• Some Republican lawmakers are backtracking their support for President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” after realizing it’s …not all that beautiful. Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona joins us to talk about what’s actually in the legislation and what his constituents are saying about it.
• And in headlines: Trump’s fifty percent tariffs on nearly all steel and aluminum imports went into effect and some of Musk’s DOGE volunteers are officially government employees.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, June 5th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that would like one 24-hour period, in which a Trump administration spokesperson, in this case, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, doesn’t say something low-key terrifying. 

 

[clip of Tammy Bruce] The thing that matters when it comes to American policy and what’s happening, is what President Trump thinks and says. 

 

Jane Coaston: Well I guess today is not that day. On today’s show, DOGE volunteers become official government employees making lots of official money. Fun! But let’s start with the Senate, the current location of President Donald Trump’s big beautiful bill that apparently no one actually read or seems to like. That’s the only conclusion I can come to after hearing numerous members of Congress, including Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted for the President’s massive spending bill that would kick millions of Americans off their health care, say they didn’t actually read the text of the bill they voted for. Take Nebraska Republican Representative Mike Flood. He voted for the big, not very beautiful bill, but he didn’t read it and missed a part of the bill that would essentially prevent judges from holding litigants who defy court orders in contempt. Litigants like, say, hypothetically, members of the Trump administration. And I’m not just saying he didn’t read it. He did at a town hall last week. 

 

[clip of Representative Mike Flood] I am not gonna hide the truth. This provision was unknown to me when I voted for that. 

 

Jane Coaston: Unknown to you or you didn’t read it. Well, potato potato. And then there was Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted that she just didn’t know about a portion of the legislation that would prevent states from making laws about or regulating AI for a decade. Here she is on News Nation trying to explain herself on Tuesday. 

 

[clip of unnamed News Nation reporter] How did you not know that it was in there, and how’d you find out about it? 

 

[clip of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene] Well we don’t get the full bill text until very close to the time to vote for it. And so that was one section, that was two pages that I didn’t see. 

 

Jane Coaston: This is like the time I missed that there was a second page of my AP bio exam, except I was 15 and not a member of Congress. Now, a lot of this sudden case of buyer’s remorse is happening because of one of the loudest and most important voices in Republican politics, Elon Musk. After tweeting on Tuesday that the spending bill was a, quote, “disgusting abomination,” the world’s most prolific poster just kept on posting on Wednesday, writing, quote, “call your senator, call your congressman, bankrupting America is not okay, kill the bill.” And making a kill bill reference that was actually pretty good. And while he was happy to yell at him on the internet, he wouldn’t even take his very good friend House Speaker Mike Johnson’s phone call. 

 

[clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson] Well, I’ll tell you, I called Elon last night and he didn’t answer, but I hope to talk to him today. I mean, it’s not, you know, he’s very friendly and and we can and we’ve laughed about our differences on policy before. 

 

Jane Coaston: Sure you have. But as much fun as I’m getting out of some very masculine men fighting it out on the internet, this very bad bill is actually very bad. The Congressional Budget Office says that it will add trillions to the deficit while leaving nearly 11 million Americans uninsured. And let’s keep in mind that many of the biggest opponents of this legislation, like Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, want the bill to do more cutting of health care spending and services for everyday Americans to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. So to talk more about the not very beautiful bill, I called up Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. Senator Kelly, welcome to What a Day. 

 

Mark Kelly: Jane, thank you for having me. 

 

Jane Coaston: You’ve been doing a lot of town halls in Arizona, especially around Republicans proposed cuts to Medicaid in the so-called big, beautiful bill. What are you hearing from folks on the ground? 

 

Mark Kelly: Well, I’m not hearing that word. 

 

Jane Coaston: Not hearing the word beautiful? 

