ‘deal with’ a threat,” they wrote.

The panel — composed of judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Trump himself (though it’s worth noting that the Trump appointee is a Democrat) — skipped over the step of temporarily pausing the tariffs and unanimously issued a summary judgement instead, which means this is the final word from that court. Any relief for Trump will have to come from a higher court; the administration has already appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

In the meantime, unless the circuit court says otherwise, the Court of International Trade has ordered the administration to stop enforcement of both the trafficking and “reciprocal” tariffs within 10 days.

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Trump’s tariffs were probably the most audacious realization of his vision of an all-powerful presidency — one that could unilaterally set the terms of America’s trade relationships across the world, as stock markets and consumer prices rose and fell in response to his commands — but many of his other, far-reaching actions have also been killed in the cradle by federal judges.

In March, Trump announced that he was fulfilling the long-held conservative dream of dismantling the Department of Education. The announcement was widely covered by the media, including me. In fact, I went to the White House to cover Trump signing the executive order in-person.

“Inside the room as the Education Department was abolished,” read the subtitle of my piece. “Or was it?”

It wasn’t, it turned out. Similar to the judges on the Court of International Trade, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun didn’t rule that a president could never fire his own employees or restructure the agencies within his control — in fact, that’s one of the areas in which Trump is finding the most legal success — but he did rule last week that there are very clearly limits on these powers.

And a big one is that, if Congress mandates that an agency it created must carry out certain functions, the agency needs to at least have enough employees to carry out those functions. Judge Joun wrote that those challenging the changes at the Education Department have “demonstrated that the Department will not be able to carry out its statutory functions—and in some cases, is already unable to do so” without the staff the administration has laid off.

The administration’s lawyers, Joun added, have “proffered no evidence to the contrary.”

And so it has gone for many of Trump’s most attention-grabbing moves. His attempt to strip birthright citizenship from the U.S.-born children of unauthorized migrants? Blocked by four federal judges. His effort to change the voter registration process? Blocked. His order to halt federal support for gender-affirming care for minors? Blocked. The U.S. Institute of Peace? Reopened. The detention of Rümeysa Öztürk? Ended. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil? Ruled likely unconstitutional.

In each case, Trump could have gone through Congress to achieve a certain policy objective. He chose not to. As a result, many of his policy objectives are simply not in the process of happening.

Of course, some of them are. And some of the policies I’ve mentioned above could very well be sanctioned by higher courts as they continue through the legal process. And that, too, would be the system working. The president is trying to expand his powers; judges appointed by both parties are thoughtfully examining whether he can do so. Sometimes, they are ruling in his favor. Very often, they are not, dooming his agenda — or, rather, confirming that he has doomed his agenda by trying to implement it himself, rather than following the process set out by the Constitution.

In some cases, the Trump administration is being dealt setbacks even in disputes that leaders of civil society appeared to have viewed as a lost cause. Three of Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms have been struck down, including one in a Tuesday ruling calling the directive “unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers.” (Other law firms had preemptively signed agreements with Trump in order to avoid such orders.) A judge has also paused Trump’s efforts to block Harvard from enrolling international students. (Other schools had preemptively agreed to various concessions to avoid such punitive action.)

In other cases, the administration appears to now be realizing that Congress is their best (only?) bet for effecting long-term change. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) generated all sorts of headlines at the beginning of the administration, but it has been largely ineffective in its goal: unilaterally reducing government spending (something even Musk has acknowledged in his farewell tour).

Despite all the bluster, the U.S. government spent more money in April 2025 ($591 billion) than it did in April 2024 ($566 billion). Perhaps that is why, only now, the administration is preparing to ask Congress to codify $9.4 billion in DOGE cuts, a belated recognition that the spending can’t really be cut until lawmakers sign off.

Some Republican lawmakers have started to get antsy, urging their leaders to put more of Trump’s executive orders up for votes as legislation, in order to ensure they actually happen. “Codify President Trump’s EOs now,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) wrote on X. “If we just knew somebody who could codify all this good stuff,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) wrote in response to a post about one executive order recently. “Hmmmm.”

