Trump Invasion Successfully Repelled by Bad-Ass Librarians
A bunch of unarmed book nerds yesterday pushed back a coordinated attack by Trump loyalists
May 13: GOP committees take up legislative pieces of Trump’s batshit agenda … House GOP appears to lack the votes to pass it — for now … Trump issues executive order on drug prices which overdoses on dumbness … Trump arrives in Mideast due to federal rules requiring workers to show up at the office …
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Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, RIP
Just hours after House Republicans yesterday delivered their tax component of Pres. Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a key Republican member declared it “dead on arrival.”
The tax cuts are the driving force behind the bill, its raison d’austérité, if you will. (Waiting to kill it until after delivery is, however, consistent with Republican pro-life values.)
We haven’t talked about it much, but one sticking point in Republican debates about Trump’s bill has been its deductions for state and local taxes (SALT). To pass his 2017, 13-figure tax cuts for the rich, Trump1.0 agreed to cap SALT deductions at $10,000.
Meaning, if you paid $35,000 in state and local income and property taxes, you could only claim $10,000 of that as deductions on your federal taxes. So, yes, this is about rich people in states with high tax rates wanting to keep more of the money they’ve hoovered from the people.
Congressional Republicans from poor states — i.e., Republican states — argue that it’s not fair for taxpayers around the country to let states with high taxes skate on federal taxes. After all, that would mean Republican states were subsidizing Democratic states and everyone knows federal taxes are supposed to subsidize Republican states.
Despite Republican claims that all the rich people (“job creators” (sic)) have already fled high-tax states like California, New Jersey, and New York, apparently enough of them remain clinging to life that they’ve got Republican representatives fighting for them. Like Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY)!
And when the House Ways and Means Committee released the tax bill portion of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” yesterday, it only raised the SALT deduction cap to $30,000 but added a cap on total income — a meager $400,000!
So now blue-state Republican taxpayersavoiders who make so much money that their non-federal taxes alone exceed $30,000 and/or their total income exceeds $400,000 are up in arms the same way that the bill cutting health-care assistance for actual-poor, not just the-neighbor’s-pool-is-bigger-poor people has those blue-state Republicans very much down in arms.1
(Hilariously, CNBC’s coverage explains how to claim your SALT deduction, the way no news outlet ever explains how poor people can claim life-saving benefits. TFN will give CNBC this: They know their audience!)
LaLota not only told Politico the tax portion is “dead on arrival,” he took shots at the committee chair who came up short on the SALT cap. Ways and Means Chair Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), according to LaLota, had acted in “bad faith” by not raising the cap more. The bill, LaLota said, “doesn’t even come close to earning our vote.”
“Our” would be the SALT caucus of Republicans from blue states that have taxes high enough that they won’t become Mississippi. And, yes, the SALT caucus has enough members to kill the entire bill.
And they have every incentive to hold out because (a) without renewal, the 2017 SALT cap simply expires at the end of the year, much like an elderly Supreme Court justice or former president, and (b) without a cap, blue-state Republicans will have more money to donate to the SALT caucus.
The tax chunk is going into committee mark-up today, so Republicans can pretend to argue publicly about stuff they’ll work out privately — which may include SALT changes, but that would require making up for SALT elsewhere in the big, beautiful bill. And Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wants the bill’s entire bigness, if not beauty, passed by the House before Memorial Day.
But as Punchbowl News reported last week, LaLota — and SALT Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), Tom Kean (R-NJ), Mike Lawler (R-NY), and Young Kim (R-CA) — “are incentivized to drag this process out as long as possible to get the best deal they can. And most of them seem absolutely willing to do that.”
Over in the Senate, the prognosis is also cloudy, for different reasons. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote yesterday that, “if we want to be a majority party — we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid.”