 

Mark Kelly: Not from a single person in Arizona that comes up to me to talk to me about this legislation. Not yet. I mean, could that happen next time I’m back? I guess so, but what I’ve been hearing from many of my constituents, you know talking about how this legislation is gonna be really harmful to them and their families, and in some cases, their friends, you know moms that have kids that are on Medicaid. I met this one woman in Phoenix named Kiana Brown. And she has two kids that she adopted out of foster care. When you adopt a kid out of Foster care, they’re on Medicaid. And she was talking about how just how worried she is that they’re going to lose their Medicaid. And she said to her, it feels like this is a quote. She said, uh, “the Republicans are burning down my house and there’s people still inside. My kids are inside.” And uh she just can’t afford, especially one of her daughters has some significant health care needs and those are paid for by Medicaid. She can’t afford it and the deal she got when she adopted these kids out of foster care would they’d be on Medicaid until they’re 18 years old. That’s what all this is about. 

 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. And, you know, to your point, more than two million Arizonans are on Medicaid. And the Republican line here, at least one of them, is that these billions of dollars in cuts are merely cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. And that the only people who are going to lose their health care coverage are undocumented immigrants or people who just won’t get a job. 

 

Mark Kelly: Right. 

 

Jane Coaston: As it specifically relates to Arizona, why are those claims wrong? 

 

Mark Kelly: That’s what they’re saying over and over again. And they think if they say it enough, it’ll become true. This is not the way this works. Work requirements are just designed to be an enormous amount of red tape. So where people can’t stay on Medicaid. But the reality of the situation is you force them off of Medicaid. They’re not gonna get any better. They’re still gonna be sick. And they might even be sicker when they go to the emergency room. And then they wind up in the ICU and they’re in the ICU for an extended period of time. And it just winds up costing more. So if you’re really concerned about costs, sure. I mean, we should figure out how to deliver healthcare more affordably. But the way to control costs isn’t to kick sick people off their health insurance. 

 

Jane Coaston: I also think people are largely unaware that there are tons of people who are on Medicaid who might not even know that they’re on Medicaid because they might have a different name in their state. And also, you know, if you’re a DoorDash driver or you drive for Uber, you might get health insurance through Medicaid because DoorDash doesn’t offer health insurance. So you know and President Donald Trump has insisted over and over and again that one, he will not cut Medicaid. And two, this bill does not change Medicaid. Those are both false. We’ve gotten into that a little bit. How do Democrats help voters connect the dots between potentially losing their health care and Republicans? 

 

Mark Kelly: Well, you’ve got to connect the dots that this is their legislation. This is the president’s priorities. And if this passes and it’s not a done deal yet, but if it was to pass, we’d wind up with a situation where all these people lose their healthcare coverage. And, and that is going to be devastating to the, to the healthcare system in Arizona, because the foundation of the healthcare system is Medicaid. There’s not one health care system for people on Medicaid and one for Medicare and one private payer. It is all the same system and hospitals will close and uh we will wind up uh in a situation where delivering health care for the entire population is affected in a negative way. If this legislation was to pass, we think around 300,000 of them would be kicked off of Medicaid directly uh because of things like you know work requirements uh and the red tape surrounding that or they would also uh. some of them would be affected by the decrease in subsidies under the affordable care act so they wouldn’t be able afford it anymore and they would just leave the program. 

 

Jane Coaston: Now, there’s been some interesting Republican opposition to this bill. So some GOP senators like Josh Hawley have expressed concern over Medicaid cuts in the bill, but we’ve also heard from some members of the House who apparently just didn’t read the bill and are having some buyer’s remorse. Is that helping Democrats make a case? And at this point, is there a chance that this just won’t make it through the Senate? 

 

Mark Kelly: Well, I saw something about Marjorie Taylor Greene. There was something she said she would not have voted for this if she had read the–

 

Jane Coaston: Read it. 

