• Apologies to the handful of readers who come poking around from time to time and have found the cupboards bare. I’ve been working on Loathsome America. It should be available on Amazon in about a week or two. Buy it. Should be back to regular posting shortly.

There’s something poetically grotesque about watching a man who eats steak with ketchup sign the most sprawling, carnivorous piece of legislation in recent memory under the blazing shadow of a stealth bomber and a camera crane. On July 4, 2025—because of course it had to be Independence Day—Donald J. Trump, red tie flapping like a matador’s cape in a bad breeze, inked the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), a legislative thermonuclear device disguised as a care package.

It’s not a bill so much as a ransom note from Goldman Sachs duct-taped to a brick thrown through the window of the social contract. It’s a tax-slashing, wall-building, welfare-obliterating omnibus beast that reads like it was stapled together by cocaine-fueled Heritage Foundation interns locked in a Cracker Barrel.

But let’s start with the optics, because Trump’s never done policy—he does pageantry. The signing ceremony had all the subtlety of a Super Bowl ad for flavored rifles. There were fighter jets, veterans flown in for clapping purposes, and a cherry-picked crowd of white people who looked like they all manage strip malls in Florida. Trump, grinning like a Times Square Mickey Mouse who just found twenty bucks, called it “the most beautiful, most powerful bill ever signed by any president in the history of history.”

And what’s actually in this democratic turducken? Buckle up.

The tax cuts are back, baby. Trump’s 2017 love letter to the donor class is now permanent—enshrined, embalmed, and launched into the sun on a golden rocket. Corporate rates stay lower than your average fry cook’s self-esteem. Pass-through loopholes are widened to the size of Elon Musk’s ego. SALT deduction caps were lifted for those making less than $500k, which is adorable, like throwing a shot of tequila into the ocean and calling it a margarita.

There’s a new deduction for cash tips, which Trump bragged about like he personally invented the concept of gratuity. Yes, servers can now deduct up to $25k in tips—so long as they still work 60 hours a week to qualify for Medicaid, which the bill simultaneously takes a weed whacker to. It’s like getting a back rub while being stabbed.

Because that’s the real muscle of this legislative shitstorm: the annihilation of the safety net. Medicaid now comes with shiny new work requirements, because nothing says “American freedom” like proving you’re employed while in a coma. SNAP (that’s food stamps for anyone who hasn’t been poor lately) is now means-tested by Kafka himself. If you’re under 64 and not working at least part-time, enjoy the taste of your own boot leather.

All of this is offset, theoretically, by “economic growth” the way lighting your house on fire offsets your heating bill.

And then, of course, there’s the border. Trump may have lost his mind somewhere around 2018, but he never lost his hard-on for the wall. This bill funds a second round of steel-reinforced nonsense, plus detention centers that sound like they were designed by Blackwater contractors with childhood trauma. ICE gets 10,000 new agents and the authority to fast-track deportations like it’s drive-thru justice. One million deportations per year is the target, which is a number dreamed up by the kind of person who thinks maps are just leftist propaganda.

The bill also includes asylum fees, remittance taxes, and penalties for immigration court no-shows, basically ensuring that anyone who makes it here legally gets nickel-and-dimed into oblivion. It’s the legislative equivalent of inviting someone to dinner, charging them to sit down, and then setting the table on fire.

Environmental protections? Gutted. Every green incentive from the Inflation Reduction Act has been shanked in an alley behind the Capitol. EV credits? Dead. Clean energy grants? Dead. Efficiency subsidies? Throttled with a plastic bag and dumped into a Superfund site. Trump called this “common sense” because in Trumpworld, anything that doesn’t make ExxonMobil hard is suspiciously communist.

Oh, and just for fun, the bill raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, like sneaking a bottle of vodka into rehab and calling it medicine. The deficit hawks who used to hyperventilate over the cost of school lunches now applaud as the national debt does cartwheels. The Congressional Budget Office says this pig will add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. But as Trump put it, “debt is just another word for future opportunity,” which is something only someone who has declared bankruptcy six times could say with a straight face.

So who wins? Billionaires. Defense contractors. ICE agents with overtime. Golf course developers. Hedge fund managers who already hide their income in LLCs named after their dogs. Who loses? Pretty much everyone else. If you’re not white, rich, or already armed with a tax attorney and a Cayman Islands bank account, you are, in the immortal words of George Carlin, not in the club.

What’s breathtaking is not just the scale of this thing—it’s the speed and shamelessness. This wasn’t policy debated in smoke-filled rooms. This was a legislative carjacking in broad daylight. Even the Republicans who voted for it are already flinching like they know what’s coming. Elon Musk—who these days seems to swing between libertarian toddler and aspiring despot—publicly denounced the bill, calling it “fiscally irresponsible,” which is rich coming from a man who burns money like incense.

And let’s not pretend this wasn’t a political calculation. Trump knows this might hurt his party in the midterms. He doesn’t care. The plan is simple: buy loyalty with tax cuts, feed the base red meat at the border, and if everything collapses in a smoking crater by 2027, he’ll blame immigrants, Democrats, or the Jews—whichever gets the loudest applause.

This bill isn’t governance—it’s kabuki theater with the budget as a chainsaw. It’s the triumph of spectacle over substance, a MAGA fever dream ghostwritten by Ayn Rand’s reanimated corpse. It’s the legislative equivalent of huffing gasoline and calling it patriotism.

And yet, this might work—for a while. Trump’s base doesn’t care about the details. They don’t read CBO reports. They see a man signing something with swagger while jets roar overhead, and they believe. They believe it’s strong. They believe it’s for them. They believe the pain will only fall on someone else.

Until it doesn’t.

Because when the hospitals close, when the SNAP cards stop working, when the border plan chokes in the courts, when the climate gets hotter and your kid’s asthma medicine costs $900 a month because your insurance lapsed, the illusion cracks. And all you’re left with is a flag, a bumper sticker, and the echo of a president yelling “It’s beautiful!” as the roof caves in.

This is the One Big Beautiful Bill. And it’s going to fuck a lot of people—many of them dumb enough to still cheer.