The One Big Beautiful Bill is law. Now what?
Not quite six months into his new term, President Donald Trump has fulfilled many of his campaign promises. He has cut taxes, launched trade wars, frustrated longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and slashed the federal government. He steamrolled the opposition, including members of his own party, to push through Congress a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation that contains nearly his entire domestic agenda.
Now the next phase of his presidency—as well as next year’s midterms—could be defined by his bet that the Republican bill, and other Trump policies, will usher in a booming economy. If that wager pays off, it would reinforce one of Trump’s strongest issues—but Democrats see an opening to hit the president for disproportionately helping the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The White House won’t push for another big legislative package between now and next November, five White House aides and outside advisers told us. Instead, Trump will turn to selling and defending what his party just passed, in addition to focusing on what he believes are his core political strengths: high-stakes trade deals and high-profile immigration clashes. Oh, and he wouldn’t mind winning a Nobel Peace Prize too.
Trump and his team spent the four years after his first term drafting a sweeping plan to overwhelm Washington—and, in particular, the Democrats—with a flurry of action. In his first months back in office, he signed one executive order after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE haphazardly chopped its way through government agencies. Law firms, universities, and media companies acceded to the administration’s demands. Its lawyers kept pushing the bounds of executive power in the courts. The point was to punish and confuse. And, although the administration stumbled along the way, the strategy allowed Trump to seize perhaps more power than he’d ever had in Washington.
[From the June 2025 issue: “I run the country and the world”]
Then, the past three weeks yielded what White House aides believe are a pair of monumental triumphs: the air strikes that Trump authorized on Iran’s nuclear program, and the passage of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in time for Trump to sign it on July 4. White House officials believe they are entering the second phase of Trump’s second term with momentum. At the same time, the West Wing recognizes that, more than any other issue, the economy will dictate the outcome of next year’s midterms.
The Republican legislation instituted a set of tax cuts that Trump believes to be the formula for rapid economic expansion. But they will primarily benefit the wealthy, and the bill was financed by cuts to federal safety-net programs, while adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt. Democratic groups plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars arguing that the bill rewarded wealthy donors and failed to address inflation, whereas Republicans hope that it will lead to real wage increases and a surging stock market deep into next year. “It’s going to be: How is the economy doing in a year and three months from now?” a GOP House strategist told us. (This person, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategy.) “If the economy continues to improve, we are going to have a great message to sell to voters.” Trump and his Cabinet plan to barnstorm the country in support of the bill. “We also have to sell it, right? Just because it passed doesn’t mean it goes away,” a White House official told us.
Ads slamming Republicans for the bill are now running in swing districts across the country. At the core of the emerging Democratic message is a simple argument about the issue that still ranks as the most important for voters: affordability. A private polling memo from the Democratic group Future Forward USA Action that we obtained advises Democrats that voters tend to pin the blame for high prices on “elites in leadership positions in government and business,” who have “no idea what life is like for regular people.” The group argues that Democrats should tie Trump’s tax bill to these concerns. “When asked to choose who has benefitted more because of Trump’s policies, the most chosen actors are: billionaires (chosen 72% of the time); wealthy Americans (70%) and corporate CEOs (67%),” the memo, dated June 5, explains. “These rank much higher than middle class Americans and working people, each chosen just 43% of the time.”
Trump’s approval on the economy is now lower than at any time in his first term, having dropped about 20 percentage points since January. So, for the first time since the presidential election, Democrats feel that they can go on the offensive regarding what has been a weak issue for their party. “The combination of what Trump did in the megabill and what he did with the tariffs set up a reality for voters where they believe that Republicans are on the wrong side on everyday costs,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told us.
To this point in Trump’s term, unemployment and inflation have largely been steady, though consumer spending has started to slow. It will take time for the impact of the law to become apparent. This week, however, Trump added another combustible element to his economic agenda: He revived his trade war, threatening to increase tariffs on more than a dozen countries by August 1. Aides insisted to us that Trump, after blinking on imposing sweeping tariffs earlier this year, will not back down this time. (His belief in tariffs is one of his few consistent ideological positions, even though most economists oppose high tariffs.)
