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NBC News
5 days ago
- Health
- NBC News
The next big health care fight that's splitting Republicans: From the Politics Desk
Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team's latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail. Happy Friday! In today's edition, Sahil Kapur notes that a looming Obamacare deadline is dividing Republicans on Capitol Hill. Plus, Kristen Welker breaks down the political fallout thus far from the Jeffrey Epstein saga. And Scott Bland answers this week's reader question on Texas Republicans' redistricting efforts. — Adam Wollner The next big health care fight that's splitting Republicans By Sahil Kapur After passing President Donald Trump's sweeping megabill that included steep cuts to Medicaid, Republicans have another big health care fight on their hands. GOP leaders are facing growing calls from their members to extend a bucket of funding for the Affordable Care Act that is set to expire at the end of this year as some look to avert insurance premium hikes and millions of Americans losing their health coverage. But the cause faces opposition from conservatives who detest Obamacare and don't want to lift a finger to protect it. Some argue it'd be too expensive to continue the premium tax credits, which cost over $30 billion per year and were initially adopted as part of a Covid-19 response. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that about 5 million Americans will lose their insurance by 2034 if the money expires. The divide: Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who represents a swing district that Trump lost in 2024, said that Congress should continue those ACA tax credits in order to avoid price increases. 'I think we gotta be doing everything to keep costs low across the board — health care, groceries, energy, all of the above. So I am currently working on addressing that as we speak,' he said. But Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., the chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said he 'absolutely' wants that funding to end. 'It'll cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford it,' he said. 'That was a Covid-era policy. Newsflash to America: Covid is over.' For now, top Republican leaders are keeping their powder dry about whether — or how — they will take up the issue. 'I think that goes to the end of the calendar year, so we'll have discussion about the issue later. But it hasn't come up yet,' House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said when asked about an ACA subsidy extension. 'But it's on the radar.' A midterm warning: Veteran GOP pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward recently released a memo warning that extending the health care tax credits is broadly popular, even with 'solid majorities of Trump voters and [s]wing voters.' They warned that the GOP will pay a 'political penalty' in the competitive districts in the 2026 midterm elections if the funding expires on schedule. Analysis by Kristen Welker The Jeffrey Epstein saga is the political headache that won't go away for President Donald Trump, as the drip-drip of new reporting on his past relationship with the convicted sex offender and repeated attempts to deflect have only fed the story. It's the first time we've really seen Trump's base break with him to this degree. Even though the impulse to rally around their leader remains as each new story breaks, no matter how Trump tries to change the subject, the calls for his administration to release more information from the Epstein files are only growing louder. The issue transcends politics — it's a devastating reminder of the victims of the crimes committed by Epstein and those who enabled him. As far as how it's playing out on Capitol Hill, Democrats and even some Republicans are trying to hold the Trump administration's feet to the fire. Both parties believe the GOP could pay a political price on the issue as they look to defend their congressional majorities in next year's midterms. That includes Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., one of our guests on 'Meet the Press' this Sunday. 'People will become apathetic again. They'll say, we elected President Trump. We gave him a majority in the House and the Senate, and they couldn't even release evidence of an underage sex trafficking ring. They couldn't even bring themselves to release that. I thought we were the party of family values, and I guess we're not,' Massie said this week on the 'Redacted' podcast. And Democrats, including Rep. Ro Khanna of California — another one of our guests this Sunday — argue the issue has salience on multiple fronts. They note it divides Trump and his base while also making a relatively popular appeal for transparency, one piece of a broader Democratic line of attack that the administration isn't being open with the American people. While it's unsurprising that Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove of how the Trump administration is handling the Epstein files, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 71% of independents disapprove, too. And Republicans are about evenly divided, with 40% approving and 36% disapproving of the administration's handling of the issue. The political cost for Republicans isn't clear yet. Will it depress the enthusiasm of voters Republicans are scrambling to motivate to turn out with Trump not on the ballot? Will it force the party onto the defense at a time where it needs to be cementing public sentiment about its landmark tax cuts and spending bill, which Democrats are already weaponizing as a key midterm issue? Could Democrats overplay their hand if it overshadows their message on the most important issue to many voters, the economy? We'll discuss this and more on this Sunday's 'Meet the Press.' In addition to Khanna and Massie, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., will also be joining us. Thanks to everyone who emailed us! This week's reader question is on Republicans' attempts to draw new congressional maps in Texas. 'Is it legal what Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans want to do for Trump?' To answer that, we turned to senior politics editor Scott Bland. Here's his response: Redistricting happens every decade after the decennial census, so that each state has representation in the House of Representatives reflecting its official population and each district in a state has the same number of people in it. But this isn't the first time someone has moved to change the maps mid-decade. In fact, this isn't even the first time it's happened in Texas. In 2002, Texas Republicans gained full control of the state Legislature, and they decided the following year to draw a new map to replace a court-drawn one that had been imposed for that decade — and to increase the GOP advantage in the state. 'I'm the majority leader and we want more seats,' Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, told reporters at the time. What flies in Texas doesn't necessarily fly everywhere, though. Colorado Republicans also tried to redraw maps in their state in 2003, but the state Supreme Court ruled that the state Constitution forbade revisiting the maps more than once per decade. While Democrats are eager to fight back against the GOP's effort to draw more red seats in Texas, such obstacles could stand in their way. As New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs told Politico this week, 'I understand those in New York who are watching what's happening in Texas and Ohio want to offset their unfair advantage.' But, he added, 'The [state] Constitution seems pretty clear that this redistricting process should be done every 10 years.'
