President Donald Trump acknowledged the difficulties Republicans have encountered pitching his One Big Beautiful Bill to the public before next year’s midterm elections.
Trump told his Cabinet on Tuesday during a meeting at the White House that he was no longer going to “use” that description amid poor polling for the tax and spending legislation he signed into law on Independence Day after prolonged negotiations in Congress.
“I’m not going to use the term ‘great, big, beautiful.’ That was good for getting it approved. But it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about. It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class. It’s a massive tax cut for jobs,” Trump told his secretaries and Cabinet-level administration officials.
Republicans have been trying to rebrand the bill as “Trump’s Working Families Tax Cut,” a development Trump alluded to on Tuesday.
“No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security,” he said, adding “no tax on overtime.” “I don’t know how you can vote for anybody else.”
Trump criticized Democrats for reducing the measure into a “sound bite,” particularly with their scrutiny of its entitlement program provisions.
“If the Democrats got in, Social Security is over, because the country is going to fail. There won’t be any Social Security,” he said. “We’re going to take care of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and we’re doing that in spades because the country is becoming so successful again.”
Polling published this month by the Pew Research Center found 46% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, while 32% approved. Another 23%, however, told pollsters they were unsure about it.
“It’s primarily because of the content of the bill,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the Washington Examiner last week. “It’s a lot more difficult to sell a tax bill that keeps taxes the same as they are as opposed to a bill that actually cuts taxes because people don’t feel any difference.”
Ayres, president of North Star Opinion Research, acknowledged the political challenges regarding the One Big Beautiful Bill’s Medicaid reforms because “there’s also millions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and millions of Trump voters are on Medicaid.”
“They’ve structured it very cleverly so that the cuts don’t take effect until after the midterms, but the fact is that the Republican coalition has changed so much over the last 10 years that there are a great many Trump voters on the lower end of the economic scale who are relying on Medicaid,” he said. “You can argue that all they did was cut Medicaid to the people who should be working but are not, but the statistics seem to show that a lot of current Medicaid recipients are already working and they just don’t make enough to pay for their health insurance.”
The White House told the Washington Examiner “President Trump is right” when asked about the change.
“And thanks to his leadership Americans received the largest tax cut in history,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “Of course we will continue highlighting this tremendous win for the American people!”
Trump made the comments during his long opening remarks during the Cabinet meeting in which he also quipped that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was “born for this job,” despite speculation the former Florida U.S. senator has presidential aspirations.
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“I don’t think he should ever run for another office,” he said. “You’re so good at this. He is so good, and everybody likes him. Everybody likes him, but everybody, much more importantly than like, I think you would say, is respect. They respect Marco.”
