Hardly any Republicans in the Senate want to be caught dead at President Trump’s big boy parade this weekend.
The two most powerful Republicans in Congress — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) — are not going to come. Johnson’s office claims he has other plans, Thune’s office says he’s engaged with constituents back home on Saturday. Reporters from HuffPost, Politico, the Wall Street Journal and others all tried to pin a handful of Republicans down on this issue in pieces published this week. Many said they weren’t coming, offering shrugs of excuses for their absence. Most refused to even touch questions surrounding the price tag on the whole spectacle: $45 million in taxpayer funds for Trump to roll out a bunch of military tanks and show off America’s lavishly unmatched spending on weaponry, all in honor of Trump’s 79th birthday (and the 250th anniversary of the Army).
It, of course, all comes on a week of growing public pushback, not just to Trump’s mass deportation agenda but to his use of the military as a prop, escalating mostly peaceful protests and infringing on the power of politicians who lead cities he doesn’t like. Bookending the week of overreach on state sovereignty with a garish military parade — which will involve rolling out 150 military vehicles and more than 50 aircraft into the streets of the capital — has at least one Republican comparing it to a scene out of North Korea.
Most of the Republicans who spoke to the media about their planned absence suggested they had other plans, or indicated that their decision to not RSVP had nothing to do with the outlandish cost of the event designed specifically for Trump’s ego.
“I don’t like spending on anything, but if you’re going to splurge on something, this is probably not a bad thing,” Johnson told WSJ this week, while avoiding questions about what he’s doing on Saturday instead.
Ironically, Johnson is the Republican in the Senate most vocally opposed to the sweeping reconciliation package that’ll fund much of Trump’s fiscal agenda if it passes the upper chamber in coming weeks — primarily due to his belief that it doesn’t do enough to cut federal spending on social safety net programs like Medicaid, which are, as I get into below, already on the chopping block.
For those observing at home for at least the past two decades, austerity matters most, to this group of politicians, when a Democrat is in the White House. And it matters the least when the wannabe dictator head of the Republican Party decides to throw himself a multi-million dollar bday bash.
Republicans’ Obfuscation On Their Medicaid Ravaging Maybe Didn’t Work
As they have for decades, Republicans in recent months have attempted to spin their devastating proposed cuts to Medicaid and supplemental nutrition programs like SNAP as necessary “reforms” to cut out the amorphous “waste, fraud and abuse” supposedly baked in to these programs. They’ve also championed the implementation of so-called common sense “work requirements” in order to be eligible for the coverage (which conveniently ignores the fact that a significant number of those on Medicaid are either people with disabilities or children).
This spin is, of course, spin, as TPM has reported, and all the changes listed as provisions in the House’s reconciliation package will result in some 16 million Americans losing their health care. By other estimates (from researchers at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania) 51,000 people may die annually as a direct result of proposed cuts to the program.
It’s real and devastating stuff.
Republicans have historically, famously spun their efforts to gut social safety net programs under the same guise of “reforms” that House Republicans are using now. They promise to never touch Medicare or Social Security, while salivating for the very types of “reforms” to the social safety net that may soon become law, that are stuffed into the House’s latest reconciliation package. In one of his last truly eloquent moments as president, Biden was able to back Republicans into a corner during his 2023 State of the Union address, and got the Republican conference to agree, on live TV, to drop their at-the-time-latest effort to sunset Medicare and Social Security every five years.
New polling from Quinnipiac University today shows that Republican efforts to obscure what exactly it is they’re doing to Medicaid may not have been as successful as it has been in the past — or perhaps the opposition party’s telegraphing of the horrors to voters actually broke through this time. Per Quinnipiac:
As the Senate debates the GOP tax and spending bill titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act and President Donald Trump pushes for a July 4 deadline to sign it, voters 53 – 27 percent oppose the legislation, with 20 percent not offering an opinion, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters released today.
Elon Has ‘Regret’ At 3:04 AM
I mean, who among us doesn’t do a little self deprecative soul searching at such an hour.
According to some reports, Trump and the world’s richest man actually spoke on the phone late on Monday night after their messy, public breakup last week. Musk posted the tweet early Wednesday.
I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2025
AOC Articulates The Asymmetry
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Tuesday night succinctly articulated the longstanding punditry norms that have Democrats policing the largely organic Los Angeles protests: “It is 100% carrying water for the opposition to participate in this collective delusion that Dems for some reason need to answer for every teen who throws a rock rather than hold the Trump admin accountable for intentionally creating chaos and breaking the law to stoke violence.”
One of the most dependable formulations in political commentary is that Democrats are responsible for everyone vaguely, even just aesthetically, associated with the left, while Republican politicians can directly fraternize with neo-Nazis and still claim ideological distance.
— Kate Riga
In Case You Missed It
How Some Very Bad Luck Has Made It Even Harder To Rein In Trump
New episode of the Josh Marshall Podcast: Ep. 377: Protest Politics
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Stephen Miller Demanded ICE Target Home Depots
What We Are Reading
Judge Bars Trump Administration From Detaining Mahmoud Khalil
National Guard troops have temporarily detained civilians in LA protests, commander says
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to deploy National Guard across the state in response to protests
“I don’t like spending on anything, but if you’re going to splurge on something, this is probably not a bad thing,” Johnson told WSJ this week.
RoJo puts in the hard work to maintain his reputation as the stupidest person in the Senate.
Austerity
"I could end the deficit in five minutes,” Warren Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in a 2011 interview. “You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”
Like Elon, I support it too.
Elon Musk
](https://x.com/elonmusk)
@elonmusk
I regret some of my posts about President
@realDonaldTrump
last week. They went too far.
12:04 AM · Jun 11, 2025
·
Omg talk about low energy. He makes Jeb Bush look like a speed freak.
I took Valentine in to be neutered on Monday, this is him recuperating the next evening. Somehow I think the wrong creature might have had their balls cut off this week…
“Trump and the world’s richest man actually spoke on the phone late on Monday night“
Ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Nope
Ending the Gaza War. Nope.
End the Trump-Musk war. Easy peasy.