Name: The backlash begins: Republicans heading home from D.C. face local protests over Trump bill
Uploaded: 2025-07-04T07:59:58.000Z
Duration: 8 min 1 s
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So, every president has a big legislative priority that they want to get done in their first year.

The first year is always the pivotal time where you can push big pieces of legislation forward.

And regardless of party or ideology or the merits of the ideas, the basic question that drives it for every single one of them is typically pretty simple.

Maybe it's making good on a campaign promise.

Maybe it's a crisis nobody saw coming that's now sitting in your lap because you're the president.

I mean, I worked for two presidents, and that's how it went for them, but that's how it has gone for pretty much every president for decades.

Obama's first 18 months were focused around getting the Recovery Act passed because his priority at the time was digging the country out of the huge economic hole, the massive unemployment rate crisis that was created by the 2008 financial meltdown.

He also fought to pass Dodd-Frank, a Wall Street reform package, to address the problems that had led to the financial crisis.

And of course he pushed very, very, very hard for the Affordable Care Act because far too many Americans lacked health insurance.

He was solving clear problems, pulling the country out of an economic hole, trying to prevent it from happening again, trying to give people health insurance who didn't have it.

Fast forward to when Joe Biden took office.

That was the height of a global pandemic.

And his focus was, of course, on delivering a rescue plan to help address the economic damage it was causing and to help get all sorts of equipment out to people, whether it was tests or masks or things to help people address and prevent them from getting COVID.

He also signed a giant bill into law that addressed the country's infrastructure needs, something way overdue.

Remember the infrastructure week that was in Trump's first term seemingly every week?

And then he passed another law that tackled inflation and the climate crisis.

He was trying to answer questions, trying to address the COVID crisis, but also address problems he had long wanted to solve.

Outdated infrastructure in our country, the need to do more for the climate.

In every case, and more cases than those, presidents identified problems that were impacting huge, broad swaths of the country.

And then they worked with Congress to try to solve them.

Which brings me to a big, unanswered question about Donald Trump's big, ugly bill, which now heads to his desk after passing by the narrowest of margins this afternoon.

What exactly is the problem this legislation is trying to solve?

What exactly did Donald Trump and his team sit in a room and think, you know what, we have two houses of Congress, we have the White House, we're going to try to solve this big problem?

Republicans have never even tried to answer that question, not coherently at least.

But looking what is in the bill, it's pretty clear to me that the problem they were seeking to address is, I guess, that the wealthy in this country have too little, and they pay too much in taxes, and the poor have too much.

And yeah, that question, and focusing your big legislative priorities on answering that question is completely at odds with the often-repeated theory that Donald Trump is somehow a champion of working people.

I mean, we have all, probably everybody watching right now, I definitely do, have all long known that this is a farce.

But now, with his signature legislation headed to his desk, there should be no doubt.

A populist doesn't kick 17 million people off their health care coverage.

A populist doesn't take food stamps away from millions of people.

A populist doesn't fund a massive immigration enforcement army with a budget bigger than many of the world's militaries.

And a populist definitely doesn't do all of that while also giving over $4 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest people in the entire country.

This is Donald Trump's signature piece of legislation.

It's the chance he had as president to solve a problem in this country at a time when, by the way, real problems need a lot of solving.

Many people who voted for him were betting he was going to do something to help them.

And yet those are the people who voted for him, who sent him to the Oval Office, many of whom will be hit the hardest by this legislation.

I mean, Trump made huge electoral gains in counties with lots of voters on Medicaid, probably in part because he explicitly pledged never to cut Medicaid.

Well, he just broke that promise to all those voters.

Some of them still have no idea what Trump and Republicans in Congress have just done.

Polling shows that many Americans have not even heard about this giant bill at all.

And of those who have, only a sliver know it includes Medicaid cuts.

And that is definitely a challenge for Democrats.

And we're going to talk about that with a few of my guests tonight because it kind of is the question now.

The more people learn about what is in this bill, the less they like the bill and all the components of it.

And the people who don't know what is in the bill are pissed.

In Danville today, people voiced their frustration with President Donald Trump's one big beautiful bill.

Loud and clear across the street from their congressman's office.

Dozens gathered outside Representative David Valadao's office.

Vote no on what the protesters call deadly cuts to health care.

Protesters tonight on Dodge Street pleading for Nebraska's representatives to have a change of heart.

Frustration mounts as a massive federal budget bill hits the House floor.

In congressional districts all across Georgia Tuesday, constituents demonstrated against President Trump's spending bill.

The organization of Monday's Stop the Billionaire giveaway bus tour says those in favor of this bill aren't looking at its harmful effects to the greater population, such as Medicaid restrictions, food assistance, and rollback tax credits on clean energy.

Everything you just saw, that package of protests across the country from all over the place, is just from the past three days.

Protesters showed up in Tucson, outside the office of Republican Congressman Juan Cascomani, and outside Republican Congressman Young Kim's office in Anaheim.

In Staten Island, protesters held what they called a die-in, that's what they called it, outside the offices of Republican Congressman Nicole Malliotakis.

They brought homemade tombstones representing the lives impacted by Trump's big, ugly bill.

Tomorrow, there are more than 200 Free America protests planned across the country.

Organizers say those protests will be focused on freeing the U.S. from billionaires' power, poverty, unlawful orders, and the politics of fear.

And those protesters understand how important it is to bring the ugliness of this bill into the light of day.

What we are seeing now is the beginning, just the beginning, of an effort to make sure every Republican who voted for this owns that vote.

And it's not going to take one speech, even a good one, or one protest.

It's not going to happen in one day, or one week, or even one month.

That effort will need to be absolutely relentless, and specifically tied to the impact this bill has on the people those Republicans represent.

And it's going to take the people who fought against it, too, also being relentless, tirelessly reminding people of the damage these Republicans just did with this bill.