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Now that the Senate has fled Washington until after Labor Day, Republicans finally have a chance to sell President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to their constituents, but some fear that Democrats already have an advantage in the messaging war.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said that Republicans could “absolutely” do better in selling the colossal bill to combat Democrats’ “lies.”
“Well, we should have been prepared right off the bat and talked about, ‘No, we’re not talking about reforming Medicaid designed for [women, children and the elderly]. We’re looking at how we can save and preserve it and repair the damage done by the Obamacare addition to it,'” he told Fox News Digital. “We should have been talking about that, but we didn’t.”
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Since Trump signed the bill into law, and throughout the entire process to get it to his desk, Democrats have largely been unified in their attacks against the bill, rebranding it as Republicans’ “big, ugly betrayal,” and targeting cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and a litany of other policies.
“It’s a very unpopular bill, so if I were them, I would probably go out and start trying to spin,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital.
Messaging against the bill has become routine in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s floor speeches, where he often targets the cuts to Medicaid touted by the GOP as reforms to a broken system.
“The more Americans learn about the Republicans’ bill, the more they are realizing that Donald Trump and Republicans sold them a raw deal,” the New York Democrat said in a floor speech last week. “The Republicans’ ‘big, ugly betrayal’ is one of the most devastating bills for Americans’ healthcare that we’ve ever seen.”
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Polling of the bill’s favorability among Americans is also working against Republicans. A Fox News poll conducted in June after the House GOP passed the legislation found that 59% of respondents opposed the bill.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., charged that “90% of the media is lying” about the bill, and countered that Republicans were actually increasing Medicaid spending faster than the rate of inflation “to the tune of $200 billion a year when it’s all said.”
“This is not the first message like this that we’ve struggled to get the truth through,” he told Fox News Digital.
“Republicans need to lean into it,” he continued. “We worked really hard, and we’re going to save and preserve Medicaid for those who need it the most. And we need to be sharing that.”
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Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., contended that Republicans shouldn’t be shy about the work they put into the bill.
Hawley, shortly after the bill passed early last month, held an event in his home state pushing the bill. He, alongside former Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., lauded the bill’s inclusion of his Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which renewed and expanded compensation funding for people exposed to nuclear waste.
When asked if Republicans had gotten off to a slow start on selling the bill, he said that too much time had been devoted to talking “about Medicaid, for my own taste.”
“It’s less of that,” he said. “Talk about the tax cuts in this bill for working people, you know. I mean, that’s what people want. I mean, I was asked when I went home. I was asked immediately by people, ‘When are those no taxes on tips? When does that start?’ So, I mean, people are tracking it, but they’re tracking what’s for them.”
And Sen. Tommy Tubberville, R-Ala., charged that Democrats had “zero credibility” when it came to bashing the GOP for cuts and reforms.
“We got a lot of time,” he told Fox News Digital. “There will be a lot of water underneath the bridge. You won’t hear about the ‘big, beautiful bill’ here in another year because there’s going to be a couple more big, beautiful bills.”
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