[James Surowiecki: Trump’s only-okay economy]
The advisers added that they hoped for a more systematic approach to trade negotiations in the months ahead—more senior-level talks, fewer Truth Social screeds—with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leading the discussions. One aide acknowledged to us that, even so, “there will be some fights” with other countries. Aides hope that a deal with China could be brokered in time for Trump to sign it on a trip to Beijing either late this year or early next. (They also said that Trump plans to travel overseas later this year for a state visit to the United Kingdom and the G20 summit in South Africa; a possible second trip to the U.K., centering on a visit to one of Trump’s golf courses in Scotland, is in the mix as well.)
Trump has asked aides to focus on deregulation in the months ahead to trigger economic growth. The administration plans to roll back a series of regulations on construction, energy development, and investment. The president will issue some executive orders on the issue, aides told us, and the administration plans to push to codify some of those orders—as well as some of the DOGE cuts—into legislation.
Bolstered by recent court decisions and the surge in immigration-enforcement funding in the just-passed bill, the White House will continue Trump’s mass-deportation program, with the aim of increasing its numbers. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, arguably the most powerful aide in the administration, has pushed for deporting migrants even if they haven’t committed crimes. And Trump has promised more ICE raids in cities. The recent protests in Los Angeles over such raids, and the deployment of the National Guard, were cheered within the White House for creating made-for-TV images of Trump’s immigration crackdown, two advisers told us. Still, some in the West Wing have expressed concern about an overly militarized response leading to violence that could be blamed on Trump.
The lack of big-ticket legislative priorities in the months ahead is unlikely to dim Trump’s ability to create controversy and generate headlines in other ways. He signaled last week, during a visit to Florida, that he wants to push for a new U.S. census before next year’s elections that would redraw congressional districts by excluding counts of undocumented immigrants—a plan certain to face challenges in court. (The next census is not due until 2030.) During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, he floated the idea of a federal takeover of Washington, D.C., which has been self-governed since 1973, or even New York City. “We’re going to straighten out New York,” he said. “Maybe we’re going to have to straighten it out from Washington.” (Trump didn’t elaborate on what authority he would use to take over his native city.)
His team has also discussed the idea of ramping up Trump’s promised retribution campaign. Multiple outlets reported this week that the FBI is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for possible false statements to Congress following a referral from CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Although some Trump advisers want more probes of his political foes, the president has not suggested recently that he intends to expand that effort, one senior official told us.
[David Frum: Welcome to the mafia presidency]
Of course, like any White House, this one is also at the mercy of unforeseen events. The devastating floods in Texas last week have cast new scrutiny on the administration’s plans to cut FEMA and slash federal funding for disasters. (Trump will visit the state tomorrow.) And although the cease-fire that Trump pushed for between Israel and Iran continues to hold, he has yet to bring a close to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as promised. The president has grown frustrated with Vladimir Putin, unleashing this week some of his harshest language to date about his Russian counterpart. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump declared. “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.” Trump was blindsided and angered by the Pentagon’s recent pause on sending defensive weapons to Ukraine and ordered the resumption of the shipments. But a senior official told us that Trump was still not ready to endorse the bipartisan Senate bill that would punish Russia with tough sanctions, despite Senator Lindsey Graham telling reporters that the president was on board.
Aides told us they were cautiously optimistic that, after a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, progress in Gaza might be on the horizon. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is slated to travel to Qatar in the days ahead with hopes of securing a cease-fire. Knowing what buttons to push, Netanyahu declared during his visit that he was nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, an award for which Trump has openly pined since returning to office.
Yet although Trump has an eye to the history books, his team has other, less lofty goals for the months ahead. If Trump fails to oversee the booming economy he has promised, at least one house of Congress could swing to the Democrats next fall. That would give them a chance to check the president’s expanding powers and bog down his final two years with investigations—and potentially another impeachment. If that happens, the early victories of Trump’s second term might fade into the background.