The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The Senate has now passed President Trump’s big bill that cuts Medicaid by around $1 trillion in order to fund a huge tax cut for the rich. Working-class voters will get badly hurt by this bill, but Trump doesn’t care. He’s now demanding that House Republicans pass it as it is—Medicaid cuts and all. In a series of extraordinary tweets, Vice President JD Vance revealed exactly how the whole scam is going to work. Over and over, he downplayed the Medicaid cuts while declaring that what really matters is the bill’s increased funding for migrant detention and deportations. See how this works? MAGA voters shouldn’t spend any time thinking about their pending loss of Medicaid; think about how immigrants will suffer under this bill instead. So how far can Trump, Vance, and Republicans get with this ruse? To find out, today we’re talking to someone who is on the road right now as we speak, talking to voters about this bill: Kristen Crowell, executive director of the advocacy group Fair Share America. Thanks for coming on, Kristen.
Kristen Crowell: Thanks so much for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So the Senate just passed Trump’s bill. Just to reiterate some numbers on this, the Congressional Budget Office found that it will cut over $1 trillion on health care—nearly $1 trillion of those cuts to Medicaid—while leaving over 11 million people more without health insurance. The bottom line is that between this other cuts to the safety net and the massive tax cuts for the wealthy it entails, the bill at the most fundamental level is a large upward redistribution of wealth. Your thoughts on what just happened?
Crowell: Well, thank you. I’m right now sitting in Rochester, Minnesota—and as you mentioned, I’ve been traveling the country talking to voters and citizens who are so furious and angry and understand that this reconciliation bill is a giveaway of our tax dollars to fund another tax cut for the rich while cutting vital services like health care and food assistance that families right now are relying on as a lifeline. This bill is the most egregious, immoral, hostile bill that has ever faced our communities. It is the largest redistribution of wealth that our country has ever seen. The people that we speak to every single day are angry and afraid of what is going to happen to their families and their communities if this bill does, in fact, get passed by the House.
Sargent: I want to get to that in a second and hear what you’re seeing out there. But first, I want to read from a tweet thread from JD Vance. He put out a bunch of them like this: “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Kristen, first of all, JD Vance is lying his ass off about the scale of the problem of undocumented immigrants getting benefits—but put that aside for a sec. By citing the “minutiae” of Medicaid policy and saying it’s “immaterial” compared to the money that’s going to ICE, he’s quite literally telling Trump voters that they shouldn’t think about the fact that they’re about to lose their Medicaid. Instead, they should think about how many migrants are now going to be jailed and frog-marched onto deportation planes. The swindle here is as clear as day. You’ve been doing politics for a while, Kristen. Have you ever heard the scam laid out quite that way?
Crowell: This is classic diversionary tactics, like, Don’t look at the thing we’re actually doing, which is shredding the safety net, ripping up our promise to cover you under Medicaid and provide food assistance. Look over here at something that we’ve been telling you to be very afraid of. But I don’t think it’s going to land. I don’t believe that the American public is going to buy the set of lies, no matter how many tweets JD Vance pumps out in the next 24 hours.
Sargent: What are you seeing out there on this? Can you tell us?
Crowell: We’re on a bus tour traveling the country. We started in New York, and we’re going all the way to California. Today is the eleventh day on the road. We’ve had 20 stops. And at every single stop, the predominant concern—whether you are a health care provider, a doctor, or a home health care aide, or whether you are reliant on Medicaid as your coverage—[is that] people are really terrified of what this will mean for their health care, what this will mean if they have to go into medical debt, what this [will] mean for families that are already incredibly stretched. And they’re also really angry because Trump and the GOP promised them something different. We see Trump voters showing up at our events to say, This is not what we voted for. We didn’t sign up. They promised us that they were going to reduce costs, that our grocery bills were going to go down, that they were going to fight for families like mine. And so I don’t believe that the American public is going to buy any number of these lies that are being put out by JD Vance or others that are trying to shill for this horrible piece of legislation.
Sargent: Well, speaking of what Trump voters are thinking, Trump’s got a sense of what he thinks he’s going to be able to get them to think. He did this long rant on Truth Social, calling on House Republicans to pass the Senate bill. He said this, “Additionally, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Benefits are not being cut, but are being STRENGTHENED and PROTECTED from the Radical and Destructive Democrats by eliminating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse from those Programs.” Now, Kristen, this is an old GOP argument: slash the safety net and then blame welfare cheats for it. It seems to me the public ebbs and flows on this. It has a lot to do with who’s in the White House. Do you have a sense of what people are thinking when it comes to that component of it—whether Medicaid is riddled with fraud and needs to be purged of layabouts who are taking advantage of it, or not? Sometimes over the last 50 years, there have been periods where people believe that, but then other periods where they don’t. I’m wondering what you’re hearing on that precise point.
