The Dictatorship
How Trump dashed Republicans’ big hope for the midterms
ByJoseph Zeballos-Roig
For Tax Day, Republicans tried to focus on trumpeting new tax breaks popular with a broad segment of voters. President Donald Trump had other plans.
Championing no tax on tips and no tax on overtime was meant to shore up the GOP’s standing ahead of the midterms, especially after the controversial war with Iran inflated gas prices to more than $4 per gallon. Many Republicans are betting that bigger tax refunds will give voters a reason to re-elect them even as Trump’s management of the economy hits new lows in public polling.
But instead of zeroing in on a kitchen-table message, the Republican Party’s chief salesman was mudslinging on biblical terrain that’s about as far away from the kitchen table as possible.
While tax refunds are up, they are not keeping pace with the price increases walloping Americans.
In the past few days, Trump has brawled with the Vatican, including sharing an image depicting him as Jesus Christ. It didn’t take long for him to take down the post, but the move helped overshadow the GOP’s celebratory messaging around the tax cuts.
During a staged event on Monday in which a DoorDash worker delivered McDonald’s to the White House, Trump could not avoid questions from reporters about the Jesus image and his caustic attack against Pope Leo XIV that generated criticism from Catholic officials. Three days later, the president appeared critical of his team’s effort to promote the tax cuts.
“To be honest, it was a little tacky,” Trump said in a flash of self-awareness at a roundtable discussion in Las Vegas. “They come up with these crazy ideas … we do these things in politics. They’re a little embarrassing.” He has also kept up his criticism of the Holy See and ruled out an apology.
Trump hasn’t been able to avoid repeated blunders that threaten to imperil the GOP’s control of Congress this November, beginning with his decision to green-light the unpopular war with Iran. Sharp price increases for gas, groceries and more will swallow most Americans’ tax refunds this year, all but wiping out the political boost Republicans could wring from last year’s megalaw.
Start with the swelling cost of refilling the gas tank, an expense few Americans can dodge. A group of Stanford University economists recently projected that American families will spend an extra $776 this year on higher gas prices. Those aren’t the only new charges they are grappling with: The Tax Foundation estimates that tariffs will consume another $600 of their budgets this year in what amounts to a tax increase.
Meanwhile, though tax refunds are up, they are not keeping pace with the price increases walloping Americans. Refunds are only $350 more compared with 2025, per IRS data. That falls short of White House promises of a $1,000 boost straight to taxpayers’ bank accounts. Sluggish wage growth won’t bail Republicans out either, and inflation overtaking pay raises will hit middle- and low-income families particularly hard.
It helps explain why U.S. consumer sentiment is plunging to record lows, driven by concern that the price hikes will stick around and stretch budgets for the foreseeable future. A recent Fox News poll showed 64% of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of taxes, an issue long viewed as a GOP strength. That share included almost 80% of independents and even 27% of Republicans, in a warning sign of eroding support.
Already, key Republican senators are acknowledging a partywide failure to tout the megalaw ahead of the midterms.
The president’s polling on the economy is similarly poor, but the White House seems to reject those numbers. Asked on Thursday why people aren’t feeling better about the economy, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded: “Well, in their heart of hearts, they feel good. I’m not sure what they’re telling the survey people.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was Republicans’ biggest hope for the midterms. But it’s falling into a familiar sequence of events — an instance of déjà vu, if you will — that similarly troubled the 2017 Republican tax law.
Shortly after entering office in 2017, Trump put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act at the top of his to-do list. The spectacular collapse of the repeal effort was among the biggest failures of his first term. Only then did Republicans retreat to their safe space of gigantic tax cuts, most of which benefited wealthy Americans and large corporations.
Democrats, though, zeroed in on health care during the 2018 midterms, a decision that propelled them back to controlling the House. They painted the GOP tax law as a giveaway to the rich, an impression that gained sway among voters and contributed to the measure’s lackluster popularity. Many GOP candidates barely mentioned tax cuts on the campaign trail that year.