 

Mark Kelly: –entire thing. But we have Republican senators that are against this bill for different reasons. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, because it adds too much to the debt. Now they don’t talk about the fact that reason it’s adding so much money to the debt is because this is a big tax cut, you know, for billionaires and the richest people in the country. But then we have folks like Josh Hawley who thinks it’s bad policy and bad politics to kick poor people off of their health care. So there will be tremendous pressure on my Republican colleagues to ultimately support this legislation, but we’re keeping the pressure up. You know, we’re explaining to them, and it’s not just about Medicaid and and taxes. I mean, it’s also about taxes, um you know, credits for renewable energy projects in Arizona. That’s solar, mostly solar, but hydropower as well. I mean, the job loss we could see in the state of Arizona because of this legislation is significant. They wanna cut, cancel, whatever. They wanna cancel the Inflation Reduction Act. This president wants to do that because it was a successful Joe Biden policy. You know, if they if they gut the legislation, in theory, you could see the price of prescription drugs go up. You could see insulin prices go back up. You know instead of thirty five dollars a month out of pocket maybe it goes back to what it was before which for some people were paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for insulin so there is other aspects of this legislation that is just bad policy. 

 

Jane Coaston: Let’s talk about immigration, obviously big issue in the last election. And voters seem to want a tougher response along the border. Trump has made good on his campaign promise to essentially shut down the border for migrants trying to come to the US. As a border state, how are Arizonans feeling about that? 

 

Mark Kelly: Well, I think the majority of Arizonans, including me, you know we want strong border security. I look at border security as part of our national security. We can’t have an open and porous border where people just walk through. We need to give resources to the border patrol to be able to do their jobs. I mean, that’s really important. That’s why we had legislation to do that, to hire more border patrol agents, to give them the technology they want, to give them barriers where they want them. I’ll tell you who doesn’t want a 2,000 mile border wall, it’s the Border Patrol. At least the agents that I talked to. In certain places, it helps. In other places, it’s a waste of money and they’d rather have you know cameras and uh you know seismic you know vibration sensors and lights and you know all that stuff. So I’ve always been a strong advocate of giving the Border patrol what they need. But I think it’s also important to recognize that we are a country of immigrants. We need to have a legal pathway for people to come to this country. It helps us support our economy, you know, we do we’re not going to be a growing population a growing country if we don’t continue to have immigrants. This idea of mass deportations that rip communities apart is not in the best interest of our country. Um. I mean to just take families and deport people often without giving them due process is not who we are as a nation We’re a nation of laws uh so there’s a lot we have to do on this issue. I think there’s bipartisan support to do some of it. A lot of my republican colleagues get this uh that we benefit by having a strong legal immigration system and if you’re a rancher or a farmer uh they need more uh need more visas if you’re like in a you know the health care industry We need more nurses, home health care aids, we can get that workforce through a legal immigration system. 

 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, it’s interesting because I think that there were people who voted for Trump believing that there were millions of criminal immigrants in this country. And that just isn’t true. And that mass deportation will mean that you are deporting families and you are deporting people who’ve been here for 30, 35 years and who have followed the laws. But, you know, to your point, the Trump administration is defying court orders to deport people with little to no due process. Some of those people winding up in an El Salvadorian super prison. And I think that the challenge for Democrats is that the Biden administration’s approach cost Democrats voters. I think there are still a lot of divisions within the Democratic party on how to talk about immigration. You were just kind of, I think, showing how you would be talking about this, but how do you think Democrats should message this issue? 

 

Mark Kelly: You know, I spent 25 years in the Navy, you know, flying airplanes, 15 of it at NASA flying spaceships. Um. I’m not a communications expert. You know I talk about this issue and other issues just like I think I always have like a regular person who’s trying to solve a problem, you know, and the problem on this is is, you know, it’s twofold. It’s uh, you know, we’ve got a rather porous southern border. We need to strengthen that. At the same time, we need to recognize that we’re a country of immigrants and we benefit from immigration. It doesn’t have to be one thing or another. There are shades of gray, and then just try to talk about it like uh being a regular person. 

 

Jane Coaston: Senator Kelly, thank you so much for taking the time. 

 

Mark Kelly: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me on. 

 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

 

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

 

[sung] Headlines. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] You’re trying to get other countries to lower their trade, their tariffs and trade barriers in return for us lowering ours. 

