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Daily Mail
36 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Republican who plans to tank Trump's 'big beautiful' bill taunts White House with enticing offer
Senator Rand Paul is tired of people painting him as public enemy number one when it comes to U.S. Senate opposition to President Trump's budget package, commonly referred to as the 'big, beautiful bill'. Paul has been a vocal opponent of the House version of the budget package since it made its way to the Senate, but he is far from the only Republican not backing the bill in its current state. During a Tuesday Fox News appearance, Paul, a Republican with strong libertarian convictions, told Mornings with Maria host Maria Bartiromo that he was not voting for the bill. 'I'm enthusiastically for the tax cuts, I voted for them in 2017 I helped to formulate those tax cuts in 2017,' Paul stated. 'I will not be the deciding vote against this, I promise you that. If I'm the deciding vote against this, they will negotiate with me.' 'Right now they are not negotiating with me, because they don't think they need me, so I will not be the deciding vote. The bill will not fail because of me,' the Senator continued. 'But if it is up to me, and I am the deciding vote, there will be a negotiation, but there is going to be a conservative shift to the bill if they want my vote, thats what I should do as a conservative,' Paul concluded. Rand Paul: "I will not be the deciding vote against this. I promise you that. If I'm the deciding vote against this, they'll negotiate with me. Right now they're not negotiating with me because they don't think they need me." — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2025 At the start of June, Paul told Newsmax that if the only thing in the 'big, beautiful bill' was making the tax cuts permanent, he would back the legislation wholeheartedly. 'If the bill were solely about making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, I wouldn't be a yes; I'd be a hell yes,' Paul noted at the time. 'Unfortunately, that's not the reality with this bill. It includes the largest increase of the debt ceiling ever and will have the United States borrowing $5T over the next 2 years. This bill is the opposite of conservative, and we should not pass it,' Paul added. If the bill were solely about making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, I wouldn't be a yes; I'd be a hell yes. Unfortunately, that's not the reality with this bill. It includes the largest increase of the debt ceiling ever and will have the United States borrowing $5T over the next… — Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 4, 2025 Republicans currently hold a majority in the Senate with 53 seats out of 100. That means Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune can afford to lose the support of up to four of his colleagues on the bill, in which case a 49-49 tied vote could be broken by Vice President JD Vance. The U.S. House of Representatives passed their version of the government budget funding package back in May, ahead of the Memorial Day Recess. The Trump White House is keeping the pressure on senators to work out a version of the bill in their chamber, and send it back to the House for a vote, so that the president can sign it by the Fourth of July. Paul has drawn the ire of the White House several times in recent weeks. Speaking to reporters out side of the Capitol last week, Paul shared that his invitation to the White House's congressional picnic had been cancelled. 'I've just been told that I've been uninvited from the [White House] Democrat will be invited, every Republican invited, but I will be the only one disallowed. I just find this incredibly petty', Paul said. The president then responded to Paul's claim's saying that the senator was welcome to attend the picnic after all. Trump contradicted his own White House last Thursday, indicating that 'of course' Paul and his family could attend, via a post made on Truth Social. 'Of course Senator Rand Paul and his beautiful wife and family are invited to the BIG White House Party tonight,' Trump wrote last week. 'He's the toughest vote in the history of the U.S. Senate, but why wouldn't he be? Besides, it gives me more time to get his Vote on the Great, Big, Beautiful Bill,' Trump wrote in a post on his social media site Truth Social on Thursday morning. 'It will help to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! I look forward to seeing Rand. The Party will be Great!' Trump concluded. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is another member of the president's team who has recently thrown arrows at Paul. 'Well, anyone who votes against the one big, beautiful bill including Senator Rand Paul, will be voting for a tax hike of more than $4 trillion on the American people and their voters will know about it,' Leavitt warned earlier this month. Paul was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, long before Trump's foray into politics, and was easily reelected to a third term in 2022 during Joe Biden's presidency. Paul is not up for election again until 2028. Kentucky's other Senate seat is up as an open seat in the 2026 midterms election. The commonwealth's senior senator and former Leader Mitch McConnell - another running Trump nemesis - is not running for another term.
The Guardian
36 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Starmer says he picked up papers dropped by Trump so others wouldn't get tackled by security
Keir Starmer said he rushed to pick up papers dropped by Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada mainly to avoid anyone else stepping forward to do so and being tackled by the US president's security team. Speaking to reporters in Kananaskis a day after Trump fumbled some of the documents about a UK-US trade deal, with a sheaf of papers tumbling to the ground, Starmer said he had little choice but to bend down and help out. The UK prime minister said: 'I mean, look, there weren't many choices with the documents and picking it up, because … as you probably know there were quite strict rules about who can get close to the president. 'I mean, seriously, I think if any of you [the media] had stepped forward other than me, I was just deeply conscious that in a situation like it would not have been good for anybody else to have stepped forward – not that any of you rushed to. 'There's a very tightly guarded security zone around the president, as you would expect.' Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion As well as dropping the papers, Trump wrongly announced that he had agreed a deal with the European Union, not the UK, and some of his answers were unclear and rambling. Asked if he had any concerns about Trump's health, Starmer said: 'No, he was in good form yesterday, and I mean we had – I don't know how many sessions yesterday together as the G7 and then into the evening session as well.' As Starmer and Trump spoke to the media on Monday before their private talks, the US president was again effusive in his praise for the prime minister. Asked why Trump liked him so much, Starmer replied: 'I mean, that's really for him to answer, but I think it's that we do have a good relationship. I think that is in the national interest. 'Frankly, there has long been a close relationship between the US and the UK, as I've said many times, on defence and security and intelligence sharing in particular. I'm very pleased that I've got a good relationship with him, notwithstanding, as both he and I acknowledge, that our political backgrounds are different.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Jon Stewart on response to Minnesota shootings: ‘What are we doing?'
Late-night hosts respond to Donald Trump's underwhelming military parade, the record-breaking No Kings protests and Republican disinformation around the shooting of a Minnesota politician. Jon Stewart arrived at his Monday evening perch on the Daily Show reeling from an eventful weekend in US news. 'Let me just say this to start off: Fuck! Just to start off,' he said. 'This weekend – terrible! Again. I'm so sorry.' Stewart started first with Israel's military strike of nuclear facilities in Iran, a conflict Trump teased that the US military would join, after his administration deployed troops in Los Angeles to battle peaceful protests of his immigration raids. 'The only problem with their posture – that I see with it – is their reluctance to commit the American military to fighting drawn-out and often pointless wars doesn't seem to extend to America,' Stewart said of Republicans reticent to support Trump's foreign policy. 'The Maga mindset appears to be: we didn't vote for foreign wars, we voted for civil war.' 'They are looking for any pretense to stick their robot dogs on Democrats,' he said of Republicans supporting the use of military force on Los Angeles protesters, 'and the strategy that they're using is to inflate the threat that this country now faces, to so rile up their base as to make the left in this country – represented by over 75 million votes in the past presidential election – as a legitimate military target for the United States of America. It's a strategy that's been used before to gin up military conflict.' Stewart then pivoted to the horrific shooting of Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota Democratic state representative, and her husband, Mark, in their home. The suspect, Vance Boelter, had a hit list of Democratic representatives and appears to have espoused far-right views, but Stewart wasn't interested. 'I don't give a fuck why this person did it,' he said. 'I don't care whose team he's on, I don't care if he listens to NPR or Fox News, I don't give a flying fuck. What blows my mind is our resignation in the aftermath of this nonsense,' he said, referring to a campaign of misinformation and outright apathy in the wake of political violence. 'We're willing to do things about other issues,' he continued. 'Why are they attacking Los Angeles right now? Why is the right so willing to tear our cities apart in this moment?' Stewart then played a series of clips of Republican lawmakers claiming that any violence by any immigrant demanded a firm response. 