Depending on who you ask, Donald Trump’s Republican Party just committed a crime against populism or passed the most populist piece of legislation in modern history. The truth is that while not exactly “beautiful,” the legislation is pretty close to the best bill he could give either wing of the party, whether the libertarians or New Right. The GOP’s margins are too slim, and the problems at hand are too big.

Trump’s signature “Big, Beautiful Bill” cleared a critical hurdle after the Senate passed it by a single, tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance. Why was there only a margin of one vote for such a critical bill? GOP leadership couldn’t get centrist Susan Collins on board, nor libertarian Rand Paul. They also managed to lose Thom Tillis in the process, who took issue with the cuts to Medicaid. Populist Josh Hawley also took issue with those provisions, just as Ron Johnson shared some of Paul’s concerns. Both ultimately voted for the legislation, along with centrist Lisa Murkowski, who managed to receive Alaska-specific benefits in the bill that forced her hand.

But the rift between Trump and Elon Musk, which seemed to have just healed, erupted again. Musk is threatening a new, third political party over the bill’s failure to cut spending, and Trump is “looking into” deporting the billionaire. On the other hand, populists like my colleague Sohrab Ahmari and Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon see the bill as a significant political and moral error, leaning too heavily towards benefit cuts to help pay for tax cuts on the wealthy. Why not allow cuts on top earners to lapse and leave Medicaid untouched, as Trump promised to do?

Then again, Trump pledged to crack down on “waste, fraud, and abuse.” There’s no question that Medicaid includes elements of all three. Spending money on the most vulnerable Americans — while nudging able-bodied adults back into the workforce — is hardly cruel. Not everyone agrees that’s what will happen.

Granted, many Republicans dispute the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of how the legislation will play out fiscally. (Democrats have had their own disputes with the office over the years too.) The CBO on Sunday said the Senate bill would increase the deficit by $3.3 trillion by 2034.

The question facing senators, and now their colleagues in the lower chamber, is not simply whether to increase the deficit. Without this legislation, the 2017 tax cuts will lapse and just about everyone will owe more money. There is no bill that would significantly deal with the debt that moderate Republicans could get through either chamber. The inverse of that is also true: the GOP couldn’t pass a tax hike on the wealthy either.

This is not MAGA’s Congress. It also represents voters in Maine and New York and voters who send establishment stalwarts back to D.C. term after term. Frustrating as that may be for partisans, it’s how the system is supposed to work.

The system, however, is not supposed to work by jamming policy priorities into megabills that can pass on a simple majority simply because Congress has punted so many of its duties to administrative agencies.

Republicans could have taken a different approach. Instead of packaging everything together, they might have split the legislation into at least two separate bills. That would have spared members from being forced into such a tangled cost-benefit analysis. As it stood, they were asked to choose between cutting programmes like Medicaid and food stamps on one side, and raising taxes on the other. At the same time, the bill included popular measures: eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, boosting immigration enforcement, and pairing Trump’s tariffs with an industrial policy to attract investment.

The two-bill strategy, though, was not popular with House leadership when it was initially proposed, and conservatives were sceptical that the party leadership would keep its promises to bring a second bill with spending cuts to the table if a tax bill passed first.

For the GOP, facing the prospect of expiring tax cuts under Trump’s watch, it was a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t scenario. With Trump staring down the expiration of his signature tax cuts, Republicans chose the path of least resistance.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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