I wrote above that Trump’s theory of action is “failing.” How will we know if it’s failed?

That will depend on two variables: how higher courts, especially the Supreme Court, handle Trump’s uses of executive power; and whether Trump complies with court orders.

We don’t have a huge sample size of decisions (yet — many more will come this month) to predict how the Supremes will tackle many of the Trump orders, but there are indications that at least some will be treated skeptically. At least, that was my takeaway when I covered the administration’s first in-person foray before the court this month, where even his own appointees seemed dubious about his birthright citizenship order (in addition to the fact that, in other cases, the court majority has appeared to treat the administration as though it is not acting in good faith).

As for compliance, we do have a large sample size, considering the sheer number of Trump orders that have been blocked. Importantly, there are two pending cases — concerning the Alien Enemies Act flights to El Salvador and the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — where judges are currently examining whether the administration complied with its orders. We will see if those judges issue contempt findings, and then how higher courts respond, and then how the administration responds to those responses.

But outside of those two pending deportation cases, both with unique circumstances, I would describe the Trump administration’s response to unfavorable court orders as “grudging compliance.” Even in cases where the administration tried to find loopholes and was initially accused of flouting court orders, like with FEMA grants and foreign aid, the administration is now reporting its compliance after being reprimanded by judges.

Notably, in one of the cases I highlighted Tuesday — in which the administration was ordered to “facilitate” the return of a man wrongfully deported to Mexico (who is now in Guatemala) — Trump officials reported last night that they are working on chartering a flight to bring him back to the U.S.

This doesn’t make it any less important to follow up on cases where the administration has been accused of non-compliance. Nor does the fact that so many of Trump’s orders are being struck down as unconstitutional making it any less important that he is issuing such legally questionable orders in the first place.

But two things can be true at once. It’s important to cover Trump’s aggressive actions when they are unveiled and important to note how few of them are materializing into reality.

Does Trump care? Maybe not. Outside the realm of hard policy, several of Trump’s more personal objectives — rewarding allies, lining his own pockets — appear to be moving along apace. While there are limits (according to Wednesday’s ruling) to the tariff powers given to the president by Congress, there are no limits to the pardon powers given to the president by the Constitution. Just yesterday, Trump continued his pattern of granting pardons almost exclusively to allies (including the son of a top donor). Those are certainly successes (in the sense that Trump set out to do something, and then it happened), but not the kind with which a lasting legacy is built.

To be fair, it’s not clear that Trump’s lack of substantial accomplishments is hurting him politically. In fact, it’s possible that the less Trump accomplishes, the more popular he would be.

His approval rating started dipping after his most dramatic policy move (the tariffs), reaching a nadir of -9.7% last month, but has now stabilized near pre-“Liberation Day” levels, at -4.9%. (In this way, Trump can thank the Court of International Trade for confiscating the knife he was using to stab his own approval rating in the back.)

Trump’s ratings on the issues tell a similar story: opinions of his handling of immigration fell as his immigration agenda became more publicized (even going briefly underwater at the height of the Abrego Garcia focus); opinions of his handling of inflation dipped post-tariffs but are now recovering as well.

From a political lens, judges trampling on his agenda might help Trump, not hurt him.

But, strictly from a policy standpoint, you’re either accomplishing things or you’re not. When Trump exits office on January 20, 2029, he will either leave with the sort of substantive policy record that tends to place presidents in the honored pantheon — think Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan — or with the sort of easily reversible orders that leave a president bereft of any long-lasting, signature achievements.

Trump staked his presidency on a theory that he could achieve the former status all by himself, and that neither a Republican-controlled Congress nor a judiciary packed with his own appointees would get in his way. The calculation that Congress wouldn’t challenge him has mostly proven right. But judges, in many cases, are almost propping up the legislature against its will: asserting Congress’ role as the lawmaking branch even when lawmakers themselves don’t seem to want the mantle. Trump’s gamble isn’t working.

After returning to office, Trump embarked on a historic run of executive orders, which were met (depending on the audience) with extreme panic and celebration. But four months in, after judges have thrown many of those orders in the garbage, he doesn’t have much to show for it.