'Violence should never be accepted, it should never be tolerated – but that's for their issue,' he said. 'In the wake of Sandy Hook, and Uvalde, and Parkland, and El Paso, and Lewiston, and Aurora, and Buffalo, and Boulder, and Binghamton, and Highland Park, and Monterey Park, and San Bernardino, and San Jose, and San Francisco, and the Pulse nightclub, and the Colorado Springs nightclub, and the Little Rock nightclub, and the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks, and the Ned Peppers Bar in Dayton, and the Waffle House in Nashville, and Virginia Tech, and UVA, and MSU, and UCSB, and FSU, and NIU, and SMC, and the Sutherland Springs Church, and the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the Living Church of God, and the Tree of Life Synagogue, and the Allen Mall, and the Westroads Mall, and Fort Hood, and Lockheed Martin, and – what are we fucking doing? What are we doing? By the way, that is a wildly incomplete list. We kept it to the last 25 years, and it's still not everything.' He continued: 'Why is it when a foreigner, or someone that shouldn't be here, kills one of us, we're gonna put $150bn into border security, we're gonna militarize our cities, we're gonna spend trillions to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas, we're gonna ban people from random countries from ever fucking visiting here, we're gonna take our shoes off at the airport forever – but when we do it to ourselves, nothing?' 'Is it that the only acceptable deaths are those that are made in America?' he concluded. 'Our only response now is to tally-up the psycho scoreboard on whose side the perp belongs to?' 'On Saturday, Trump had his much-anticipated stupid sweet 16, disguised as a tribute to the US Army he bone-spurred his way out of,' said Jimmy Kimmel, referring to Trump's military parade. The $50m event turned out to be 'boring' – 'it was basically the $50m version of when a five-year-old shows you every car in his Hot Wheels collection'. The parade boasted corporate sponsors including UFC, a crypto company and Scott's Miracle-Gro, 'which is the product Trump uses on his head', Kimmel quipped. 'There were flyovers, there were combovers, the whole thing!' 'After all this talk that this wasn't a birthday party for him, it kind of seemed like a birthday party for him,' Kimmel continued before a clip of the muted crowd singing 'happy birthday' to Trump. He then cut to a shot of Trump appearing to doze off during the firework show. 'There's sleepy Don taking it all in,' he said. 'In fairness, that's as close as he gets to being able to sleep with his wife, so he took the opportunity.' 'The turnout was much lower than expected, but as Trump would say, there were record-breaking crowds,' he added. 'The bleachers, as you can see, are almost empty. The crowds were sparse.' On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert celebrated Father's Day, because 'Daddy got just what he wanted: no one came to Trump's big stupid birthday parade.' The White House claims that 250,000 people attended, though Colbert was skeptical. 'Apparently a quarter of a million people looks like this,' he said over a photo of a sparsely populated lawn. 'They must be really good at hide and seek. Maga stands for Make America Grass Again, I guess.' 'That was so sparsely attended that these poor troops were forced to march past empty bleachers,' he added before a clip of squeaky tanks rolling by mostly empty stands. 'We may have one WWII, but this weekend we lost the battle with WD-40,' he quipped. 'It looked like no one was having a good time at this thing, not even Donald Trump,' he said before a photo of Trump scowling as he watched the procession. 'That is one sad sack of potatoes,' Colbert laughed. And on Late Night, Seth Meyers also mocked Trump's poorly attended birthday parade, where every administration official in attendance looked bored. At one point, the camera captured Marco Rubio yawning. 'Everything about this soggy, poorly attended birthday parade just made Trump look more pathetic,' said Meyers. 'The special guests were bored out of their minds, the bleachers were emptier than a football game at Oberlin, the lawn had enough empty space for a game of ultimate frisbee.' 'But while deflated Trump was watching robot dogs walk by sparse crowds for his birthday, millions of Americans were fanning out across the country for historic nationwide protests,' he added, referring to the 5 million or so Americans who showed up for the 'No Kings' protests in rebuke of Trump's administration. 'Our system of government is in dire straits, but the massive outpouring of energy across the country was proof that Americans will not easily give up democracy,' said Meyers. 'This was, by all accounts, one of the largest protests in American history. Compare that to the president who, despite all his power and wealth, looked like a guy who was using his crappy golden phone to call roadside assistance.'
