(Dobbs) “The most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress.”

Trump doesn't do deals. He does extortion.

Donald Trump boasts that his “big beautiful budget bill,” which passed only thanks to the vice president’s tie-breaking vote yesterday, will be “good for all Americans.” He’s sure got a funny way of figuring out what’s good. Or maybe, he has a new way of figuring out who really qualifies to be counted as “all Americans.”

It’s easy enough to summarize what’s not good. For starters, health care cuts. Estimates range from 12 to 16 million people who have healthcare today but will lose it if the House goes along and the bill kicks in. Most are on Medicaid— they are the poorest. Others currently covered by Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, could be left hanging high and dry.

“We take care of Medicaid,” Trump lied to reporters yesterday. Yeah, by kicking the neediest people off its rolls.

Yale’s School of Public Health projects that if these cuts stand when the bill goes to the House, there will be more than 50,000 preventable deaths. Is this how this perverse president defines “good for all Americans?”

But this shouldn’t surprise us. As of this week, he has officially sealed the coffin of USAID. This prompted The Lancet medical journal to estimate that 14 million people who could be saved around the world by affordable American largesse instead will die over the next five years. So, just 50,000 preventable deaths from cuts to healthcare? Why would Donald Trump lose any sleep over that?

His bill also calls for cuts that especially hit hungry children. It chops out a quarter trillion dollars over the next ten years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. For 60 years now, they have helped keep millions of Americans from going hungry. Soup kitchens in church basements aren’t going to make up the difference.

These are the kinds of cruel cuts to the nation’s social safety net that Donald Trump says will be “good for all Americans.” All Americans, that is, except the ones who he can’t see and couldn’t care less if he could.

And why? To pay for tax cuts. Naturally, the biggest beneficiaries are in the highest income tiers. Maine Senator Angus King described it perfectly: “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give…. tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps…. we cut food aid to people?’”

But it gets even worse.

Yesterday, the Yale Budget Lab, which focuses on the economy, issued a report projecting that for the bottom 20% of Americans— the ones who can’t afford it— the bottom line on Trump’s big beautiful bill eventually will reduce their income by almost 3% while for the top 20% of Americans, it will raise their income by more than 2%.

That’s how Trump defines “good for all Americans.”

Then there’s the national debt. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the tax cuts in the bill that passed yesterday will add $3.3 trillion to the debt— that will put it almost 10% higher than it is today.

Of course Trump and his toadies have a plan. Tariffs. Tariffs, they say, will make up the difference. In their dream world, tariffs won’t lead to inflation. Of course it’s already going in that direction, which leads to lower demand, which leads to less net revenue in taxes. That’s why, to actual economists, it’s more of a nightmare. Fed chair Jerome Powell said yesterday, “All inflation forecasts in the United States went up materially as a result of the tariffs.”

But why would we listen to people like Powell, whose mandate is economic stability, when we can listen to people whose only mandate is to make MAGA happy.

Finally, there’s a sideshow in all this. Its name is Elon Musk.

Yesterday and the day before, he took to his social media site X and took his chainsaw to Trump’s budget bill and to every member of Congress “who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history.” They should, he wrote, “hang their head in shame.” As we know, Musk throws out more than idle threats. He throws out money, and pledged to throw it at candidates who run against the hypocrites he suddenly scorns. “They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth.”

I never thought I’d be cheering for Elon Musk.

Of course after Musk vented, Trump showed his true colors for the millionth time, threatening Musk’s government contracts and government subsidies— as if the government is a tool for his vengeance, not the the nation’s well-being. In the crude way that Donald Trump communicates, he said that DOGE, which Musk created, may “go back and eat Elon.”

The bill yesterday passed by the narrowest of margins— with three courageous Republicans risking Trump’s wrath by voting against it, it took JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote to push it through.

Basically, Trump bought the last votes he needed. People say he makes great deals. But he doesn’t do deals. He does extortion. Whether it’s Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who was against the bill until she wasn’t, or Canada, which cancelled a digital tax against American companies when Trump cut off tariff talks.

To hear Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tell it, the big beautiful budget bill is “the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress.” He’s been there since 2007. Starting today, GOP members of the House have to decide whether they’ll have the guts to stand against such a deeply immoral piece of legislation, one that can’t honestly even pretend to be “good for all Americans.”

After what we just saw, I don’t have much hope.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net