PRESSURE TEST

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is now law, and voters can expect to hear a lot about it during next year’s midterms

- BY PHILIP ELLIOTT

IN THE END, DEMOCRATS WERE UNABLE TO STOP Republicans from getting their tax-cuts-and-spending plan across the finish line. But, in conversations with strategists close to Democratic leaders, they had a credible consolation spin: this bill is the most hated piece of major legislation since at least 1990, and Republicans have no plan to fix that. President Donald Trump’s decision to package a July 4 signing ceremony with a showy military flyover at the White House further lashed supportive lawmakers to the red-ink fountain of a law. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill may soon be best known as a campaign-trail blunder—if not a burden.

GOP strategists seemed to understand the buzzkilling buzz saw they were marching toward with a grim sense of inevitability as they muscled it into law. Fiscal conservatives hated the massive spending and budget trickery. Centrists despised the deep cuts to programs for the poor and elderly. Parochial lawmakers did not realize until the 11th hour that cuts to subsidies for wind and solar energy would hit their states hard, plus an industry-killing hidden tax on those clean-energy sectors seemed to come from nowhere, before getting scrapped. And the pragmatists were watching the GOP’s biggest donor, Elon Musk, threaten everyone who voted for it with a primary challenge and then announce on July 5 he was forming a new third party.