The scene was sublime, and patriotic Americans had much to celebrate.
It was Friday, July 4, and there on the south lawn of the White House was Donald Trump, and all around him were beaming lawmakers and service members and their families. They were gathered for a picnic in celebration of our Armed Forces and commemorating our nation’s Declaration of Independence for the 249th time.
But that wasn’t all. During normal times, such an Independence Day celebration would’ve sufficed. These, though, aren’t normal times, and Trump, the America First President, had one other matter to attend to.
A day earlier, after a sleepless night and a long and bruising battle, House Speaker Mike Johnson brought down the gavel on Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “On this vote,” Johnson said, “the yays are 218, the nays are 214. The motion is adopted.”
:whitecheckmark: The House of Representatives just officially PASSED the One Big Beautiful Bill.
The largest middle-class tax cut in American history — and so much more — is on its way to President Trump’s desk.
MAGA! pic.twitter.com/V3U8xhenrS
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 3, 2025
The chamber then erupted, and chants of “USA! USA! USA!” broke out. And with that, the bill headed to Trump’s desk for his Independence Day signature, just as he’d asked.
It was, without a doubt, Speaker Johnson’s finest moment. And it was also Donald Trump’s greatest legislative win. As I noted a while back, OBBBA is the Trump agenda, and failure was never an option.
Trump had been in Iowa on Thursday, and he marked the event’s significance. “There could be no better birthday present for America,” he said, “than the phenomenal victory we achieved just hours ago when Congress passed the one big, beautiful bill to Make America Great Again.”
Indeed, there’s much to like in OBBBA. As the editors at National Review write: “It is a significant conservative policy win that the bill makes permanent the meat of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017: the individual income tax brackets, the doubled standard deduction, the repeal of personal exemptions, the cap on the mortgage interest deduction, and the near-elimination of the alternative minimum tax and the estate tax.”
OBBBA is also a win for pro-lifers, as it includes language that forbids Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds.
But, as National Review adds: “The spending side of the bill is much worse than the tax side. Despite the caterwauling from Democrats and the media about drastic cuts, it hardly cuts spending at all. The fundamental problem with American fiscal policy is that relatively low taxes are funding relatively high spending. Republicans get the tax side right while getting the spending side only slightly less wrong than the Democrats.”
The left-leaning scaremongers at the Congressional Budget Office say the bill will add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years and leave millions of us without health insurance. But as our Nate Jackson cautioned last week, the CBO’s scoring is just plain garbage: “It does not, as the CBO says, ‘add $3.3 trillion to the debt’ over the next 10 years. That’s based on the CBO’s bogus baseline scoring, which treats the tax cuts as if they will expire and then calculates the ‘cost’ of extending them.”
Democrats, of course, are upset, but they aren’t the only ones. Elon Musk, bless his heart, is forming a new political party. “By a factor of 2 to 1,” Musk posted, “you want a new political party and you shall have it! When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”
Yes, Americans want choice. But they also want what Donald Trump ran on. And he’s delivering.
The Democrats, though, are in a heckuva bind. Yeah, they say, let’s rile up our base about a spending bill that closes the border, rebuilds our military, reforms Fraudicaid, and delivers the greatest tax cut in American history — including no taxes on tips or overtime. Yeah, yeah, and while we’re at it, let’s all of a sudden become deficit hawks and lament the size of the national debt. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.
James Carville, for example, is the increasingly unhinged gift who keeps on giving. Recall what the Ragin’ Cajun told his audience of dead-enders and true believers just four months ago: “I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse, in particularly a collapse in public opinion.”
Some collapse, huh?
And this weekend, Carville was at it again, sounding downright Linus-like in his Great Pumpkinness during an appearance on CNN. First he lauded the Democrats for voting en masse against OBBBA without a single defection — as if they had a choice, and as if such knee-jerk obstruction is actually a virtue. Then he primed and pull-started the ol’ prediction machine for untold dozens of Anderson Cooper groupies: “We’re going to pick up more than 40 House seats. … I mean, you know, political anthropologists are going to look back at this, and it’s going to be called a mass extinction event because there are a lot of them are going to be extinct.”
Mark it down: “more than 40 House seats.” Carville thus thinks the 2026 midterms will be a repeat of the 2018 midterms. And he obviously thinks OBBBA will be this cycle’s animating principle, its Russia collusion hoax.
On the one hand, we can’t blame Carville. He’s become a political drug dealer, and he’s continuing to push a drug called “Hope” to an increasingly strung-out and zombie-like customer base.
These days, it’s got to be tough to be a Democrat.
