Even if President Donald Trump accomplishes his goal of signing his massive domestic policy bill into law this weekend, he will have failed to accomplish multiple crucial long-term goals of the Republican Party.
That's according to a Wednesday analysis by Politico's Charlie Mahtesian, who wrote that Trump's first major legislative push of his second term underscores "real limits to the MAGA revolution" in several ways. He observed that the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" has no "overarching plan to create and lock in a durable Republican coalition."
"It’s an astonishing oversight. Over the past decade, Trump has unleashed the tectonic forces of political realignment. He has torn his party down to the studs and then remade it in his image," Mahtesian wrote. "He has splintered the Obama coalition and accelerated a class-based political reordering that stands to upend nearly a century of convention. His most recent win was marked by a more racially and ethnically diverse voter coalition than in his two prior campaigns."
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"These are accomplishments most presidents have only dreamed of," he continued. "Yet the centerpiece of Trump’s legislative agenda does almost nothing to harness any of it in the service of a permanent MAGA governing majority. He is spending every last cent of his political capital on a bill marked by its lack of ambition and vision."
Mahtesian noted that despite the immense size of the bill, it typically relies on Ronald Reagan-era Republican doctrine like supply-side economics (the belief that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will trickle down to the working class), and significant cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps). Oren Cass, who is the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, told Politico that he found the legislation lacking in the kind of economic populist policies that Trump promised to enact.
"[It’s] not something that has an especially coherent logic to it or much prospect of actually accomplishing the things that I think people want," Cass said.
Mahtesian also acknowledged that the bill was widely unpopular with the same kinds of voters Trump won over in his 2024 campaign. A plurality of non-white voters and non-college graduates — the latter of which went for Trump by more than double compared to his 2016 campaign — disapproved of the bill in a June Washington Post-Ipsos poll. However, he opined that should the bill fail to pass in the House, one silver lining for Trump could be an opportunity to craft a bill that makes efforts to broaden the 2024 Republican coalition.
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Click here to read Mahtesian's full analysis in Politico.
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