Heilemann: House GOP Ignored Trump on ‘Big Beautiful Bullsh-t Bill’

MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann claimed Friday on “Deadline” that House Republicans ignored President Donald Trump’s policy direction on what he called the “big beautiful bullshit bill.”

Heilemann said, “Right before the big beautiful bullshit bill started going through the House, Trump said a bunch of things that normally because of Trump’s power in the Republican Party would have been like, would have caused chaos to break out. He went to Mike Johnson and said, I want to see the top income tax rate raised.”

He continued, “Huge news, Donald Trump went to the Speaker of the House and said let’s raise the top rate. He wanted to create a new tax bracket that was that people who made more than, $4.5 million a year, very high, wouldn’t have affected very many people, but would have raised a non-trivial amount of money. It wasn’t that it got rejected explicitly, it was that no one in the House took it seriously.”

Heilemann added, “And don’t, for God’s sakes, go after Medicaid, that is what Steve Bannon would advocate and that is what Trump weekly advocated and no one in the House gave a crap about it. They didn’t scurry, they didn’t panic, and they didn’t do what Trump said. I don’t see anyone on the Senate side saying that either. If anybody is defying Trump over there, it’s the ones who want to cut Medicaid more.”

He concluded, “I think that you’re starting to see the first moment where the clearly the politics of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, populist politics and the politics of the House Republicans and Senate Republicans are starting to diverge. We’re getting closer to the midterms, and the Republican Congress is kind of going, you know what? We got to look out for ourselves because Donald Trump not going to save us and not running again.”

Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN