Michael1942's Blog

No, Democrats aren’t trying to fund health care for “illegal aliens.”

Jonathan Cohn

Sep 30

Hey, guys. Earlier today, my colleague Mona Charen and I talked about President Trump’s speech before the generals and admirals, as well as the politics of the government-shutdown fight.

In today’s newsletter, I write about the likely shutdown and the main argument about health care that Trump and his allies are making. I am calling it a “lie,” which is not a phrase I typically use. I reserve it for instances when a claim seems fundamentally untrue and when the people making the claim know better—or, at least, should know better. I think this instance qualifies. Let me know in the comments if you agree.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S CLOSING ARGUMENT heading into the government shutdown is a big, brazen lie.

The lie is so big and so brazen that it’s almost not worth addressing, because doing so gives the claim far more credibility than it deserves.

But it’s become ubiquitous in Republican talking points, from the president on down. There’s also a chance some people will believe it, because it feeds into some common misconceptions about health care and immigration policy, as well as preconceptions of how the parties operate. And in a standoff that has been all about political leverage and public opinion, setting the record straight matters.

So let’s get to it.The claim is about what Democrats are demanding in exchange for their support on a spending bill that would keep the government open past midnight tonight, when funding runs out. Remember, Republicans control both the White House and Congress, but need Democratic votes in the Senate to approve a new spending measure.

The central Democratic demand is about health care: They want Republicans to extend a temporary Biden-era program that has lowered health insurance costs for more than 20 million Americans buying coverage through the Affordable Care Act. And they want Republicans to undo at least some of the dramatic Medicaid cuts that the GOP enacted over the summer, as part of Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Trump and Republican leaders have refused to negotiate. And after flailing about with a few different arguments—including a preposterous claim that Democrats just want to pad the profits of insurance companies—they have settled on a new line: that Democrats want to fund health care for “illegal aliens.”

I put the phrase in quotes because it’s the phrase Republican officials have used over and over again—literally eight times by Vice President JD Vance in one recent Fox News interview, as my Bulwark colleague Will Saletan observed the other day.

Vance made the claim yet again on Monday while standing outside the White House, following a failed negotiation session between GOP and Democratic leaders. At his side was House Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s been putting out the same message, including in a Sunday tweet saying that Democrats “want to give free health care to ILLEGAL ALIENS paid by hardworking Americans.”

And then there is Trump, who has been using the same line in conversations with reporters and on his own social media feeds. On Monday night, he even reposted an AI fake of a press appearance by the Democratic congressional leaders in which the fake Sen. Chuck Schumer says: “If we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.” A digitally animated, sombrero-wearing, mustachioed Rep. Hakeem Jeffries looks on as mariachi music plays in the background.

If you’re not too busy gasping at what it says about the president’s state of mind that he’d post this, you might be wondering what on earth he and the Republicans are talking about when they claim Democrats want to fund health care for illegal aliens.

It’s a very good question, because people who are in the United States unlawfully cannot get federally funded health insurance. They cannot sign up for Medicaid. They cannot get federally subsidized coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s online marketplaces.

In other words, what Trump, Vance and the other Republicans are saying is just not true.

SO WHAT COULD THEY HAVE IN MIND with this claim?

It’s hard to be sure, because neither the White House nor Johnson’s office has put out material to substantiate their arguments, or responded to my queries asking for evidence. And when a reporter finally asked the president about it, during a press appearance in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump gave a rambling non-response that quickly veered into other immigration-related topics.

In the same press appearance, he said of the Democrats “they want to give incredible Medicare—the Cadillac Medicare—to illegal immigrants.” That’s also not true, in case you were wondering.

As best as I can tell, the Republicans who actually know what they are talking about are zeroing in on a small portion of federal health spending that’s in play as part of the shutdown debate. It’s funding connected either to the Affordable Care Act subsidies Democrats want to extend or to the GOP Medicaid cuts they want to roll back. And they are leaning heavily on a set of two flimsy assertions that appeared in an early September GOP press release and echo claims made by the Paragon Health Institute, an influential conservative think tank.

One of those assertions is about rules that opened up “Obamacare” subsidies to a small number of non-citizens, including some who are in the country because they have protected status. Republicans might not want these people to be eligible for those subsidies. But these people are not “illegal aliens.” They have permission to be in the United States.

The other main assertion is that people here unlawfully are tricking the system, and getting coverage even though they are not eligible. It’s an extension of another highly questionable argument Republicans have made repeatedly over the past few months, which is that many millions of people have been signing up for either Medicaid or subsidized Affordable Care Act insurance fraudulently.

The evidence for that claim is awfully shaky, for reasons you can read here and here and here and here. But even if it were true that millions of Americans were getting Affordable Care Act insurance through deception or error, there’s no reason to think that large numbers of undocumented immigrants would be among them.

For one thing, enrollment systems check citizenship status pretty carefully, by cross-referencing Social Security numbers with data from the Department of Homeland Security. People who apply as non-citizens—say, because they have protected status—must supply other forms of documentation to prove that they have permission to be here and that they qualify for one of the special exemptions allowing them to get coverage.¹

The system isn’t foolproof; no system is. Maybe some undocumented immigrants are going to the trouble of faking data, and maybe DHS is missing them. But most people in the United States unlawfully steer clear of government programs, precisely because they fear triggering deportation for themselves or loved ones.

“People who are immigrants are afraid, they’re not going to risk exposure,” Shelby Gonzales, vice president for immigration policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me in a phone interview. “We’ve got problems getting people who are fully eligible, people who have been eligible for a long time, to trust that they can provide their information.”

That last part is well known to researchers and analysts. Immigrants legally eligible for federally funded benefit programs like Medicaid are actually less likely to get them than U.S. citizens. And during the first Trump administration, immigrants repeatedly told pollsters and journalists they were afraid to seek out public services—or even, in some cases, basic health care.

IF YOU REALLY WANT to give Vance and the Republicans the benefit of the doubt in a way they never do for their political adversaries—if you want to consider the most defensible part of their claim, for the sake of intellectual honesty—you could zero in on a single provision of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB).

It’s a cut tied to a program called “Emergency Medicaid.”

Emergency Medicaid reimburses hospitals for emergency care they provide to immigrants not entitled to federally funded insurance. This includes people who are here lawfully but not eligible for federal programs. It also includes undocumented immigrants.

The OBBB reduces the federal contribution to Emergency Medicaid, saving about $28 billion in federal spending over ten years. If you squint hard enough, you could argue this is an example of the Republicans cutting funds that had been paying for health care of undocumented immigrants—and that Democrats want to restore that money, insofar as they have said they want to undo the legislation’s Medicaid cuts.

But here are a few other things to keep in mind:

That $28 billion over ten years represents less than 3 percent of the health care cuts within the OBBB and less than 1 percent of total Medicaid spending, according to data from the Urban Institute and KFF.

Only a portion of that money actually finances care for undocumented immigrants. Some of it finances care for people here legally but not yet eligible for Medicaid. An example would be people with work permits and those seeking permanent residency, who by law must wait five years before enrolling in Medicaid.

Emergency Medicaid doesn’t go to individuals. It’s a direct subsidy to hospitals and (in some states) outpatient providers, for care they provide.

A lot of the money is spent on truly emergency services like resuscitating somebody from a heart attack or delivering a baby that hospitals and clinics are obligated to provide, thanks to a 1980s law, signed by Ronald Reagan, that prohibits denying care to people who need stabilizing or life-saving treatment.

One other thing to note is that the cut does not apply to Florida, Texas, and eight other states that have refused to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. So this is a cut that largely spares some of the biggest red states, which could be a byproduct of GOP philosophical priorities lining up with those states’ choices, GOP leaders wanting to protect politically friendly states, or both.

As Georgetown research professor Edwin Park told me: “Emergency Medicaid is about reimbursing providers, especially hospitals, and the Emergency Medicaid provision is actually more about further increasing the cost-shifts to expansion states by lowering the match for Emergency Medicaid reimbursements.”

Add it all up, and even the most expansive, generous reading of the Emergency Medicaid argument wouldn’t come close to validating claims by Trump, Vance, and the other GOP leaders.

“Republican talking points have consistently featured claims that Democrats are trying to provide health care to undocumented immigrants, but this debate isn’t about that,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told me. “Democrats are looking to restore health coverage for citizens and lawfully present immigrants. It is those groups that will bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and the ACA.”

To be perfectly clear: Not a single Democrat has talked about wanting to fund care for people in the United States unlawfully. Instead, what Democrats have said is they want to undo Medicaid cuts projected to leave nearly 10 million Americans uninsured—and extend a temporary Biden-era initiative in order to avoid a jump in health insurance premiums expected to affect 20 million more.

You might agree with that. Or not. You might think tying this to the shutdown makes sense. Or not. But you can say one thing about Democrats’ underlying claims that you definitely can’t say about the Republican counterpart: They are telling the truth. The challenges of setting up that verification in real-time was one of the reasons the Obama administration had such a hard time setting up the HealthCare.gov website—and why its rollout in late 2013 was such an infamous

By William Edwards

Aug 26, 2025, 4:45 AM CT

New disclosures show that President Trump has bought roughly $100 million of bonds since starting his term.

These purchases could gain from Fed rate cuts, benefiting Trump’s portfolio value.

The president has been pressuring the Fed for months to lower interest rates.

While President Donald Trump has grabbed headlines for his meme-stock holdings and forays into crypto, he’s also been steadily amassing a large stake in good, old-fashioned bonds.

This is according to a US Office of Government Ethics filing from August 19, which showed that Trump has made more than $100 million in bond purchases since starting his second term. The purchases span state, municipal, and corporate bonds with a wide range of maturity dates and yields.

While administration officials have said the transactions are managed completely independent of Trump, it’s still relatively unprecedented for an active president to be making these types of moves at all. He’s the first commander-in-chief in more than 50 years to not at least have personal holdings put into a blind trust while in office.

Given that bond prices normally rise when yields fall, any decline in the latter would increase the overall value of the president’s portfolio. Those yields are likely to decline if the Federal Reserve cuts rates — something Trump has not-so-subtly been imploring it to do for months.

A few caveats: The purchases make up a small portion of Trump’s net worth, which Forbes estimates at around $6 billion. It’s also unclear how Trump’s bond-purchase activity compares to previous periods when he wasn’t in office.

Overall, it’s difficult to know the exact degree to which Trump would benefit from reductions in the fed funds rate. The benchmark rate impacts short-duration yields the most, while factors like inflation impact longer-duration bonds more. Price action on long-duration bonds specifically in response to rate cuts can also be hard to measure because long-term rates can move in advance of cuts.

Trump has called for the central bank to slash rates by 300 basis points, to the 1.25%-to-1.5% range. He has repeatedly pressured Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut rates. But Powell has run his own race and stuck to the Fed’s internal calculus, even going as far as to say the potentially inflationary effect of Trump’s tariffs was part of the FOMC’s decision to keep rates unchanged at recent meetings.

Trump’s bonds — and the bond market overall — may not have much longer to wait for another rate cut. Investors are currently pricing in an 84% chance of a 25-basis-point reduction at the September Fed meeting, following a weak July jobs report that saw large downward revisions.

For his part, Powell appeared to open the door to a September rate cut during remarks at last week’s Jackson Hole Symposium. Upon the release of his prepared statement, stocks soared instantly, while government bond yields tumbled.

Tom Boggioni-Raw Story

State Representative Matt Morgan (R-TX) holds a map of the new proposed congressional districts in Texas, during a legislative session as Democratic lawmakers, who left the state to deny Republicans the opportunity to redraw the state’s 38 congressional districts, begin returning to the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, U.S. August 20, 2025. REUTERS/Sergio Flores

Less than 24 hours after Texas Republicans shoved the redistricting plan across the finish line over Democratic objections, some GOP lawmakers are having a bit of buyer’s remorse that they may have gained some seats in U.S. House of Representatives but put others in play.

According to conservative journalist David Drucker, the plan was to give Republicans a shot at picking up an expected five House seats in the 2026 midterms, but the map, as now written, may put some other districts in play.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the Dispatch journalist was prompted by host Joe Scarborough with, “One of the main consequences I see from gerrymandering is you get the people in the safe seats, and I won’t even mention their names, but you get people in the safest seats, they say the most, especially in the Republican side, they say the most outrageous things, and they raise a ton of money. The more insulting, the more outrageous, the more vulgar, the crazier, the more insane they sound, because they’re safe in their district, the more money they raise nationwide, the more their profile goes up.”

