The madman did it. Mike Johnson pushed the Big Beautiful Bill through the House in a razor-thin 215–214 vote, with one Republican voting present. It happened in the early hours of the morning, after an all-night session where, reportedly, one GOP member literally fell asleep during the vote. It’s wild how this keeps happening: Johnson, backed by Trump, threads the needle just enough to claim victory — first on his own speakership, then on the budget, and now on the crown jewel of Trump’s second-term domestic agenda.

The vote was close, but this wasn’t chaos. It was strategy. Johnson avoided making promises, waited out the loudest factions, and let Trump do the squeezing. First, the SALT caucus got its $40,000 cap. Then, once the blue-state Republicans were on board, the House Freedom Caucus got summoned to the White House. Trump made it clear — get in line. And they mostly did.

What’s Actually in the Bill

The bill itself is massive. It permanently extends the 2017 Trump tax cuts. It temporarily exempts tips, overtime, and auto loan interest from taxes through 2028. It raises the SALT deduction cap to $40,000 for households earning up to $500,000. It imposes work requirements on Medicaid recipients aged 18 to 65 who don’t have disabilities or young children. It bans Medicaid and CHIP from covering gender-affirming care. It cuts federal funding to states offering Medicaid to undocumented immigrants.

Then there’s the border and defense spending: $46.5 billion for the wall, $4.1 billion for more Border Patrol agents, $1,000 asylum application fees, nearly $150 billion for defense, including missile shields and naval expansion. It throws in a Trump Savings Account for kids, expands 529s for education, and guts clean energy tax credits earlier than expected. This is not a modest proposal. This is the full kitchen sink — and it cleared the House.

The Congressional Budget Office says it’ll add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. For a party that used to live and die by fiscal restraint, it’s a hell of a turn. And yet, what’s striking is that Democrats are the ones now talking about debt again. The shift is real. But the counterargument is simple: we’ve been living under this tax structure for seven years. Making it permanent just formalizes the status quo. The new spending and credits? That’s where the fight will be.

Next Stop: The Senate Wall

None of this becomes law unless it gets through the Senate — and that’s a very different battlefield. The GOP has three votes to spare. And their best lobbyist is JD Vance, who’s barely spent any time in the chamber. This is not the House. Rand Paul is a hard no. Ron Johnson is already calling out the deficit. Susan Collins is watching the optics. McConnell still looms over the process, even if he’s stepping back from leadership.

The House version of this bill isn’t making it. Changes are coming — the question is whether they come from the right or the left. Johnson’s strategy got him this far. But in the Senate, Trump’s grip isn’t as strong, and the margin is even tighter. The message is clear: they passed it out of the House, but the real negotiation starts now.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:12 - Big Beautiful Bill Passes House

00:13:34 - Interview with Ryan McBeth

00:46:17 - Update

00:47:21 - Israeli Embassy Shooting

01:02:26 - Senate Bill Response

01:04:15 - Texas Hemp Ban

01:06:06 - Interview with Ryan McBeth, cont.

01:34:29 - Wrap-up

Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill this week to push House Republicans across the finish line on his big domestic policy bill. Behind closed doors, he told conservatives not to “F— around with Medicaid,” and told blue-state Republicans to take the SALT deal on the table: $40,000 for four years, then snapping back to $30,000. That would cover about 90% of blue-state filers, but not the ones making the most noise. Even with Trump applying pressure, guys like Andy Harris and Mike Lawler are still holding out. Some members are softening, but others like Thomas Massie are dug in. So, for now, Speaker Mike Johnson’s goal of getting a vote within 48 hours is shaky at best.

The bill itself is massive — over 1,100 pages, with tax cuts, defense spending increases, and border policy changes. It would still remove Medicaid coverage for more than seven million people, depending on which estimate you believe. And of course, any version that passes the House is going to get shredded in the Senate. Whatever they vote on now, they’ll end up voting on something worse later. So a lot of this feels like performance. The fight is real if you’re in the trenches, but from the outside, it looks like an inevitable mess.

The bottom line is that they have to pass this. Everyone’s worried about the attack ads, about the carveouts, about what they’ll be blamed for, but if they don’t pass this, they’ve got nothing. No achievements. No wins. And that’s a death sentence for 2026. Trump knows it, and that’s why he’s pushing so hard. The longer this drags out, the more nervous the business community gets. Right now, things are relatively stable — tariffs are high but consistent, regulations are locked in, and the tax code hasn’t changed yet. That kind of stability is gold to investors. It gives them permission to move. If you pass this bill now, businesses start planning in Q3, making decisions in Q4, and consumers start to feel it by next summer — right as the midterms heat up.

