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Donald Trump’s mega-bill has been widely criticized in the press. News outlets and Democrats have warned that millions of people could be stripped of their health coverage through cuts to Medicaid, that cuts to food programs would see children go hungry, and that the legislation would cause the deficit to balloon.
Fox News sees it differently.
“This legislation is packed with massive, huge, important wins for you, the American people,” Sean Hannity told viewers on Monday, as US senators debated the bill in Washington.
“Here’s what the bill doesn’t do. It does not decrease Medicaid, Medicare, Snap or social security benefits,” Hannity continued, a claim that completely contradicted the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the bill will cut Medicaid across the US by 7.6 million to 10.3 million people.
Hannity had more.
“The big, beautiful bill also does not increase the deficit. Instead, the deficit will go down around a little shy of $2tn – that’s to begin with, according to estimates,” he said.
“Because guess what? That’s what happens when you cut taxes. It stimulates the economy, creates jobs, gets people off the welfare rolls. Guess what? People are working, now they’re paying taxes.”
It was unclear where Hannity got his $2tn number from, because he didn’t say. But the CBO says the bill would add at least $3.3tn to the national debt over the next nine years, while the tax cuts will benefit high earners more than others.
Hannity held up Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 as an example of how the deficit will be reduced – a take that ignored that those tax cuts saw an increase of the deficit, and had to be reversed over the rest of Reagan’s presidency.
Still, Hannity was sold.
“The American people are on the verge of a level of prosperity they have never experienced before,” he said.
Hannity’s interpretation was starkly different from the one many Americans were seeing.
Even Republican senators have been dubious about the bill’s benefits, with three voting against it in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and House Republicans wavering on Wednesday.
Yet, on Tuesday, Laura Ingraham largely ignored the bill – framing it only as Democrats losing a battle to “derail” the legislation before going on a minutes-long riff about a “slide in patriotism” in the US.
She went on to offer complaints that there were “more foreign flags waving” in America’s streets and that leftwing politicians believe that “America can only be redeemed when she’s totally dismantled and then remade, with millions of new people from other countries”.
Elsewhere, there were occasional, albeit small, concessions that the “big, beautiful bill” might not quite be the masterly piece of legislation the White House would have people believe.
“It’s not perfect, but it does need to pass if we want this tax cut,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends at the start of the week. Her co-host Brian Kilmeade at least presented some of the negative points in an interview with Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, on Tuesday, challenging him to address the claim that “this is a tax break for the rich”. But Bessent didn’t even attempt to address that, and Kilmeade was unwilling or unable to press him further.
Later that day, the theme continued. Trace Gallagher pulled up data from the Tax Foundation and the Tax Policy Center during his show, with a series of bullet points claiming that if Trump’s bill failed it would lead to tax increases for families and small business owners.
Gallagher left out the part of the Tax Foundation’s analysis where the organization said the bill would reduce incomes by 0.6% and result in a nearly $3.6tn deficit increase, and ignored the Tax Policy Center’s verdict that most of the tax cuts in the bill would go “to the highest-income households”.
His guests seemingly overlooked those bits, too, as they kept up the ruse.
“No bill is perfect,” Elizabeth Pipko, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told Gallagher, as she claimed “the Democrats seem to have forgotten that” before accusing the mainstream media, with no irony, of not accurately representing the bill.
Pipko added: “I think it will pass, and I think it’ll go down in history as again another false alarm from the legacy media, from the Democrats, and another victory for President Trump.”