 

[clip of Howard Lutnick] That’s true for the things that they’ll take from us. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] That’s called reciprocity. 

 

[clip of Howard Lutnick] Of course. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] So are you or are you not seeking reciprocity in these trade deals? 

 

[clip of Howard Lutnick] We are thinking we are absolutely seeking reciprocity with respect to things that can be reciprocal. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] But you just–

 

Jane Coaston: What the fuck did he just say? That was Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asking Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a simple question on Wednesday, and Lutnick proving, once again, that no one in the White House knows what they’re doing. During a budget hearing, Kennedy pressed Lutnick about Trump’s approach to international trade deals. He gave a hypothetical. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] If Vietnam, for example, came to you tomorrow and said, okay, Mr. Secretary, you win, we’re going to remove all tariffs and all trade barriers. Would the United States please do the same? Would you accept that deal? 

 

[clip of Howard Lutnick] Absolutely not. Absolutely not that would be the silliest thing we could do. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] Why is that? 

 

Jane Coaston: Lutnick continued. 

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] You wouldn’t accept that deal?

 

[clip of Howard Lutnick] No that’s a terrible deal, we’re the one with money. We’re the one with the store. Of course they want us to take down.

 

[clip of Senator John Kennedy] Well then, what’s the purpose what’s the purpose of reciprocity then? Is reciprocity not one of your goals? Are you telling the president that we shouldn’t seek reciprocity? If that’s what you’re telling him, why are you trying to do these trade deals? 

 

Jane Coaston: Why, indeed. Also on Wednesday, Trump’s 50% tariffs on nearly all steel and aluminum imports went into effect. That’s double from where they previously stood at 25%. Imports from the UK are exempt from the increase. The president signed a proclamation Tuesday saying that the tariff hike will, quote, “Reduce or eliminate the national security threat posed by foreign-made metals.” Sure. But experts say this will likely hurt Americans in the long run. We rely on aluminum and steel imports to build a lot of important stuff, like planes and cars. We also use steel and aluminum to package canned goods, like soup and tuna. So these tariffs could make groceries more expensive. I keep saying this, but the federal judge issued a temporary order on Wednesday to prevent family members of the man charged in an attack on demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado from being deported. According to an FBI affidavit, the man threw Molotov cocktails at a group of people on Sunday. They were demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. He allegedly yelled, free Palestine, during the attack and is facing a federal hate crime charge and state charges of attempted murder. The man’s wife and five children were taken into custody by immigration officials on Tuesday. They have not been charged in the attack. The judge Wednesday granted their request to halt deportation proceedings. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the suspect and his family are Egyptian citizens who arrived in the US in 2022. His visa expired in 2023. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement posted to Twitter on Tuesday, the suspect’s actions will be prosecuted. 

 

[clip of Kristi Noem] But we’re also investigating to what extent his family knew about this horrific attack, if they had any knowledge of it or if they provided support to it. I am continuing to pray for the victims of this attack and for all of their families. 

 

Jane Coaston: Authorities on Wednesday raised the number of people injured in the attack from 12 to 15, plus a dog. Even though tech billionaire Elon Musk has left the White House, some of the staffers in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, are here to stay. You might recall that DOGE workers were restricted special government employees, and could only work for the feds for 130 days. But on Wednesday, Wired magazine identified three DOGE workers who are moved to full-time government worker status, and they’ve landed some of the highest federal salaries. Wired says one of them is Edward Coristine. You know, the Gen Z-er with the screen name, Big Balls. Wired reports that DOGE appears to be actively hiring. And Politico reported Wednesday that the White House has requested congressional funding to grow the so-called department. And that’s the news. 

 

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, think about Donald Trump’s abiding interest in leopards, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how seriously, Donald Trump helped secure two Arabian leopards for the National Zoo and, according to a Smithsonian staffer, had a lot of questions about their personality and interests, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and Trump being a cat guy, I’m just saying it tracks. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

 

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