And that’s the ballgame. Republicans don’t want to be running in 2026 on the ghost of Joe Biden’s presidency. They want to run on Trump’s second-term economy. They want to say, “This is what we did. Do you want to go back?” That’s the message — and it only works if the economy is good. So from a strategic perspective, if you’re a Democrat, you want this thing to grind. Drag it out. Make the House Freedom Caucus fight harder. Blow it all up and pray the delay ruins the timeline. Because that’s the only way this thing doesn’t end in a campaign-ready boom for Republicans.

My guess? The bill passes the House in the next five days. I don’t see what changes between now and the two-week delay the Freedom Caucus wants. Someone’s going to have to eat it, and most likely, that someone is going to realize there’s no better option coming. As for the SALT caucus — I’m still not sure what they’re waiting for. Whatever it is, it’s not making them look particularly sympathetic to the rest of the country.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:37 - Original Sin Book Thoughts (with Chris Cillizza)

00:35:17 - Update

00:39:13 - Big Beautiful Bull

00:48:41 - Russia Talks

00:53:17 - Kristi Noem

00:57:42 - Original Sin and the State of Cable News (with Chris Cillizza)

01:37:56 - Wrap-up

Joe Biden has aggressive prostate cancer. That news dropped as we were getting ready to record today’s show, and it immediately redefined everything I had planned for this episode. The White House says he found out late last week. But after everything we’ve seen — after everything we now know — I just don’t buy it. Not on its face. Not without skepticism. And certainly not from a team that has serially misled the public about this president’s health.

This isn’t partisan. This isn’t about political advantage. It’s about trust. And the Biden White House has burned every ounce of trust it ever had on the question of Joe Biden’s mental and physical condition. We were told he was sharp. We were told he was healthy. We were told the only concerns were conspiracy theories. Now we’re told he has bone-level prostate cancer and just found out a few days ago. The story does not add up.

We’ve known — not speculated, but known — that Biden’s team actively suppressed signs of his decline. It’s the core premise of the new book Original Sin by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper. In it, we learn the White House doctor predicted Biden would be wheelchair-bound in a second term. We hear about the memory lapses, the failures to recognize people close to him, the moments that were carefully hidden or brushed aside. The story isn’t new — it’s just finally being told with names attached. And that’s the part that stings.

Because for those of us who were watching this unfold in real time, the media’s about-face is galling. Take Jake Tapper. He’s now co-author of the book and the face of its rollout — doing long, self-congratulatory segments on CNN about the secrets he’s finally exposing. But these weren’t secrets to people who were paying attention. Fox News ran segments on Biden’s decline all throughout 2023 and 2024. Clips went viral. The press dismissed them as “cheap fakes.” And now Tapper’s shocked — shocked — to find out the emperor has no clothes?

That’s what grates. Not just the cover-up, but the theater around its unmasking. The same people who waved it away are now acting like they cracked the case. And worse, they’re treating the rest of us like we weren’t there watching them do it. CNN actually responded to a viral clip reel of Tapper’s past dismissals by calling it “disingenuously edited.” The same playbook they criticized the White House for using. You can’t gaslight people and then write a book about how gaslighting is wrong.

And now we get to the real question: what did they know, and when did they know it? Did Biden already have this diagnosis when he decided to run for reelection? Did his inner circle? Did the press? These aren’t cynical questions — they’re essential ones. Because if the answer is yes, then everything about 2024 shifts. Every calculation, every debate, every moment the press refused to ask harder questions — it all changes. Because this wasn’t about a stutter or a slip of the tongue. This was about a man with a potentially terminal illness running for the most demanding job on the planet.

The cleanest way for Biden to bow out was always going to be health-related. I said it on this show more than once. If he ever had to step aside, cancer would be the story. Not scandal, not defeat — just a body failing a man who still wanted to fight. I didn’t think he’d actually get cancer. But now that he has, the question isn’t whether he should drop out. The question is whether he was ever in the race honestly to begin with.

We deserve the truth. Not just out of respect for the office, but because the American people shouldn’t be the last to know that their president is unwell. And certainly not after being lied to for years about how well he was.

Chapters

00:00 - Intro

01:26 - Joe Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis

13:04 - Jake Tapper’s CNN Broadcast

27:17 - Wrap-up