The Big, Awful Budget Bill is out of committee. Passage in the House is another hurdle. But never fear; the Big Man himself, Donald Trump, came to Capitol Hill and ordered congressional Republicans to pass the bill asap.

However, the bill Trump was pitching isn’t the one that was just released by the committee.

Trump told Republicans he didn’t want Medicaid cuts beyond rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“Don’t fuck around with Medicaid,” Trump said, according to a source in the room.

But the current bill makes dramatic Medicaid reductions, more than $700 billion over the next decade, with Republicans considering additional changes that would cut hundreds of billions more in order to get conservatives on board.

He told Republicans the bill was a choice between “the biggest tax cut in the history of our country” or “a 68% tax increase.” Neither claim is remotely true. The bill would largely extend current individual tax rates, and if the rates expired, most people would see a 2% or 3% increase in their taxes.

And, he suggested, politically, it wasn’t really wise to increase the state and local tax deduction, reasoning that blue state governors would be the big winners. The current offer from leadership, according to Punchbowl, is to quadruple the state and local tax deduction, from $10,000 to $40,000, allowing wealthy homeowners to write off their huge property tax bills on their federal returns. (SALT caucus members still want more.)

As one House member said,, “He’s not a detail guy.”

When Trump was campaigning last year, he did promise to bring back the SALT deduction that used to let taxpayers deduct what they paid in state and local taxes from federal taxes. This is popular in blue states, which tend to have higher state and local taxes because nobody wants to be Mississippi. And blue state Republicans who are not locks for re-election want to bring it back, too. But now Trump is opposed to it, because he hates Gavin Newsom. See Tobias Burns at The Hill, 5 things to know about SALT, the tax break holding up Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’.

The bill is a disaster. It’s ruinous to the national economy and probably to a majority of its citizens. Most Republicans, including the ones who are smart enough to understand what they’re doing, are refusing to face reality. See David Graham at The Atlantic, Congressional Republicans vs. Reality.

Any straightforward accounting points to one conclusion: The president’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” (as Republicans insist on formally calling it) would make the country’s fiscal situation worse. It would slash taxes for years to come, and although it would make some budget cuts, they aren’t anywhere near enough to cover the difference. The bill is projected to add trillions of dollars to the deficit; the only real disagreement among analysts is over how many trillions. Yet Republicans leaders keep trying to pretend otherwise. …

…Later on Friday, the credit-rating agency Moody’s lowered the nation’s rating from the top Aaa to Aa1 with a negative outlook, citing, um, greater federal spending without greater taxes to cover it. “Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue remains broadly flat. In turn, persistent, large fiscal deficits will drive the government’s debt and interest burden higher,” Moody’s said in a statement.

Republican leaders’ response to the downgrade has been denial. On Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “I think that Moody’s is a lagging indicator. I think that’s what everyone thinks of credit agencies.” Even insofar as this is true, why exacerbate the existing problems that Moody’s notes? This morning, Majority Leader Steve Scalise told CNBC, “This bond downgrade is another serious blow that shows that America needs to get its fiscal house in order. We start to do that in this bill.” Never mind that Moody’s is responding to exactly the bill’s approach.

Russell Vought, the White House budget chief, made the tortured argument that because the bill cuts more than the 1997 Balanced Budget Act agreement, it must be fiscally conservative, as though the huge reductions in revenue included in the bill are somehow irrelevant. Vought also noted that the GOP’s accounting is based on “$2.5 trillion in assumed economic growth”—in other words, keeping their fingers crossed for the rosiest results. Among other things, the bill would extend tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, which didn’t live up to GOP projections that they’d pay for themselves.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went with a simple up-is-down approach. When asked this morning whether Trump was okay with the bill adding to the deficit, she deadpanned, “This bill does not add to the deficit.”

So there it is. They are counting on the Magic Prosperity Fairy to bail them out.

But even assuming the House GOP manages to vote as one and get the bill passed, what will happen to it in the Senate is anybody’s guess.

Trump’s people were on a real roll today. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem explained to a Senate hearing that “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to—.” That’s as far as she got before she was interrupted by an exasperated Senator Maggie Hassan.  There were a lot of interesting hearings today, in fact, with RFK the Lesser and Marco Rubio, who holds several jobs now. I imagine him singing the “Largo al Factorum” from Barber of Seville, about how everybody needs him for something. Lesser and Little Marco notably didn’t know anything about what they were asked. Trump’s people are brilliant at not knowing anything. I guess none of them are detail guys.