Transcript: Trump’s Rage at Thom Tillis Backfires, Wrecking a GOP Scam

Noah: Right. They don’t actually give a damn whether anybody actually gets a job. They just want to get people off the rolls, and throwing sand in the gears is a time-honored way to do it, specifically with work requirements. It works pretty well when you do it to food stamps too. And the budget analysts know this, so they they make their calculations accordingly.

Sargent: Absolutely. So Tillis got furious about this because it’s going to mean hundreds of thousands of people in his home state of North Carolina losing health coverage. On Sunday, he shouted the following on the Senate floor, “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off Medicaid? Trump’s advisers in the White House are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.” That’s Thom Tillis. Tim, what’s striking to me about that is Tillis is saying straight out that Trump is getting scammed by his own advisers into believing that this bill doesn’t do what it actually does. Now, I think Trump knows perfectly well what it does, but still his advisers really are probably trying to scam him this way. Your thoughts about those quotes?

Noah: Yeah, well, there are a million ways that they’re scamming themselves on this. Josh Hawley is a counterexample to Tillis. Last month, he published an op-ed in The New York Times saying Republicans are committing suicide if they’re going to do these kinds of cuts to Medicaid. But over the weekend, he quietly signed off on the cuts and signed off on the legislation by allowing the bill to move forward. So yeah, I don’t think it’s any great secrets to Trump or anybody else that they are cutting the hell out of both Medicaid and food stamps—which they’re cutting 20 percent, the largest cut ever made to food stamps as well. And it’s kind of a neat trick. They are committing unprecedented cuts to the social safety net and at the same time more than doubling the deficit. That’s hard to do at the same time.

Sargent: They really want those tax cuts for the rich, Tim.

Noah: Yes. And they are pretending that.… They’ve even changed their accounting method. In effect, they are saying, Whenever we Republicans tell you that a tax cut is temporary, it’s not temporary. It’s permanent.

Sargent: I want to grab on to what you said about Josh Hawley, who’s the senator from Missouri, because he actually engaged in a two-step that’s really disgusting. As you say, he wrote a New York Times op-ed—Hawley did—saying, Trump, you must not cut Medicaid. It will screw your own voters. Working-class people did not vote for you, Donald Trump, for you to cut Medicaid. Our voters, working-class voters, rely on these programs. Great, right? It’s great to hear that from a Republican. And it actually caused Josh Hawley to stand out. But you could tell that he was heading toward a bullshit conclusion to all this because he was also saying, Well, work requirements are probably OK. And then of course at the end—