Johnson Embraces Trump's Big, Beautiful Package
Republicans have decided to bet the entire Trump agenda on one, gigantic bill
Jan. 7: GOP decides on path forward for Trump agenda … Texas couldn’t build a wall, either … Tesla gets lost even with actual human at the wheel … Carter had a totally overlooked very-not-good part of his legacy …
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Let’s take a step back and hit pause on the movie in our mind of the future. Namely, the ending of Thelma and Louise.
On The Nicole Sandler Show last night, Nicole said to me that “anything can happen.” Which is true. But it’s not true only about how bad things can get.
As every Newsfucker knows, politics is Newtonian. Actions. Reactions. Things can turn very, very quickly.
But good turns are much more difficult if we decide victories are impossible. Yes, Americans appear historically bad at this whole voting thing. So bad that they didn’t grasp fundamentals about Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party.
And if those two entities were good at anything but manipulating media, I would be much more worried. (Which isn’t to say that people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, secularists, and poor people don’t have reason to worry.)
But it’s important to go into this with a confident mindset. That’s, after all, the only thing Trump has and it works pretty well for him. So in light of the Republican decision to bet the entire Trump agenda on one giant, all-encompassing bill — which we’ll get to — I wanted to remind everyone just how bad these people are at thing-doing, and how savagely that’s going to bite them in the ass (in a sex-positive way, of course) while the Democrats are essentially off the field.
The Wall
No, not Donald Trump’s unfinished wall, which the GOP isn’t even talking about finishing. This is Texas’s unfinished wall.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), perpetrator of true monstrosities, in December 2021 unveiled his plans to take over where Trump failed left off.
Since then, the Texas Tribune reports, Abbott has spent $3.1 billion on his own border wall (which doesn’t even include the border with Louisiana, failing to prevent Shamsud-Din Jabbar from crossing into the U.S. and killing 14 people on Bourbon Street). And the result of Abbott’s project?
Texas won’t say where it’s built wallage so far, so the Texas Tribune found out for itself. And checked Abbott’s progress:
“The 50 miles constructed through November [2024], totaling 6% of the 805 miles the state has designated for building, are far from the endless barrier Abbott often presents the wall to be in video clips he shares on social media. The wall is not a singular structure, but dozens of fragmented sections scattered across six counties, some no wider than a city block and others more than 70 miles apart.”
So, do any newsfucking showoffs remember from school what grade a score of 6% is? That’s right, Newsfuckers, it’s a K-, barely above an L+.
I got a 6% on a Spanish test once, so I know. That’s a failing grade, even in 2025 Texas.
Trump’s Big, Beautiful Package
At the direction of RePresident-elect Donald Trump, congressional Republicans over the weekend agreed to put everything they want to do in “one big, beautiful bill.”
That includes any and possibly all of the following:
Extending all the Trump tax cuts (which Democrats didn’t kill), worsening economic inequality and further enriching the oligarchs at a cost to the United States of $5 trillion over the next decade.
More-raising the debt ceiling.
More-militarizing the border.
More-rounding up people who look like they don’t have green cards.
More-deregulating the drilling and transportation of fossil fuels.
Eliminating taxes on tips (which will immediately include “gratuities” that corporate boards pay to top executives).
Cutting back on the IRS agents who fight to make sure rich people rob us less.
Oh, and spending cuts on education, food for poor people, medical care for poor and old and young and disabled people, and money for old people to have homes and food.
It will be the biggest bill in U.S. history. Coming from the small-government, long-bill-mocking party. Over-fucking every constituency known to science and creating new ones.
As Axios puts it, “Rolling it all into one fat package is unlike anything Washington has done before.”
Then again, that’s what voters just did.
While TFN tries to shun tactics talk, this tactic is unprecedented, and likely to determine the outcome, not to mention months worth of news. I suspect Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is right in his guess that packing everything into The Donald Trump Act of 2025™ will make it a lot tougher for the hardest and brittlest of the hard right to object. Nits they could’ve picked on smaller bills will fade into insignificance in contrast with the enormity of The Holy Writ.
