Trump’s Budget Bill Is Most Unpopular Move Yet, New Poll Shows

Americans oppose Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” so overwhelmingly that the president may need to find a new name for it, according to CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten.

“Yeah, if we’re talking about adjectives, how ’bout they think it’s ‘awful,’ they think it’s ‘horrible,’ and to quote our colleague Charles Barkley, ‘terrible, terrible, terrible,’” Enten explained Sunday night.

Enten highlighted multiple polls from throughout June that found that Trump’s gargantuan budget and tax bill was wildly unpopular with voters. “I don’t just got one poll for you Omar, I got five of ’em,” Enten explained to CNN host Omar Jimenez.

A survey by The Washington Post found that 42 percent of Americans opposed the bill, while only 23 percent supported it, leaving the legislation with a net favorable rating of -19—and that was the most positive that the results got. A Pew Research Center poll found that the bill had a net favorable rating of -20, Fox News found a net favorable rating of -21, Quinnipiac found a net favorable rating of -26, and KFF found a net favorable rating of -29.

“You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to know that when the net favorable rating of your bill is somewhere between negative 19 and negative 29 points that it is not a positive bill as viewed by the American public,” Enten said.

CNN’s reporting only continues to confirm what is already clear: The public doesn’t support legislation that will add $3.2 trillion to the deficit while slashing critical Medicaid and food stamp programs and giving tax breaks to wealthy people and corporations. Even members of Trump’s own base have been left feeling betrayed by the president.

Mister “Liberation Day” is suddenly tired of his tariff plan.

The newest chapter in Donald Trump’s global trade rearrangement will look like a series of “very fair” letters that will effectively dictate permitted trade rates with the U.S., the president outlined in a rough pitch on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.

“We made deals, but I’d rather just send them a letter, a very fair letter, saying, ‘Congratulations, we’re going to allow you to trade in the United States of America, you’re going to pay a 25 percent tariff, or 20 percent, or 40 or 50 percent.’ I would rather do that,” Trump said.

The Trump administration has already extended trade discussions until July 9. Last week, there were murmurings among senior Trump officials that the deadline could be extended yet again, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt describing the hard stop as “not critical.” But on Sunday, Trump didn’t seem sure that he’d need to extend the pause.

“I don’t think I’ll need to. I could, there’s no big deal,” he told Fox. “What I wanted to do is, and what I will do just—sometime prior to the ninth—is we’ll send a letter to all these countries.”

The letters, according to Trump, will be the “end of the trade deal,” suggesting that no negotiations will take place after the White House hits the mailbox. “We don’t have to meet. We understand, we have all the numbers,” he said.

But one provided example did little to evoke confidence in the plan, as Trump apparently forgot the name of Japan’s prime minister: “‘Dear Mr. Japan, here’s the story,’” Trump proposed. “‘You’re going to pay a 25 percent tariff on your cars.’”

It’s not the first time that Trump has offered to stamp out trade talks by issuing a string of letters. He made similar promises on May 16 and June 11, claiming both times that the letters would be issued in a handful of weeks, though that never came to fruition.

Trump’s tariff proposals haven’t won the U.S. too much negotiating ground. Instead, countries around the world began observing that—rather than playing the waiting game to meet with the White House over potential trade relief—China’s tough negotiating strategy with the former real estate mogul had actually gotten the Eastern powerhouse a significantly better deal.

In the end, it will be America that pays the price when the Trump administration runs out of time on its “90 deals in 90 days” promise. Last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the central bank would wait to see the residual impacts of the country’s new tariff plan before reducing its key interest rate, as companies have already decided to increase product prices this year in reaction to hampered global supply chains.

Senate Republican Thom Tillis spent his Sunday night railing against the Medicaid cuts contained in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in a fiery speech just hours after he announced he would retire at the end of this term. 

“Between the state-directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill—there’s a reduction of state-directed payments. And then there’s the reduction of the provider tax. They can’t find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that ‘yeah, it’s rough, but North Carolina’s used the system, they’re gonna have to make it work,’” Tillis said. “Alright, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? The people in the White House advising the president … are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Tillis went on to compare the bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid to Obamacare, and posited that the wave of Republican victories that followed that policy will now be transferred to the Democrats in both the upcoming midterms and the general election. 