Credit Republicans in Congress for learning from their mistakes. For this legislative go-round, they designed distinct tax benefits for restaurant servers, Uber drivers, hairstylists and others in the service sector who rely on tips or are used to working overtime. But the learning only went so far: Most of the law’s benefits were again freighted toward the richest Americans while leaving poorer ones in the lurch.
Democrats are capitalizing on messaging similar to 2018 and chipping away at the law’s approval ratings. Already, key Republican senators are acknowledging a partywide failure to tout the megalaw ahead of the midterms. Sen. Steve Daines of Montana said at a Semafor event this week that “we’ve done a very poor job” in selling it. “We’ve just not done a good job litigating that,” he said.
Republicans want voters to deliver a favorable verdict in November. Yet Trump’s decisions that led to surging prices for groceries, gas and more are setting them up to fail if the election hinges on the economy. Many voters will correctly judge that a war with Iran wasn’t part of the agenda. Neither was picking fights with pontiffs.
Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a reporter who has covered economic policy and politics for Semafor, Business Insider and Quartz, among other publications.
A dozen state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, citing the harm the megamerger could pose to competition in Hollywood.
The deal would consolidate two powerhouse movie studios, several popular streaming services and the national news networks CBS and BLN into a single company under the purview of the billionaire Trump-aligned Ellison family.
That consolidation, greenlit by the Justice Department’s antitrust division last month, would negatively reshape the production landscape in Hollywood by depriving studios of the blockbuster series they rely on to generate revenue, the state law enforcement officials maintain.
The concerns in the lawsuit echo the “unequivocal opposition” to the merger voiced by thousands of industry professionals in an open letter in April.
In the lawsuit, the states argue the merger would “extinguish competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences nationwide,” and that it “combines two
of the nation’s five major film distributors, leaving only four to control over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States.”
The state-led challenge poses the most significant legal barrier in the country to that new media landscape becoming reality. The United Kingdom’s antitrust regulator is also considering action.
Consolidation in markets “leads to increased unaffordability, a loss of good paying job opportunities and fewer choices for consumers. It gives too few too much power,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference shortly after the lawsuit was filed. “Antitrust enforcement is democracy’s check on oligarchy.”
Paramount said the lawsuit “distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today.”
The media giant characterized the merger as a means to create a “stronger competitor against dominant streaming and technology platforms who have harmed the market for theatrical exhibition and jobs in the entertainment industry.”
Movie producer David Ellison’s Skydance Media bought Paramount last year after receiving financial backing from his father Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle co-founder and personal friend of President Donald Trump. He then launched a bidding war with Netflix for Warner Bros., which had been put up for auction last year as part of a strategy to manage its $35 billion debt load.
The Ellisons ultimately prevailed over Netflix in February after Warner’s board announced that Paramount Skydance’s offer, which involved $40 billion worth of personal financing from the elder Ellison, was superior to an agreement it had previously struck with Netflix.
The Trump administration’s swift approval of the merger reignited speculation over his personal relationship with Larry Ellison. The deal would put the Ellison family in control of BLN, a news organization the president frequently decries without evidence as “fake news.”
Trump publicly involved himself in the competing Warner Bros. bids last year, saying that it was “imperative” BLN be sold and that its current ownership should not be in charge of the company. The president has since downplayed his personal role in the mergerbut concerns about what the deal could mean for the future of BLN still loom large.
The Trump administration approved the Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount Globalthe parent company of CBS News, last year after the network agreed to shell out $16 millionto settle a lawsuit Trump brought over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. Trump sought $20 billion in damages over claims that the Harris interview, which aired during the 2024 presidential race, had been deceptively edited, a legal claim that experts said almost certainly would have failed.
With Ellison at the helm, Paramount Skydance also acquired Bari Weiss’ media company, The Free Press, and installed Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News. Weiss’ control over programming has since raised questions of objectivity and spurred an exodus of many of the network’s most prominent career journalists.
Erum Salam contributed to this report.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.