You might think Johnson could just whistle for Trump to come in and bully the SALT caucus into line, but Trump, too, opposes the SALT cap. So Johnson stands alone. And Punchbowl dropped another doody in Johnson’s punchbowl with this:
“…some GOP lawmakers and aides have privately argued they’re better off letting the entire reconciliation process collapse and holding out for a late December tax deal with Democrats. A bill like that would almost certainly keep all tax cuts in place, be silent on politically risky spending cuts and restore the full deduction of state and local taxes. That would be a nightmare for the majority of the House Republican Conference but would be a dream for blue-state Republicans.”
Your empirical TFN doesn’t traffic in speculation about the future except in moments of weakness. But we will say that no one should be surprised if the SALT caucus collapses and backs a bill with some tiny, meaningless tweak they can market as a victory.
The thing to do then is make sure these blue-state Republicans wear their SALT failure from now through next year’s elections and use it to cap Republican House membership at a minority.
WAIT A TICK Hey, where’s the SALT work requirement? How can we make sure these SALT grifters aren’t just sitting home or on the golf course not working while passive income just flows into their offshore accounts?
More Unbeautiful Shit in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill
The legislation House Republicans are marking up this week and aiming to vote on next week will, if it passes the Senate, take America a few giant steps toward the Republican utopia of liberating rich people to do as they wilt and liberating poor people to wilt as they wilt.
In broad strokes, the Washington Post reports that the bill will further shred America’s remaining social safety nets, let rich people keep more of the money they took from us, oh and accelerate the world down the path to irreversible, catastrophic climate change. If you want something to read while you sit on the ledge waiting for 911 to pick up, the Post and others have helpfully listed some specifics:
Remove 8.6 million people from Medicaid
End $290 billion in food relief for hungry people
Give $60 billion to farmers presumably to make up for income they’ll lose due to all the people who can’t buy food
More spending to more-militarize America’s border with Mexico
$45 billion to build detainee camps
$14 billion to deport people with due or undue process
$50+ billion to Viagra the border wall that Trump couldn’t get up last time because hey it happens to lots of presidents
$150+ billion increase in military spending
End student-loan forgiveness, putting millions of borrowers back on the hook for $295 billion
New taxes on
billionairescollege endowmentsRemove some benefits for non-citizens, even those here legally
Raise standard tax deductions for people over 65 but exclude Trump’s promise to end taxes on Social Security benefits
Kill incentives to reward people such as you and other Newsfuckers for using solar, wind, and renewable energy
End the $7,500 tax credit for buying electric vehicles
Lease $20 billion worth of public lands in protected Alaskan wildlands and the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas extraction even though, hello, Big Oil doesn’t want new drilling because the Trumpconomy has suppressed demand so much that the low price of gas makes new drilling unprofitable
End tax credits for nonprofits that
don’tsupportTrumpterrorism$5 billion in tax credits using taxpayer money to fund private schools including ones that teach that God is real and does stuff but somehow doesn’t violate the laws of physics.
As the AP notes, the total bill for tax giveaways and militarization comes to $4.9 trillion. It’s being paid for with massive new borrowing and also by cutting spending on things that will cost us a shit-ton more later if we cut them now, like food for poor people and health care for poor people who don’t have food, and also to mitigate climate change, which is going to cost us trillions of dollars even if we don’t rebuild Florida.
And Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who generally favors tax credits for both cuckoos and bananas, says the total cost is a lot more — like, $20 trillion total. Roy, too, sounds like a maybe at best on the bill.
He said he hopes his Republican leadership have “a backup plan…. because I’m not here to rack up an additional $20 trillion in debt.”
SPEAK OF THE DEVIL Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took time off from rescuing Trump from his tariffs to remind congressional Republicans that as of the August congressional recess — because Congress has very lax work requirements! — the U.S. will no longer be able to borrow money to pay down its debt on the previous money it borrowed. Specifically, $36 trillion worth of debt.
That’s why the “big, beautiful bill” also includes a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, so the U.S. can borrow even more to pay off its debts, because a debt-ceiling hike was the only way Republicans could think of to raise $4 trillion in their bill that reduces tax revenues by $4 trillion.