“Now, Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betray a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump was in the Oval Office.” 

Tillis announced his retirement Sunday after once again angering the MAGA base with a vote against Trump’s budget bill the day before. He isn’t the only Republican to realize that Trump’s marquee piece of legislation will have a direct negative impact on Medicaid access for his constituents, many of whom are Trump supporters, and many of whom believed Trump when he promised to leave Medicaid alone. While Rand Paul was the only other “no” vote on the bill, a recent Fox News poll showed that Republican voters, especially white men with degrees, oppose the legislation. But the “big, beautiful bill” trudges on, as the Senate convenes on Monday to finalize the 940-page piece of legislation.  

Early Monday morning, President Donald Trump lashed out against Democratic Senator Chris Coons for mentioning reports that the Trump administration is looking to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran eerily similar to the Obama-era agreement Trump discarded during his first term.

On Thursday, CNN, citing four sources familiar with the matter, reported that “the Trump administration has discussed possibly helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program, easing sanctions, and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds.” Trump at the time called such reports a “HOAX” propagated by a “SleazeBag” within the “Fake News Media.”

Coons cited the reports in a Sunday appearance on Fox News, telling host Shannon Bream, “I’ll just note that President Trump, by press accounts, is now moving towards negotiation and offering Iran a deal that looks somewhat similar to the Iran deal that was offered by Obama: tens of billions of dollars of incentives and reduced sanctions in exchange for abandoning their nuclear program.”

A piqued Trump took to Truth Social just before 3 a.m., posting, “Tell phony Democrat Senator Chris Coons that I am not offering Iran ANYTHING, unlike Obama, who paid them $Billions under the stupid road to a Nuclear Weapon JCPOA (which would now be expired!), nor am I even talking to them since we totally OBLITERATED their Nuclear Facilities.”

Trump set off the chain of events leading to his June 21 bombing of Iran by withdrawing from President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018—a decision which prompted Iran to “accelerate its nuclear program,” per Axios, which in turn led Trump, upon resuming office, to consider a renewed deal that geopolitics expert Jeffrey Lewis called “a dollar-store” JCPOA. “He’s trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Lewis said earlier this month.

This, of course, went up in smoke as the self-proclaimed dealmaker President Trump resorted to unlawful military action.

Donald Trump erupted Friday after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared victory over Israel.

In a defiant video statement released Thursday, Khamenei said that the United States had been dealt a “severe slap” and that Israel would have been “completely destroyed” if the U.S. had not stepped into the conflict.

Trump hit back the following day in a lengthy post on Truth Social. Trump said Khamenei should consider himself lucky he wasn’t killed. “I knew EXACTLY where he was sheltered, and would not let Israel, or the U.S. Armed Forces, by far the Greatest and Most Powerful in the World, terminate his life,” Trump wrote. “I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!’”

Trump had previously threatened to give in to Israel’s campaign for a regime change in Iran, even though the president’s own administration has claimed that is not a U.S. objective.

Trump patted himself on the back for desperately and publicly begging Israel to call off a massive attack shortly after he announced an imminent ceasefire earlier this week. “Tremendous damage would have ensued, and many Iranians would have been killed. It was going to be the biggest attack of the War, by far,” he wrote.

The president claimed that he had been making efforts to remove “BITING” sanctions on Iran, but in light of the ayatollah’s recent statements, he had “dropped all work on sanction relief.”

“Iran has to get back into the World Order flow, or things will only get worse for them,” Trump warned. He added, “I wish the leadership of Iran would realize that you often get more with HONEY than you do with VINEGAR.”

During a press conference Friday morning, Trump was asked whether he’d consider another strike on Iran, if intelligence determined that the country had rebuilt its uranium enrichment capabilities.

“Sure, without question, absolutely,” Trump replied. “It’d have to be unbelievable.”