Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Is a Blood Offering

A gospel written in debt and delivered in blood. Read it and weep.

Illustration (Donny Evans)

---

They received it in the dead hours, long after midnight, as if its birth could only occur in legislative darkness. At precisely 1:23 a.m., according to Senator Ron Johnson, a thick sheaf of fiscal scripture was delivered to his desk—its name already blasphemous in its presumption: the One Big Beautiful Bill. By noon, this unread and unreadable edict was expected to command obedience from the Senate, with all the solemnity of divine law but none of the clarity, deliberation, or coherence. Not unlike the golden calf that led Moses into rage and retribution, this bill was fashioned in haste and worshipped by fools. It promised salvation, demanded sacrifice, and arrived with the unmistakable scent of sulfur still rising from its amendments. President Trump, who long ago blurred the line between governance and gospel, declared there would be “no vacation until it passes”—as if national policy were a Fourth of July doorbuster and Congress the checkout line for his moral liquidation sale.

Let us read, then, from the Book of Illusion. The bill—this graven thing—extends the lapsed Trump tax cuts not as policy but as liturgy, complete with deductions for overtime and tipped wages—cheap garnishes on a poisoned plate, designed to fool the starving into thinking they’ve been served a meal. It caps the SALT deduction at $10,000, trimming the House’s $40,000 figure not for fairness but for show, like slashing offerings to the temple while gilding its doors. Its cruelty is not veiled: Medicaid eligibility is narrowed by over $930 billion, a near-trillion-dollar purge of the inconvenient poor, while SNAP burdens are thrust onto the states and environmental credits are being surgically rolled back—wind and solar punished while nuclear and hydro glide untouched, as if only breathable air offends the divine. Even the Congressional Budget Office, an agency historically more bean counter than bellwether, projects a deficit swell of $2.8 trillion. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, less bound by decorum, warns the true cost—when permanence and interest are added—could reach $4 trillion or more. But this is no ordinary ledger imbalance. This is debt sanctified by delusion: a bill that adds trillions while preaching fiscal responsibility; a script that promises prosperity while slashing the very supports that allow people to survive. It is not budget-making. It is idol-carving. And it is every bit as hollow as the golden ox that once made a prophet break stone.

To this temple of contradictions stepped an unlikely priestess: the Senate Parliamentarian. Elizabeth MacDonough, who has served in silence and ceremony since 2012, did not ascend by ambition but by adherence—to rules older than most laws and arguably more feared. Her name is not known to crowds, nor chanted at rallies, but in a chamber drunk on spectacle, she remains the last official bound by procedure rather than politics. And so, one by one, she struck down the false commandments: the forced work requirements for the poor, the cynical Medicaid cost shifts, the defunding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the judicial castrations disguised as budget control. Gone, too, were the silencer deregulations and the cuts to Pell Grants. Like a weary archivist refusing to stamp a forged scroll, she reminded the Senate of its own liturgical constraints—the Byrd Rule, that dry parchment which forbids reconciliation bills from smuggling in ideology dressed as numbers. And for this simple act of fidelity to process, she now stands in the crosshairs of Republican rage—denounced, dismissed, and demanded out by those whose project depends on her silence. But she did not stay silent. She read the scroll and she said: this is not a budget. This is blasphemy.

There is something almost hieratic in the date itself: July 4. Independence Day—America’s civic Sabbath—has been seized as the bill’s sacramental deadline, as if the republic’s founding could somehow sanctify its undoing. In Trump’s hands, the calendar is no longer a measure of time but a cudgel of obedience. “No vacation until it passes,” he bellowed, transforming legislation into penance and senators into apostles of urgency. It is no coincidence that the bill was named not for its contents, but for its appearance—beautiful—that glittering adjective of dictators and demagogues, of palaces built over slums and parades held after purges. Behind the deadline is the dogma: that haste is virtue, that speed is strength, that to delay—even to read—is to betray. The Senate was told to vote before its own members had finished reading the text—certainly before the parliamentarian could deliver another incision, and well before the public had any chance to grasp what was being done in its name. Deliberation was treated as indulgence, revision as betrayal, and comprehension as a luxury no longer afforded to lawmakers or citizens alike. What remained was obedience—just one more sacred act in the American ritual of legislative self-harm.

Yet even in this rite of submission, a few voices strayed from the chant. Senator Rand Paul, Kentucky’s self-appointed accountant of the apocalypse, glanced at the numbers and announced what any sentient observer could have told the altar boys: “The math doesn’t add up.” Lisa Murkowski of Alaska urged her colleagues to slow down, warning, in tones more pastoral than partisan, that they were being asked to legislate blindfolded—a rare moment of candor in a Senate increasingly allergic to hesitation. Ron Johnson, typically more banker than bard, refused even to open debate, calling the entire process “mortgaging the future.” These were not radicals, nor reformers, nor ideologues. These were the inheritors of the very party pushing the bill. And yet for breaking ranks, for hesitating before the pyre, they were cast as apostates. In Trump’s theology of governance, dissent is not disagreement—it is sacrilege. The faithful do not think; they kneel.

It is one thing to bankrupt a country; it is another to call it discipline. The authors of this bill have not simply abandoned arithmetic—they have beatified it. In their theology, deficits are not incurred, they are consecrated. Future debt is waved through not as a hazard but as a rite, and every upward tick in the ten-year projection is shrugged off as if the ledgers were written in invisible ink. The so-called “current policy baseline”—a bureaucratic sleight of hand that treats temporary tax cuts as if already enshrined in eternity—serves not as an accounting tool but as a moral disguise. By pretending the damage is already done, they seek to make its continuation blameless. This is not governance. It is indulgence disguised as stewardship, an orgy of debt without confession, in which the only real sacrifice is truth.

It is not the authors of this bill who will live with its consequences. They will not be the ones who lose coverage when Medicaid is redefined downward to exclude the inconvenient poor. That exclusion—over $930 billion in Medicaid cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the Senate draft—is not some accounting adjustment. It is a purge. They will not stand in a grocery line wondering which child eats less because SNAP funds have been rerouted into state budgets already flayed to the bone. They will not retrain for jobs that no longer exist in energy sectors the bill was written to dismantle—not by drift but by design. The rollback of clean-energy credits is not a policy correction. It is a vendetta. It is a message to the future, writ in oil and coal: progress is permitted only when it is profitable to the powerful. Texas alone is projected to forfeit $87 billion in GDP and over 100,000 renewable jobs by 2035, but figures like these are not arguments in this theology. They are heresies. The faithful are told to ignore them. The rest are punished for noticing. The budget is a mandate—draped in populism, enforced like scripture, and inflicted on the powerless as proof of their place. The altar is federal, the blade is legislative, and the blood—as always—belongs to the poor.

They call it the One Big Beautiful Bill, as if naming the idol sanctifies the worship. But this is not beauty. It is ornamented ruin: cruelty gilded for those conditioned to kneel before suffering. It offers no growth, no uplift, no shelter—only austerity masquerading as virtue, and pestilence paraded as prophecy. What it builds is not a future but a mausoleum of greed, a reliquary where ambition lies embalmed and public hope decays beside it. And when the collapse comes—as it will—the authors will not stand among the wreckage. They will be behind podiums, cloaked in gospel and flag, declaring it deliverance. And those left bleeding will be told—once again—that this was the cost of freedom.

---

One Big, Beautiful Implosion