But building big, complicated things takes time, even for shoddy, shortcut-taking, law-breaking developers like Trump. And even MAGA knows it.
“If that’s what the president wants, he’s going to have to wait until the summer for it all to get ironed out,” Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) told Fox.
Axios says it could even stretch into the fall. And the timing is really the key aspect of the tactics.
Because bill-writing isn’t the only thing that happens slowly. Learning does, too. And if the bill-writing gives people enough time to learn about this prophesied monstrosity, then the politics around it will change. Just as they did when the holidays rang with the sounds of carolers singing out, “Alexa, what are tariffs?”
And even without problems developing over the months ahead, there are already entire strata of internal GOP rifts on the issues at stake. For instance, to raise the debt ceiling, Johnson’s team has said he’ll make a deal in which debt hardliners agree to jack the debt ceiling up by (another) $1.5 trillion in exchange for cutting $2.5 trillion in spending. But that much in cuts will touch everyone. And now we’ll all have the time to learn about it. Before it’s too late.
And the timing also means that if we ever get to a vote, by then Trump’s honeymoon/mandate/bullshit period will be an ancient artifact sitting in history’s dust pile alongside Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN)1. And it means we’ll also by then have many of the first of so many Trump scandals.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth crucifying ISIS members. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., impaling undersecretaries under his desk on his 71-year-old virility. FBI Director Kash Patel trying to direct the FBI. On and on. For all we know, nude pictures of the first lady could emerge online. It could happen!
Plus, that time lag is the equivalent of opening the dance floor for Washington’s indigenous population: The lobbyists. A must-pass, includes-everything bill is the Holy Grail for corporate America, who will jam everything Santa didn’t bring them into that bill — with still enough time for us to newsfuck at least half of it before it comes up for a vote.
And with no other big bill competing for air time over the next six+ months, this is a fantastic opportunity for the civics lesson America so richly deserves and the planet so desperately needs America to have.
I know it’s hard to envision victory right now, when it looks like MAGA’s winning everything it puts its sweaty hands on. But that’s very much not the case.
And it’s not just The Fucking News fucking this news. Here’s Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA): “I'm counting on them to be as ineffective as they were in the last Congress.”
(Hell, just yesterday, Trump already waffled on the one-bill tactic he insisted on. So, so far they can’t even settle on the tactic they’re going to use to settle how they settle what’s in the bill.)
Remember Elon Musk? He’s Terribling Everything He Does
While we’re on the subject of not-thing-well-doing-good, Elon Musk is RePresident-elect Donald Trump’s point man on, well, everything a president’s supposed to do if he didn’t prefer cheating at golf instead.
Musk’s made-up Department of Government Efficiency is more than cutting spending, it’s regulations, too. In other words, it covers literally the entire federal government and everything it does.
But Musk hasn’t even gotten started yet — his unofficial, non-government job hasn’t even officially non-started yet — and already the bedrock of the myth around him is crumbling.
Tesla, for big instance, has self-droved into the shit.
The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper has a great write-up — “Tesla Is Cooked” — of the looming doom(s) ahead on Tesla’s GPS … unless Trump gives Tesla all kinds of government welfare. A similar piece in the Telegraph is headlined, “Tesla is now fighting for its future.”
And keep in mind, this isn’t all happening now because Trump’s victory has distracted Musk. Thanks to corporate lead times, everything facing Tesla is the result of shit Musk did/didn’t do before Election Day. To wit:
Tesla’s annual sales were down last year for the first time since 2011.
Tesla’s EV competitors are catching up or are passing Tesla by, with rising sales last year.
Competitor BYD of China saw a massive increase, selling 1.76 million EVs, almost topping Tesla’s 1.79 million.
Tesla has failed to roll out the wide range of models that other automakers offer.
