President Donald Trump on Thursday evening characterized his just-approved cuts to Medicaid and food stamps as eliminating “wasteful spending” in a lie-filled victory lap speech in Iowa.
“With this bill, every major promise I made to the people of Iowa in 2024 became a promise kept,” he told his supporters in Des Moines about the massive tax-and-spending cut bill that cleared Congress earlier in the day.
He similarly claimed that he had delivered on his campaign promise of “no tax on social security” ― which is true only for a small set of senior citizens who happen to earn just over the existing threshold for untaxed social security income, and only if they die before 2028, when the new tax deduction for them disappears.
New tax breaks creating deductions on overtime and tip income similarly expire after just three years, while reductions to income tax rates that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest 20% of Americans are now permanently on the books.
The new bill ― which Trump and his allies call the “big, beautiful bill” and which he is planning to sign into law Friday ― extends tax cuts originally passed in 2017 and slashes close to $2 trillion in spending, half of that from Medicaid, a program Trump promised he would not touch. In all, the new law will increase annual budget deficits by about 33% annually and increase the national debt by $4.1 trillion by 2034, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
During the congressional debate on the legislation, Republicans argued that the bill was the largest tax cut in history while simultaneously claiming that failing to pass it would mean a massive tax increase.
“This bill includes the largest tax cut in American history,” Trump told his Iowa audience.
In fact, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts were smaller as a percentage of gross domestic product than those passed under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Further, the vast majority of the tax cuts approved Thursday morning by the House after clearing the Senate over the weekend just extended those 2017 cuts.
Trump, as he nearly always does, meandered and rambled through various unrelated topics during his 66-minute speech. He invented a conversation with Iranian leaders in which they set a convenient time for when they would fire missiles at the U.S. military base in Qatar following his strike against that country’s nuclear facilities. He bragged about renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. He called bad bankers “shylocks,” an anti-Semitic slur. He confused Fifth Avenue in New York with Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., when recounting the $45 million military parade he threw for himself on his birthday last month. He announced that he would host a kick-boxing match on White House grounds as part of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration. And he attacked Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, as a “communist at the highest level.”
“As president of the United States I’m proclaiming here and now that America is never going to be communist in any way, shape or form, and that includes New York City,” he said.