In a Truth Social post on June 3, President Trump lashed out at Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) for Paul’s opposition to The One Bloated Brobdingnagian Bill (erroneously titled “The One Big Beautiful Bill”). Trump wrote:
Rand votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas. His ideas are actually crazy (losers!). The people of Kentucky can’t stand him. This is a BIG GROWTH BILL!
This came less than three months after an equally unhinged post by Trump denouncing Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) for opposing the same legislation:
Congressman Thomas Massie, of beautiful Kentucky, is an automatic “NO” vote on just about everything, despite the fact that he has always voted for Continuing Resolutions in the past. HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Chaney before her historic, record breaking fall (loss!). The people of Kentucky won’t stand for it, just watch. DO I HAVE ANY TAKERS???
Elon Musk—former leader of the failed DOGE attempt to cut $2,000 billion from annual spending and rumored to be a likely financier of Republican primary challengers—is not a taker. Musk responded to the attack on Senator Paul with an X post expressing his own low opinion of the bill and its supporters:
I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.
Musk knows from first-hand experience with DOGE that there is still a lot that could be cut from spending that wasn’t. Congressional opponents of the bill share Mr. Musk’s frustration that DOGE’s efforts were largely in vain. However, there is much more to their opposition to the bill. What the automatic naysayers (who—as Senator Paul pointed out—can count on at least four votes in the Senate) have in common is a desire to reduce deficits while still preventing the previously scheduled tax rate increases.
The dissenter’s fiscal policy does require large spending cuts, but they adhere to political principles favoring such cuts. Paul and Massie in particular are champions of individual liberty who want to keep the powers of the federal government strictly confined within the limits prescribed by the Constitution. Senator Paul warned that he is refusing to maintain “Biden spending levels.” On the Tucker Carlson Show, Paul’s Wisconsin colleague, Senator Ron Johnson, made the same point about the fiscal necessity of rolling spending back to pre-Biden levels. For Senators Johnson and Paul, the bottom line is that spending that forces a $5,000 billion increase in the debt ceiling and violates their libertarian-leaning constitutional principles is totally unacceptable.
So what is it about Senator Paul’s libertarian ideas concerning spending cuts that infuriates Trump so much, provoking Trump to rail against them as being impractical, unconstructive, and “actually crazy”? When interviewed by Breitbart News, Paul specified where cuts are needed and noted the political risks to Republicans of not making them:
But I can’t reconcile myself to adding $5 trillion in debt, raising the debt ceiling. Really, this year, the debt’s going to be $2.2 trillion and the Republicans have largely continued the Biden spending levels. They’re anticipating $5 trillion in two years, and that means next year’s deficit that some people are saying it’s going to grow to over $3 trillion a year again. It’s because we need to have more force of character to be against spending. The fact we’ve limited ourselves to not really looking at the entitlements just doesn’t leave that much spending we can look at. My fear is that when this bill passes that the ramifications a year out, two years out, will be, “My goodness, what happened to DOGE? What happened to the spending cuts? Why is the deficit so big still?”
The idea in dispute then is Paul’s contention that America needs cuts to mandatory spending in entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As I noted in my previous article analyzing the bill, public opinion is strongly against such entitlement cuts, but it is mathematically impossible to balance the budget without at least some entitlement rollbacks. Senator Paul is entirely correct in his assessment that Republican politicians need more force of character to do what is right and not keep doing what is popular with the voters in order to achieve any significant spending and deficit reductions.
What Trump seems to be suggesting is that a spending cut is impractical and unconstructive if public opinion is overwhelmingly against it, and therefore, must be crazy. However, this fails to consider the possibility that it is the public itself that has gone a bit crazy in its thinking about entitlements, and that it is even more crazy for so-called leaders who know better to keep indulging the public’s delusions about entitlements. An entitlement cut is entirely practical and constructive for any politician who puts the economic survival of the country ahead of worries about own personal political prospects. The question of what is practical for a politician boils down to a question of what the point of his being in office is—the correct answer depends on what standard one measures success by.
There is a notable historical precedent that is worth pondering. When President Grover Cleveland courageously refused to inflate the dollar by compromising the gold standard in the midst of a depression despite pleas to mint silver dollars to help farmers pay off loans, he lost support from much of his own party. The pro-inflation leader, William Jennings Bryan, won the presidential nomination in the following election cycle by arousing the mostly pietist delegates at the party’s convention with the slogan “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Not long afterwards, the public came to appreciate Cleveland’s principled defense of sound money, with the other party even enacting the gold standard into law just a few years later. The pro-inflation populists who had seized control of Cleveland’s party were shut out of the White House for sixteen years; Bryan himself went down to defeat in three presidential elections. So between Cleveland and Bryan, who was the real winner and who was the real loser?
There is nothing crazy about the kind of fortitude that President Cleveland displayed, even if his preference for doing the right thing instead of the popular thing is exceedingly rare among professional vote-mongers. The fact that a man like Cleveland made it to the residency (and even won a non-consecutive second term, the only person besides Trump to accomplish that feat) is something to respect, not to be angrily dismissive about.
What is genuinely crazy, however, is refusing to acknowledge the basics of elementary arithmetic. It is insane to think that Republicans can keep doing the same thing to the budget over and over again for forty years and expect different fiscal results. The proof of Trump’s detachment from reality is in his characterization of the bill as leading to “BIG GROWTH.” The only thing that will be big growers under this bill besides deficits are the overall size and power of the federal government, something which libertarians must resolutely oppose in any event.
Soaring deficits cripple American industries just like taxes on investment income do, as deficits are financed by diversions of savings away from productive private sector investments. Even worse, thrift to provide for one’s own future needs is discouraged by entitlement promises and by artificially-low interest rates. With the personal saving rate being less than half what it was in the 1970s, and net domestic saving as a fraction of income having practically vanished over the same period due to this reduced thrift and due to deficits eating the remaining private savings. According to official figures (which understate government dissavings), imports of foreign savings (almost entirely foreign lending) have risen from nothing to account for a third of the entire supply of net savings in 2024, with 59 percent of the overall supply of net savings being consumed by government dissaving.
If Trump gets his way, foreigners won’t be allowed to sell the additional imports needed to finance their lending to America even as surging deficits gobble up all of the remaining net private savings. With Trump’s policies, growth will screech to halt. The Federal Reserve will probably have no choice but to create more dollars out of thin air to prop up the government and financial sectors, but money-driven credit bubbles are not real savings. Newly-created dollars can only drive up prices of existing capital assets, not produce more of them (thrift is what accomplishes the latter). No less a pillar of Wall Street than JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned recently that the bond market will crack because of huge deficits. Is Mr. Dimon crazy too? Or are the crazy ones those who still insist that deficits don’t matter?