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Just-Saying-Stuff Presidency
By the time President Donald Trump told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press in May that he would not 'rule out' using military force to annex Greenland, I was pretty sure that I'd been had. He first outraged me with his Greenland plan six years ago and has brought it up at intervals ever since, periodically stirring up the Danish prime minister and domestic critics by, for example, posting an image of the Trump Tower Las Vegas photoshopped into a frozen village. 'I don't say I'm going to do it, but I don't rule out anything,' he told Welker, inadvertently describing his whole approach to political communication as a practice of toying with the general American electorate, if not specifically me. At this point I can admit he played me on Greenland, although even now I hesitate to say so in print. For all I know he could invade tomorrow, and in this regard, he plays me still. In defense of those of us who were fooled, though, Trump has spent the last decade training us to accept remarks more outlandish than that. Whatever else might be said of him, he has solved the problem of public speaking, in roughly the same way 'Woolly Bully' solved the problem of song lyrics: by saying all sorts of things but meaning very little. If American politicians have historically spoken in ways that seem wooden or uncandid, it is because their speech is at once necessary and dangerous. One cannot seek office without addressing the people, but to address the people is to invite disaster. Known gaffe machine Joe Biden confronted this hazard throughout his career, transcending it by misspeaking so often that misspeaking became part of his personal brand — a strategy that worked right up until it didn't in the first debate of the 2024 election. Other national figures have kept their microphone time brief and anodyne, speaking only when necessary and avoiding firm language when they do. Our president has taken the opposite approach. From the moment he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy and wound up calling Mexican immigrants 'rapists,' he established a pattern of calumny, hyperbole, name-calling, speculation and nonsense that made it clear nothing he said could be taken at face value, except the stuff he meant. Identifying that stuff amid his spray of unserious remarks requires a knowledge of his mental state that no one else has. It's impossible to know when Trump is joking, when he's off on a rant and when he might actually mean what he says. His weaponization of this just-saying-stuff strategy is Trump's major contribution to electoral politics. At this point in his improbably long career as a guy who either is or could be president, he has opened up space to lie, reverse course or simply screw up in ways no previous American leader has managed, freeing himself from nearly all consequences for his own speech. This freedom is not just negative. Trump's commitment to loose talk has given him unprecedented leeway to act on his words without criticism or debate, before people have even decided whether he's serious. Trump's unserious remarks run the gamut of rhetorical modes. He is probably the most sarcastic president in history. He speculates into microphones and cameras with no particular concern for facts, rants to visiting dignitaries and stadium crowds alike and routinely issues threats he never follows through on, interspersing them with public acts of revenge. Does he contradict himself? Reader, he contains multitudes, though none of it seems to stay contained for long. His recent about-face on Jeffrey Epstein reflects his willingness to weigh in on controversial issues with no firm commitment to his own position: In 2019, Trump demanded a 'full investigation' of the financier's death and purported client list, but now he frames questions about them as a conspiracy concocted by Democrats. The confused, exhausted state in which we find ourselves after 10 years of continuously trying to guess when Trump means what he is saying feels, two presidencies in, like a chronic neurological condition. It began in 2015, with the problem of when and how to say that he was joking. Trump does sometimes just joke. 'He's going to be fantastic. He's going to bring home the bacon,' he said while signing an order to make Mike Huckabee ambassador to Israel. 