Crowell: We are hearing people stand up and give testimony at town hall events, basically saying straight up, Do you want to call my health care waste, fraud, and abuse? Nearly half of the babies born in this country are born under Medicaid coverage. Are all of the babies that are born waste, fraud, and abuse? So I just think we’re in a different time. We had a farmer this morning talk about the impact that this has on his small family farm and how even before this reconciliation package, crops are sitting in fields rotting because of this administration’s cuts to the USDA. So they don’t buy that there is this massive waste, fraud, and abuse element. They believe in the community. They understand that these are our neighbors; these are our senior citizens; these are the doctors and nurses. And they trust each other. They’re telling each other the stories of what the implications [are] in a really different way.
And like you said, I’ve been doing this a long time; I’m getting up there. And it is very different. This is a true grassroots populist movement. And I do not believe that the voters are going to buy this. And as this goes to the House, I would just caution the members of the House caucus, the GOP: Do not believe your voters are going to fall for this rhetoric. They are angry and they are fired up. Just this afternoon, we were in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where 130 people marched to the Republican congressman’s office demanding to be met with, demanding to be heard—and they would not open the door. I think there will be massive ramifications for leadership siding with billionaires over their community members and their families.
Sargent: Are there any chance at all this thing gets slowed down in the House, looking at how “moderates” among House Republicans have been handling this debate? They write some sternly worded letter saying, We’re really, really upset about the Medicaid cuts. And then of course, they voted for the House version of the bill, which cut Medicaid by almost as much. Any chance House Republicans stand in the way of it? It seems to me they’re just going to rubber stamp it, with maybe a few little dog-and-pony show moments in which they’re pretending to make changes.
Crowell: I still remain hopeful that there’s a handful of them that are watching what played out in the Senate debate over the last several days. We now have members of the Republican Party standing up—Senator Tillis on the floor saying, This will decimate Medicaid in my state. You have the statement that Senator Murkowski put out afterward, Well, it got better for Alaska, but it’s really bad for the rest of the country. And they’re even admitting this is really bad. The more you know, the worse this bill gets. So I’m still hopeful. And we are seeing [that] as more of the American public is understanding what is at stake, the uptick in activity, the uptick of calls that are going in.… These House members are going to get pounded in the next 24–48 hours by their constituents. And so we’re really calling the question: Do you have a spine and will you stand with your district, or are you going to do what the party says and what Donald Trump says?
And the House—when it moved to the Senate, there was one vote to spare. There are Republican members of Congress that do not want to vote for this. And the question is, Will they have the courage to stand with their constituents?
Sargent: I’ve pulled up the statement that you just mentioned from Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and it really is shocking in many ways. It’s quite revealing, actually. She says pretty much straight-out that the bill isn’t close to good enough. She says it’s going to hurt the country. There’s one part where she says, “It is the people of Alaska that I worry about the most, especially when it comes to the potential loss of social safety net programs—Medicaid coverage and SNAP benefits—that our most vulnerable populations rely on.” She says that straight-out, then lists a few things that she got into the bill to rectify that. But then she also says, “This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it. My sincere hope is that this is not the final product.” That’s remarkable stuff. Now, it’s frustrating as all hell that she voted for the damn thing in spite of all this.
Crowell: Exactly.
Sargent: Right? But she did basically say that every Republican knows that it’s a piece of shit that’s going to hurt a lot of people and it’s going to hurt Republicans’ own constituents. What do you make of it?
Crowell: I think the 50 senators that pass the buck to the House are pretty spineless and are completely out of touch with their own voters. And again, now all eyes go to the House. The pressure that is building on the ground is not going to let up. It is only going to increase. We are out on the ground. There are canvassing. There are phone banking. No member of Congress can legitimately say they did not hear from their constituents. Their constituents are angry. And it’s wide-ranging. We talk to the health care sector—doctors, nurses, patients. We talk to faith leaders, farmers, local electeds. We had a school board member give public testimony this morning. State representatives are standing up and saying the damage that this would do to the state budgets … and there’s no way that the states can absorb trillions of dollars of cuts to services that we all rely on. So I just think the House is in for a rude awakening of where the American public stands with this reconciliation bill. And I continue to remain hopeful that there are a handful of Republicans in the House that are going to stand up and say, Actually, we are not going to allow this to happen. We are not going to allow this to happen on our watch. But it is harrowing to watch this all go down.