Tesla is estimated to have sold no more than 12,000 Cybertrucks in the fourth quarter of last year, down from the previous quarter.
Also, the Cybertruck is a disaster by every auto industry metric.
It’s too heavy to be sold in some countries — like Europe.
Instead of making better cars with more model variety, Musk is investing in self-driving.
Geico won’t even insure Cybertrucks because fixing a ding in stainless steel is really expensive.
Musk’s support of climate-denying politicos in the UK and Germany has undercut Tesla’s appeal to people who like Earth.
As Cook concludes:
“Tesla’s preposterous meme stock-esque valuation may stay high for a long time. As we’ve seen with GameStop, markets can stay irrational so long as there is a supply of suckers willing to throw their money down the toilet. But in terms of business fundamentals, Tesla may have already peaked.”
And it’s not just Tesla. You’ve heard of meme coins and meme stocks, Musk is the world’s first meme CEO. There’s no evidence he’s some management genius and an embarrassment of evidence, including embarrassing lawsuits, that say otherwise.
The one thing Musk, like Trump, does do well is fooling people who are stupid enough to have tons of money into thinking that he is not dumb.
The Wall Street Journal did a great podcast last year about Musk’s Twitter purchase (no, I didn’t listen to it, I read the transcript; what am I, 30?) in which we heard all kinds of great details about the rank stupidity of the bankers who loaned Musk the money. From Wall Street Journal reporters, i.e., non-Commie pinkos.
The banks had expected to make money on the high-interest loans by quickly selling them to some (stupider) buyer eager to cash in all those high-interest repayments Musk would make. Except instantly Musk’s (mis)management rendered the prospect of default too likely for anyone to buy those loans.
Which means now all those Wall Street geniuses are stuck carrying billions of dollars in Musk debt on their balance sheets, which I’m pretending to know what that means but do know it ain’t good. Some choice quotes from the podcast transcript:
“...now considered the worst deal in merger finance that banks have participated in since the 2008 to '09 financial crisis.”
“...there still hasn't been a good time for the banks to sell the loans because X's [Twitter, not Musk’s son] business is still struggling.”
“It's a pretty remarkable amount of value destruction in a short period of time.”
“it appears to be a real failure of risk evaluation, which is pretty much the main thing banks are supposed to be good at.”
“They didn't fully appreciate the risk of the individual in question here, Elon Musk, and how he single-handedly could alienate a whole company's relationship with large swaths of the advertising industry.”
The best part? How Musk got his filthy South African oligarchic stank all over the UK bank Barclays. Barclays took such a hit from getting stuck with the Musk debt (and other Barclays fuckups) that they had to cut their Christmas bonuses by 40%.
Fifty of their 200 managing directors quit. Which is hilarious because weren’t the managing directors the ones managing and directing?
So, why did all these financial he-men and their masters of the universe fuck up so badly? “The allure of banking Elon Musk.” “...the good graces of the world’s richest person…” In lay speak: They were suckers. Rubes.
And Musk, of course, also runs the most high-profile company dedicated not to profits but to a social agenda (which he says he hates in other companies). That’d be Twitter — now known as X by no one because everyone still calls it Twitter — which he bought to make a bastion of free speech.
Musk’s commitment to free speech might be better known if his employees weren’t prohibited from discussing it by the non-disclosure agreements he makes them sign.
But his whole social-engineering project for Twitter was that it’d not only be an oasis of free speech, it would prove that an unfettered, unmoderated, private-sector platform would give the Invisible Hand the space it so desperately needs to create the smartest, most high-toned home for discourse in human history.
In Musk’s view of this experiment, “The more Twitter improves its signal to noise ratio, the less relevant conventional news becomes.”
Without admitting he’s admitting defeat, Musk has now admitted defeat. It’s not just that he’s now doing the censorship himself. On Friday he announced an “algorithm tweak … to promote more informational/entertaining content.”
