The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate

President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a bad piece of legislation. It includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts that are very much tilted toward the rich, along with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and green energy.

And on Tuesday, July 1, the Senate passed it in a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance as the tiebreaker.

But bad policy only matters if people know about it, and a lot of people don’t — partly because there are an overwhelming number of provisions, and partly because the Trump administration is already flooding the zone with so many other major policy fights.

So I asked Matt Yglesias, the author of the Slow Boring newsletter, back on the show to go through what is in this bill and why it has been so hard to build momentum for pushback. We spoke on Thursday, June 26.

Mentioned:

“A List of Nearly Everything in the Senate G.O.P. Bill, and How Much It Would Cost or Save” by Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz, Aatish Bhatia and Josh Katz

The System by David S. Broder and Haynes Johnson

The Ten Year War by Jonathan Cohn

Book recommendations:

Proto by Laura Spinney

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick and Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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