The Dictatorship
Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorneys for possible disciplinary actions
By now, Donald Trump has probably grown accustomed to legal setbacks in court, though his case against the IRS has started to backfire in ways the president didn’t see coming. The Associated Press reported:
A federal judge said Monday that President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose” as she referred attorneys for disciplinary actions.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams amounts to a stinging rebuke of the Republican president’s lawsuit, characterizing it as an exercise in self-dealing in which he sued an entity that is effectively under his control.
The basic details of Trump’s IRS lawsuit are likely familiar: During his first term, a contractor leaked his tax returns, and six years later, the president has filed suit against the tax agency, saying he’s entitled to $10 billion in taxpayer funds.
In May, he voluntarily withdrew his own litigationand soon afterward, the administration unveiled his reward for having done so: a compensation fund worth $1.766 billionwhich was quickly condemned by members of both parties as a “slush fund” that would be used to benefit the White House’s political allies.
That bipartisan pushback appears to have forced the president to back off his plans for the fund. And at that point, the case appeared to have run its course: Trump filed a rather preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration; he then abandoned that case before it could be fully adjudicated; and that was that.
Except, it wasn’t quite that simple, and one of the underlying legal problems persisted: The federal judge in the case, responding to a request filed by 35 former federal judges calling on her to reopen the case, raised serious concerns in late May, ordering Trump and his lawyers to address allegations that he committed fraud on the court.
In a four-page orderWilliams said she intended to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve the dubious case was “premised on deception.” (This same judge, as recently as late April, expressed skepticism about the propriety of the casesince it appeared the president was, for all intents and purposes, both the plaintiff and the defendant.)
More than a month later, she apparently did not like what she discoveredconcluding that Trump and his lawyers acted “in bad faith” and filed a civil suit “for an improper purpose.”
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote.
The judge also prohibited the parties from even referring to it as a “settlement.”
Just as notably, as CNBC reportedWilliams “referred Trump’s lawyer in the lawsuit, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for consideration on whether Brito should be disciplined in light of the findings in the new order.” The judge also “ordered that a copy of her ruling be mailed to the State Bar of New York, of which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is a member, as well as to the District of Columbia Bar, of which Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward is a member.”
The developments come just two days before Blanche, Trump’s choice to serve as attorney general, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing.
A spokesperson for the Republican’s legal team said in a written statement, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
The statement made no effort to address allegations of professional misconduct or the fact that Trump’s lawyers just received a brutal smackdown in court.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline, as his temporary replacement in the Senate on Monday, two days after the lawmaker’s sudden passing.
With Darline Graham alongside him, McMaster said she “agreed to serve through tears” in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Graham is nine years her brother’s junior and has never held public office. Her parents died before she reached the age of 14, and her brother later became her legal guardian. She is the Commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, where she has worked for nearly seven years; serves on the state’s Workforce Development Board; and is the president-elect of the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind.
“Lindsey has always been there for me, and now, I will be there for him,” Graham said in her first public remarks after the senator’s death, calling it a “privilege” to temporarily fill his seat.
President Donald Trump wrote on social media earlier Monday that he recommended the Republican governor appoint Graham to serve the remainder of his term, which expires in January.
“This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!” Trump wrote.
Tim Scott, South Carolina’s senior senator, appeared to agreesaying that she would be “a fantastic pick” to serve out the remainder of the senate term.
“After speaking with Darline, there is no one better who understands Lindsey’s love for family, our state, and our country,” Scott wrote in an X post Monday morning.
Appointing the senator’s sister as a neutral placeholder avoids the appearance of favoritism in the special primary later this summer to decide the new Republican nominee for the seat he held for more than two decades.
Trump, who said he spoke with Graham just hours before his death, called him “one of the greatest people and Senators” he has ever known and “a true American Patriot.”
Graham was elected in 2002 and was seeking a fifth term in November. A special primary election will be held Aug. 11 to decide the new Republican nominee, who will likely go on to succeed him in the reliably red state.
Erum Salam reported from New York.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Nnamdi Egwuonwu is a reporter for MS NOW.
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- Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorneys for possible disciplinary actions
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