'Even though bacon isn't too big in Israel.' This remark was a down-the-middle jest, and anyone who tried to make a scandal of it would embarrass themselves — a trap Democrats repeatedly fell into in the early years of Trump's political career. In significant part, the experience of spending the last 10 years watching Trump run for president, be president or monetize his past presidency has been the experience of watching other people make the mistake of taking his frivolous remarks at face value. Feeling superior to such people is basically the core of his appeal, if your taxable income is less than $400,000 a year. Trump's ability to consistently deliver proof that people widely regarded as smart didn't get it was his main advantage during the 2016 election, when his irresponsible, hateful or simply dishonest statements became occasions for him and his supporters to look authentic compared to a stodgy and pretentious establishment. From there, the problem of how to interpret Trump only became more vexing, particularly for those outside his base. The growing national realization that Trump should be taken 'seriously but not literally,' as journalist Salena Zito put it in 2016, laid the groundwork for a second kind of experience, in which the president says something most observers assume is a joke that turns out to be sincere. His talk of mass deportations, for example, seemed like mere rhetoric for several years (deportations during the first Trump administration did not exceed levels under President Barack Obama) and then abruptly became real during his second term, when social media was flooded with videos of masked ICE agents pulling people into unmarked vans. Knowing that this kind of thing can happen keeps the first-order Trump experience — that of mistaking his loose talk for genuine policy proposals — maddeningly fresh. His plan to take control of Gaza, expel its Palestinian population and redevelop the area as a resort property appeared to be one such surprise-I-meant-it statement, at least for a while. No one thought his idea for a real-estate deal based on ethnic cleansing was serious, and then we experienced a few days of queasy reevaluation when he was posting videos about it and treating it as an actual plan. Then he never talked about it again. The Gaza Riviera situation provided a test case for another disorienting experience, in which Trump himself seems not to have made up his mind, implying he is caught in the same will-he-or-won't-he uncertainty he regularly inflicts on the rest of us. Earlier this year, we got this third variety of Trump speech experience in his promise to enact massive tariffs on nearly every other country. It sounded like the usual bluster at first, but then he was actually doing it, to the panic of financial markets and neoliberal economists. Some of those tariff threats have since been walked back; others have been redoubled, while a 30-percent tax on goods from China has already gone into effect — a series of false starts and surprise follow-throughs that have made it impossible for investors to guess what conditions might apply to international trade in the future. Perhaps these reversals were a clever ploy to bring complacent partners to the negotiating table, or perhaps Trump genuinely wasn't sure about his own trade policy. Only he knows for sure. It is worth noting that this process of saying it, walking it back and then actually doing it materially benefited the president, in that it likely discouraged members of Congress and other interested parties from mounting a legal challenge to his authority to impose tariffs in the first place. After Israel attacked Iran, Trump's announcement that he would take two weeks to decide how to respond worked in a similar way: Debate over an issue with the potential to split his coalition was forestalled while he (perhaps really, perhaps only ostensibly) waited to make up his mind, and then he acted suddenly, before intra-Republican conflict had a chance to begin in earnest. I call attention to this phenomenon because I want to rule out the theory that Trump has some kind of personality disorder that prevents him from knowing when he means something and when he doesn't. A wise clinician once told me that it's not a disability if it works to your advantage. While I believe that, like Royal Tenenbaum, the president occasionally says something and then realizes it was true, he generally knows when he is lying, joking, bluffing or riffing to see what sticks, as well as when he is speaking sincerely and when he is giving the impression of one but actually doing the other. And his awareness creates an information asymmetry that works to his advantage. This advantage should be familiar to anyone who has ever been in a bad relationship with someone who was quote-unquote funny. The husband who calls his wife fat and then complains she can't take a joke is an archetypal instance of this phenomenon. By framing his remarks as a joke, he creates space to say mean things without having to take responsibility for them. If he said sincerely, 'I want you to lose weight,' he would open the floor to his wife's critique of his own appearance, a conversation over which he might rapidly lose control. By making 'jokes' that are exaggerated versions of what he actually means, he enjoys the advantages of hassling his wife about her weight while avoiding the costs, or at least deferring them. Eventually she will leave or install Tinder, but until then he can evade the consequences of mistreating her by insisting he was only kidding. The recently popular 'TACO' acronym can be read as one misguided attempt to cope with the psychological fallout of this dynamic. The claim that 'Trump Always Chickens Out,' which started as an investment strategy and became a taunt, is seductive but reflects a longing for certainty that is simply not