Sargent: It’s interesting that you bring up the state reps. The level of spinelessness in the Republican Party to let this thing become law is really remarkable. It doesn’t just stop with Trump and his advisers and the Republican Congress. It requires input and complicity from all levels of the Republican Party. You have these state representatives and governors—Republican governors—who know that their state is going to get the crap kicked out of it as a result of this. That’s the whole point: By cutting Medicaid at this volume, you shunt a lot of the burden over onto states that can’t bear the load. And for those Republicans to just put up with that—to allow their own states to get this huge burden thrown on them—is just incredible.
Crowell: It’s mind-blowing, and the effects that this will have on rural hospitals? I was in Pennsylvania a week ago. There are at least four rural hospitals that will close if this bill goes through. I really don’t understand how they can just tow the party line when so many families’ lives are at stakes and how it will decimate the local and state economy as well.
Sargent: I just want to return to one point about JD Vance before we close this out, which is that when he goes through this routine where he essentially says, Don’t worry about the Medicaid cuts, you’re going to get to watch a lot of immigrants suffer, I don’t think they even realize how unpopular the immigration side of their argument is. It’s as if he’s saying, Oh, the Medicaid cuts are all right, the public is going to love what we’re about to do on deportations. Guess what? No, they don’t. They don’t like it at all. What we’re seeing now is on Trump’s “strongest” issue—immigration—disapproval of him is high, particularly for the deportations, which are faring really terribly in the polls. You’re seeing major public backlash against that. So they’re basically saying, Don’t look at this one deeply unpopular thing we’re doing—cutting the heck out of Medicaid. Go look at this other deeply unpopular thing we’re doing—deporting day laborers and landscapers and gardeners and carpenters. What are you seeing out there on the immigration front? Are you seeing a shift in how the public is perceiving that stuff?
Crowell: Again, it’s Washington politicians out of touch with what happens in local communities. Immigrants are part of our communities. They are working on family farms. Their kids go to school at the same schools. To scapegoat an entire population and use the rhetoric, it just doesn’t land. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe the American public buys that, and it’s certainly not a trade-off they’re willing to make. It is certainly not the trade-off that they’re willing to make—to give up their health care coverage.
Sargent: So how does this play out from here until Election Day 2026? [If] this thing goes through, they’ve obviously structured this bill so that some of the impacts don’t hit before the midterms. But we’re going to see a ton of discussion in local media around the country, and we know independents care a lot about local media. We’re going to see a lot of discussion of rural hospitals closing. We’re going to see a lot of discussion of people fretting about their health coverage and so forth. Does this sustain until Election Day 2026, and what does that look like?
Crowell: Absolutely, I believe it does. I have never seen people so angry and willing to work so hard to stop this piece of legislation. And it is not just going to get swept under the rug, and people are not going to just go back to business as usual. And Fair Share America and our partners are going to continue to organize to make sure that we are building a different kind of politics where we are putting the billionaire class in their place.
Again, the only thing I can say to the House Republicans right now is underestimate us at your own peril. This is going to be the driving force of the midterms. There is no way to put this genie back in the bottle, and the public is ripshit pissed. And they’re not going to be satisfied by talking points from JD Vance or Donald Trump. This is their day-to-day life that is at stake, and they totally understand it.
Sargent: Just want to close on this one question. There is some talk out there about how, if this thing passes, it could demoralize the Democratic base—essentially make people think that fighting is doing nothing at this point. And obviously, Trump’s authoritarianism and a lot of the autocratic stuff they’re doing is designed to make people feel that way. But I really worry that when they see something like this pass— something this horrible—that, paradoxically, it just leads people to throw up their hands and say, We’re defeated. I really hope that doesn’t happen, and I think it probably won’t—but I’d love to hear you tell me it won’t.
Crowell: I don’t think that will happen. Again, going back to this is something I’ve never seen before, that people are coming together. They’re doing so much work right now and so much advocacy against this bill, but they’re doing it together. People want to be in public spaces together. They want to organize. And I think there’s going to be a requirement that we understand that we’re going to have to all step up and help each other—and that the Republican leadership put us in this position. And never again will we allow them to lie to our face and get our votes.
It is just a very different populist movement. And I have faith. I have tremendous faith in the people right now that we understand the stakes. We will never be duped again, and we’re not going back. And we’re going to continue to organize if we can’t defeat this bill; the midterms are not that far away. And we are trying to build a different kind of politics writ large that is about our families, [that] is about local organizing, local community, and taking care of each other and paying our fair share so that the government is responsive to our needs and not the billionaire class needs.
Sargent: Well, we did see that happen in 2018. There was a different kind of energy, a different kind of organizing, and I’m really hoping it’s replicated. Kristen Crowell, it was really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on with us.
Crowell: Thank you so much.
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