Librarians Take the Front Lines Against Trump Tyranny
A besieged battalion of fucking librarians yesterday pushed back a frontal assault by a squad of goons deployed by Pres. Donald Trump.
Yesterday, Trump named his former personal lawyer — so you know he’s smart — as head of the Library of Congress. Which Trump probably can’t do without Congress because “of Congress.”
Trump’s appointee, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — because Trump has to keep giving his loyalists multiple jobs since he doesn’t have enough loyalists who aren’t clinically brain-dead — yesterday sent two of his own appointees to storm the Library of Congress.
That’s where Blanche’s appointees ran head-on into the full buzzsaw savagery of librarians unbound. The librarians mounted their defenses just as rapidly and fiercely as if they had to tell a couple kids to knock it off and please keep it down or else take it outside.
Capitol Police were called to the scene, but it turns out they weren’t needed. The fucking librarians had shit covered, thanks.
Observers were stunned that Trump loyalists were even able to find a library. But the two Blanche appointees — also Justice Department officials because see above about Trump loyalist moonlighting — were turned back from the library gates.
Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen said in an email Monday that he didn’t even recognize Blanche’s appointment to his post and is waiting for guidance from Congress.
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) asked the library’s inspector general to investigate the attempted breach. While Trump can appoint the library’s chief (with Senate confirmation), the office itself is part of the legislative branch. Which Trump might know if he ever read a book.
Why would Trump give a shit in the first place? Well, he fired the first Black and female librarian of Congress for obvious reasons and then fired her appointee, the copyright chief, a day after she issued a report on the use of artificial intelligence, which Trump wants to give sovereignty over all the Earth.
This is not Trump’s only military surrender even just this month. Last week, he surrendered to Houthi rebels in Yemen because they were, like, fighting back and shit.
Trump Order Would Lower Drug Prices and Also Raise Them
Pres. Donald Trump yesterday issued a new executive order pretending to force drug companies to charge Americans no more than they charge other developed nations. Okay, better-developed nations.
Your action-swinging TFN, of course, instantly2 swung into action and newsfucked the bullshit news. You can read the whole TFN Bonus Story slicing up Trump’s order here.
In short, Trump’s order shoots Americaself in the foot because that’s the only place he ever points his metaphorical gun. Turns out, while the order pegs U.S. drug prices to European drug prices, the order also directs U.S. officials to go make European drug prices higher.
Specifically, Trump wants Europe to stop enjoying just one of its many advantages of semi-socialized medicine — their governments can use the fact that there’s only one health-care provider, THEM, to negotiate much better drug prices than the U.S. will allow itself to negotiate.
Honestly, the most effective way to reduce drug prices quickly — with no path for legal challenges — would simply be full and unconditional amnesty for Luigi Mangione. A Presidential Medal of Freedom for Mangione alone could reduce co-pays by as much as 200%.
In fact, if Trump then replaced another alleged killer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with Mangione, UnitedHealth executives would likely eliminate fees and premiums entirely; add dental, vision, mental health, veterinary, spa treatments, mani-pedis, happy endings, monthly abortions, and face transplants; donate four billion dollars to Our Revolution; and start issuing checks to their customers to cover weekly checkups and regular gender-affirming care for all the genders, including making up new genders.
Short of appointing Secretary Mangione, however, Trump is left with yesterday’s stupicidal executive order, which is probably dead on arrival in court, simultaneously lowering and raising U.S. drug prices. Which is almost as stupicidally self-defeating as raising and then lowering China tariffs.
Four Quickies
Pres. Donald Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia today just to check in with the home office. His Mideast trip will also include the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which may or may not give him an airplane as a performance bonus. In a bittersweet, romantic gesture to a simpler, less obviously corrupt time, Trump flew to the Mideast on a plane purchased honestly by the U.S. government.
