GOP ruthlessly betrayed the 'fiscal responsibility' it once championed: conservative strategist

04 July

Trump just got a wake up call as he tries to escalate his war on defiance

Before the U.S. House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on Thursday afternoon, July 3, GOP lawmakers were being threatened with primary challenges by both Trump and Elon Musk.

The Tesla/SpaceX leader threatened to primary House Republicans if they voted for the megabill; Trump threatened to primary them if they didn't. And the GOP lawmakers were obviously more afraid of Trump than they were of Musk. Only two House Republicans voted against it: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, although House Democrats were united in their opposition.

Massie opposed the bill because of how much it will increase the United States' federal deficit, but other Republicans in Congress, critics argue, are more worried about offending Trump than they are about the national debt.

One of those critics on the right in The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell, a conservative strategist and outspoken Never Trumper. During a conversation with her colleague Jonathan V. Last in a Bulwark video posted on July 3, Longwell lamented that the GOP is totally betraying the "fiscal responsibility" it once claimed to promote.

Longwell told Last, "The point of Republicans, as I saw it in my younger days — because this is how they sold themselves, this is what they told me they were — is that they were the grownups in the room. The ones who looked around and said, 'You know what? We, with a debt load of over $30 trillion, we simply can't afford to cut taxes this deep'…. There was a lot of talk about fiscal responsibility."

Longwell warned that the United States' "national debt" is a major problem, and 2025's Republicans are only making it worse.

"The amount that we are paying in interest on our national debt is actually crushing us for the future, for innovation — and just straight-up how much money we have to pay in the interest to service the debt," Longwell told Last. "And this is something Republicans have paid a great del of lip service to…. This new bill that Republicans are passing, it doesn't even take a minute to grapple with the level of debt that it adds."

In "another ten years," Longwell warned, Trump's "big, beautiful bill" will "get us to about $60 trillion" in debt.

Watch the full video below or at this link.

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