White House advisor Stephen Miller spent Tuesday evening making the case on X that Donald Trump’s embattled tax bill is “the most essential piece of legislation currently under consideration in the entire Western World, in generations”. Miller based that claim on the “Big, Beautiful Bill” — now known in Washington as the BBB — increasing “by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens from the United States”. This dramatic framing comes as the White House flails to convince fiscal hawks that they should swallow tax cuts in the middle of a debt crisis.

It’s also one of the rare instances in which Steve Bannon and Elon Musk are on the same side, albeit for different reasons. On X, Musk claimed that the “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination”, while Bannon warned that, to stop the “debt bomb”, the wealthy “can’t get an extension of the tax cut”. Republicans in the upper chamber share Bannon’s scepticism. Sen. Ron Johnson recently spent hours on Tucker Carlson’s podcast explaining why the bill’s spending cuts are too small and delayed to justify revenue dips and debt increases. Both Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Rand Paul appeared to agree with the sentiment. Add to that the buyer’s remorse felt by some GOP House members, and it’s easy to see why the President might be feeling uneasy.

To make matters worse for Trump, some of the bill’s GOP critics in the Senate aren’t even fiscal hawks, but populists such as Josh Hawley and moderates including Susan Collins — figures with little appetite for supporting legislation that cuts Medicaid benefits. What constitutes a cut to benefits can, of course, be cleverly defined to exclude cuts to non-citizens or cuts as a consequence of work requirements. But whether that’s enough to keep Hawley and Collins, while also slashing spending to satisfy Paul and Johnson, is an open question.

House Republicans barely even kicked the reconciliation package over to the Senate, and changes made by the Senate still need the approval of the House. Trump, who wants the bill on his desk by 4 July, will benefit enormously from his party’s desperation. The tax cut bill was a signature GOP campaign pledge, and the White House has been pitching it as a necessary supplement to harsh tariff increases. The BBB contains an industrial policy of sorts, with provisions meant to entice onshoring and domestic investment.

But this fight is pitting so many different strains of MAGA Republicanism against one another that it’s practically a battle royale for the soul of Trump’s GOP. Everyone will compromise on something, but this process is testing the tenuous marriage of DOGE — now a “way of life”, according to Musk — with blue-collar populism.

There’s certainly an intellectual argument to be made that cutting the bloated federal budget actually protects entitlements like Medicaid for US citizens in need, and that slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” protects the country overall. In practice, though, that’s impossible to pull off with such slim margins in the House and Senate, which is why the costs of the bill are still outweighing the benefits for its GOP critics.

Miller’s dramatic X posts, framing the immigration provisions as “[making] this the most important legislation for the conservative project in the history of the nation”, are telling. Cracking down on illegal immigration is what unites the Trump-aligned GOP, both in Washington and among voters. Miller and Trump, desperate to make good on a key campaign promise and augment the tariff policy to staunch further bleeding, know this is their best weapon to pressure fiscal hawks and moderates. Railing against the BBB will then look like railing against immigration enforcement.

As senators huddle with Trump to strike compromises, they can likely leverage these provisions to give up less during negotiations. Ultimately, with the House and Senate, Trump will be able to pass a bill that Republicans can sell as a big win. The question is whether that will actually be true, politically and ideologically, and whether they’re able to get it in before the Independence Day holiday, before August recess, and before heading into a midterm year.

The populists have the most to lose, along with the supporters of the multiethnic working-class movement Trump purports to champion.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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