In other words, Musk cried uncle. Or at least coded uncle. Because Nazis and crypto-hawking pornbots took over his playground as soon as he fired the grownups. So now he’s tweaking the algorithm, which is an Orwellian way of saying he’s going Orwellian.
Lost in all the understandable Musk mockery is the fact that his experiment worked. It showed what would happen. It just wasn’t what Musk said would happen. We saw the results of an unfettered social-media platform and it wasn’t what Musk said it would be.
Because he is $400 billion stupid.
One final example.
Over the weekend, a Finnish researcher Tweeted that Musk is “becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history,” not counting Fox, obvi. How did Musk respond?
The world’s richest man, an ostensible genius with access to the finest minds on the planet — and artificial intelligence capable of stealing the work of the finest minds on the planet — assembled his historic brain trust and composed a statement he then issued in which he said, and I want to get the nuance right here, “F u retard.”
Four Quickies
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he’s going to resign. At some point.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today banned credit reports from dinging you for medical debt. And companies can no longer consider your medical debt as a factor when evaluating your application for a loan or a place to live or whatever the fuck you need to get by. RePresident Donald Trump is expected to make America great again by undoing the new rule and requiring your medical debt to be tattooed on your face.
McDonald’s says it’s ending a bunch of its diversity initiatives, so now middle-aged white guys will finally have a shot at wearing a paper hat while teenagers yell at them through scratchy microphones. Remember McDonald’s made a big point of claiming they’re not political? Then you may also remember your newsfucking friends here at TFN showing how McDonald’s was full of more shit than McDonald’s.
Services for former Pres. Jimmy Carter are starting in Washington today, with the funeral set for Thursday. And much of the remembrancing is deploying his generally appealing humanity against the horrific/punchliney legacy that Republicans slapped on him after Pres. Ronald Reagan committed treason to fuck Carter over. But Christopher Simmonds at the American Prospect has a really important point to make about perhaps Carter’s most lasting legacy, one that’s sorely under-examined: It was Carter, before Bill Clinton and more than anyone before him, who really turned the Democratic Party away from its New Deal heritage and into the hands of the Invisible Hand of capitalism. It’s important to acknowledge that because without seeing the moments where it happened, it’s really hard to identify how we fix that fucking shit.
TCB
In Friday’s TFN I neglected to credit the Military Religious Freedom Foundation for their work on the watchwall against religious extremism in the United States military. The best kind of asshole is the one on your side and nothing gets past these assholes. If you have any money left over after supporting TFN, you can’t do much better than the MRFF. Or the Freedom From Religion Foundation, for that matter.
SUPPORTING TFN I don’t know if it’s my own shame around money issues, or the co-dependency of toxic Substackinity, but every time I share my anxieties or hopes about TFN’s financial support, you Newsfuckers step up and kick in, as you did yesterday after a weekend drought. Which, of course, makes me feel terrible, like any self-respecting self-conflicted socialist operating in the confines of capitalism.
Perhaps the weirdest, most dysfunctional thing is that the salaries I got from big media companies felt more real. Even though I saw just how incompetent the top earners were, and even though my own highest salaries came for reasons I knew were stupid for jobs I was barely doing.
But there’s a real dilemma in fundraising the Substack way. My ego wants only my best original reporting or finest snarkery to generate the most donations and paid subscriptions. But what actually works is just me sharing about it. Which creates an incentive to talk about it all the time. Which makes talking about it ethically suspect! These are the knots into which I twist myself. So, my heartfelt plea is for the universe to convert to a meritocracy and for everyone to donate or upgrade to paid purely on the merits of the newsfucking.
I know. I’m a mess.
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Go get ‘em, kids!
Sorry, Gov. Walz! We still lurv you!
TFN…you make a beautiful pretzel! (All that twisting!😁)
“… when the holidays rang with the sounds of carolers singing out, “Alexa, what are tariffs?”“
PS: And if you didn’t “get it” on your 1st read, read the article’s title again.