available. It's no good to assume that nothing the president says will actually happen, because historically some of it has. The false sense of wisdom TACO encourages might simply be the next phase of our training. Trump has long made his plans for the presidency a kind of state secret. During his third campaign, he told a town hall in Iowa that he wouldn't be a dictator, 'other than day one.' CNN uploaded its video segment on this remark to YouTube with the title 'Donald Trump jokes about acting like a 'dictator.'' Six months into his second term, he has ignored court orders to return residents deported to foreign prisons and remarked that 'homegrown' criminals are next. Now his last election is behind him, maybe. On March 30 he told NBC News he might seek a third term, then told Meet the Press five weeks later that he wouldn't. Americans who may want to act on or at least think seriously about this information are faced with the daunting task of determining in which case, if either, he was just talking. It is the kind of thing he says, after all. Whether it is the kind of thing he means is beyond what any of us could pretend to know.
NBC News
17-07-2025
- Sport
- NBC News
Bob Costas warns legalized sports betting will ‘ruin some lives': Full interview
In a Meet the Moment conversation with Kristen Welker, sports broadcaster Bob Costas warns about the rise of online sports betting and reflects on how his father's gambling shaped his perspective.
NBC News
17-07-2025
- NBC News
Sal Khan says A.I. can help teachers create ‘an exceptional classroom': Full interview
In a Meet the Moment conversation, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan tells Kristen Welker that artificial intelligence can empower teachers, personalize learning and help build more effective classrooms, despite growing concerns over its misuse.
Fox News
13-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Kristi Noem clashes with NBC anchor over 'inhumane' conditions at Alligator Alcatraz in testy exchange
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem clashed with NBC "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker in a testy exchange on Sunday over alleged "inhumane" conditions at the newly-opened Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention facility in the Florida everglades. The detention facility, which currently holds 900 people but has the capacity to hold nearly 4,000, has been under scrutiny after Democratic lawmakers toured the facility on Saturday. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., described the facility as an "internment camp." Democratic lawmakers who toured the facility claimed that detainees were subjected to inhumane treatment, unsanitary conditions and sweltering heat. Wasserman Schultz claimed that detainees were forced to drink water from the same sink they use for the bathroom, and were packed into "wall-to-wall cages." "Our detention centers at the federal level are held to a higher standard than most local or state centers and even federal prisons. The standards are extremely high, now this is a state-run facility at Alligator Alcatraz ---" Noem told Welker in response to being questioned over whether the Florida facility was inhumane, before being interrupted by the host. "More than 30 people stuffed into a jail cell?" Welker asked, cutting off Noem. "I wish they would have said that back during the Biden administration and back when the Democrats were in the White House when they were piling people on top of each other on cement floors and they didn't have two feet to move. They never did that, and that's why this politics has to end," Noem said. "I wouldn't call them jail cells, I would call them a facility where they are held and that are secure facilities, but are held to the highest levels of what the federal government requires for detention facilities --" Noem said before once again being cut off by Welker. "Democrats have called them cages," the "Meet the Press" host interrupted. Noem vowed to allow cameras to document the conditions inside migrant detention centers to show how their conditions are superior to centers used in the Biden administration. She also encouraged illegal immigrants to self-deport to avoid the detention process entirely and give themselves an opportunity to return to the country legally. Trump administration Border Czar Tom Homan also took Democrats to task Sunday for overlooking migrant detention conditions under Biden and failing to criticize them until Trump took office on CNN's State of the Union. ""You didn't see them complaining about, under Biden administration, people being held in a border patrol parking lot surrounded by a fence and sweltering heat, they ignored four years of open borders, historic migrant deaths, historic Americans dying from fentanyl, historic numbers of women and children being sex trafficked." The Trump administration's deportation policies have been the subject of widespread controversy and multiple court injunctions. The White House has aggressively moved to secure the southern border and has been deporting illegal immigrants at a rapid pace.