TFN doesn’t usually do hypocrisy policing, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s recent scapegoating of Pres. Joe Biden for the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) current woes goes woe beyond scapegoating. Duffy says Biden should have fixed the FAA’s understaffing and under-working-equipment-having, but it turns out both of those problems were caused in part by Duffy. As Crooks and Liars points out, when Duffy was in Congress, he voted against increasing FAA funding. I guess Duffy’s chickens have come home to roost now that their flight path home is less crowded with airplanes.
An important but I suspect overlooked service that TFN provides is ignoring the blathering of unserious people who lack power. But when it’s unserious people turning on Pres. Donald Trump, TFN is willing to make an exception. So here’s MAGA right-winger Ben Shapiro complaining that Trump’s petty corruption like free planes and memecoins threatens Republicans’ ability to pass Trump’s wholesale corruption. In other words, even devout acolytes are turning on the most blatant of this shit.
Funny point about those Afrikaner “refugees” who arrived in the U.S. yesterday, escaping the tyranny of not having total power in South Africa anymore. I spotted this on X (I know, I’m sorry, I rarely post there but do occasionally look for shit, which it has in abundance): “If you can't make it as a white person in South Africa, then you were never going to make it anywhere else, unfortunately.”
TCB
SUPPORTING TFN Thanks to all of you Newsfuckers responding to the call and upgrading to paid subscriptions so TFN can keep heading toward financial sustainability! TFN is still growing, and folks are still reading it, but whether it’s economic fears or Substack’s algorithms, something’s clearly changed and our rate of growth remains below where it’s been. (One thing I should probably do is explain more often why I don’t think the economic-downer stuff TFN covers is actually going to mean economic doom!)
In any case, it’s not fair to keep haranguing you hardcore Newsfuckers. I’m sure daily readers who can afford it have already upgraded. So now it’s on me to come up with other strategies. TFN videos? Paid-only events? (I want to hold the line at keeping the newsletter and reporting free for everyone, of course!)
Please let me know what you think would make a paid TFN subscription worth the money. Thanks!
ELECTIONS
June 10 — New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary.
June 24 — New York City mayoral primary.
TAKING ACTION
Today-The Second Coming: Tesla boycott.
Target boycott: The boycott is back on until Target reverses course on DEI and Black-owned suppliers.
Boycott El Salvador products (you can find a list of potential products here) (h/t).
Sept. 21: Climate-action events for Sun Day.
Dec. 25, well, actually, the days before Dec. 25: SaveChristmas.net.
The unknown future: Find upcoming events near you here.
RESOURCES
Jim Earl channels your rage
Mental reassurance that at least lawyers are fighting back on fill-in-the-blank.
REVOLVING DOOR PROJECT
The Revolving Door Project has a number of ways you can help and/or get help/info:
Tip line (assuming you didn’t send TFN your tip first!)
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Go get ‘em, kids! The librarians are holding the line…
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
TFN officially congratulates any Newsfucker who made it through that sentence. You’re the real heroes.
Poetic license.
Fucking Lines of the Day:
1. "The tax cuts are the driving force behind the bill, its raison d’austérité, if you will. (Waiting to kill it until after delivery is, however, consistent with Republican pro-life values.)" That's some dark humor!
2. "In fact, if Trump then replaced another alleged killer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with Mangione, UnitedHealth executives would likely eliminate fees and premiums entirely; add dental, vision, mental health, veterinary, spa treatments, mani-pedis, happy endings, monthly abortions, and face transplants; donate four billion dollars to Our Revolution; and start issuing checks to their customers to cover weekly checkups and regular gender-affirming care for all the genders, including making up new genders." Your cleverness knows no bounds!
I already think that TFN is worth a paid subscription, so I'm not sure what else would motivate others to subscribe. I would like more "inside the media" analyses/stories from your career—but that's just me and I can't claim that the things I like are popular.
"TFN doesn’t usually do hypocrisy policing"
as if there could conceivably be enough hours in the day ...