According to Drucker, “Well, we’ve seen that over the past decade and a half, at least, because all the action, Joe is in the primaries, right? I mean, how often are we discussing a topic here? And you guys ask me, what do Republicans think, and my answer is usually they don’t want to rock the boat ahead of primary season, because the only place they’re going to have a competitive race is in a Republican primary.” After discussing the dilemma Democrats are facing, he added,” Look what’s happening now with the gerrymandering of seats … on the one hand, we could, in the short term have some more competitive districts, right? If you look at that Texas map, some is dark red, a lot of it is shaded light red. And that means if this atmosphere goes against the president and his party next year, I’ve had Republicans in Texas tell me they’re worried [that] instead of gaining five seats, you can have ten competitive seats, and you could end up losing seats

NBC News

Steve Kopack

1.7k

President Donald Trump has purchased at least $103 million worth of corporate and municipal bonds since he took office in January, according to new filings from the Office of Government Ethics.

The documents, released late Tuesday, show that Trump began the bond-buying spree one day after he was sworn in on Jan. 20 and that it includes debt sold by companies, local governments and entities that could be directly affected by his sweeping agenda. All told, Trump made about 690 purchases from Jan. 21 through Aug. 1.

The active trading by a president of the United States is unprecedented, and it puts Trump in a direct position to benefit — or lose out — if any of the entities that own the bonds he has purchased succeed or fail. It’s also another example of Trump’s pursuing business endeavors and transactions to increase his wealth in office.

“Ultimately, the president is not involved in these transactions,” a senior administration official told NBC News. “They’re managed completely independently of him.”

On Jan. 21, Trump purchased a bond belonging to the New York Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. A week later, he purchased another handful of bonds over consecutive days. Those bonds belong to various municipal hospital facilities, airports, regional development funds and school districts from Florida to Alaska.

The filings do not provide exact purchase amounts but instead show a broad dollar range for each transaction. The filings did not show any sales by Trump.

Trump’s buying continued at a steady clip for months, including bonds from megabanks Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Citigroup worth at least $100,000 apiece.

Trump’s direct ownership of bonds from three of the country’s banking giants also comes as he considers an eventual replacement of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and weeks after he nominated one of his top aides, Stephen Miran, to a seat on the Fed’s board. The Fed can directly affect a bank’s profit by lowering or raising interest rates, along with myriad regulatory actions. As a Fed governor, Miran would have a direct say in many of those actions.

Trump purchases also included at least $500,000 of bonds apiece from chipmaker Qualcomm, mobile provider T-Mobile USA, Home Depot and UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest private health insurance company.

The filings also show that Trump bought at least $250,001 of Meta’s bonds. CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump’s inauguration and donated $1 million to the event.

Likewise, Trump’s ownership in hundreds of municipal bonds puts him in line to benefit when those municipal entities pay back the debt, and it comes when the administration has been tightly controlling the distribution of funds from the federal government to local and regional governments.

Trump’s net worth is around $5.5 billion, according to the Forbes Billionaires List, up a staggering $3.2 billion since last year.

Typically, presidents divest their financial assets before or shortly after they enter office, but Trump has rejected that precedent and retained most of his empire since his first term.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

The Atlantic

Story by Rogé Karma • 14h • 5 min read

The Trump economy doesn’t look so hot after all. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised data showing that, over the past three months, the U.S. labor market experienced its worst quarter since 2010, other than during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The timing was awkward. Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had announced a huge new slate of tariffs, set to take effect next week. He’d been emboldened by the fact that the economy had remained strong until now despite economists’ warnings—a fact that turned out not to be a fact at all.

After Trump announced his first sweeping round of “Liberation Day” tariffs, in April, the country appeared to be on the verge of economic catastrophe. The stock market plunged, the bond market nearly melted down, expectations of future inflation skyrocketed, and experts predicted a recession.

But the crisis never came. Trump walked back or delayed his most extreme threats, and those that he kept didn’t seem to inflict much economic damage. Month after month, economists predicted that evidence of the negative impact of tariffs in the economic data was just around the corner. Instead, according to the available numbers, inflation remained stable, job growth remained strong, and the stock market set new records.

The Trump administration took the opportunity to run a victory lap. “Lots of folks predicted that it would end the world; there would be some sort of disastrous outcome,” Stephen Miran, the chair of Trump’s council of economic advisers, said of Trump’s tariffs in an interview with ABC News early last month. “And once again, tariff revenue is pouring in. There’s no sign of any economically significant inflation whatsoever, and job creation remains healthy.” A July 9 White House press release declared, “President Trump was right (again),” touting strong jobs numbers and mild inflation. “President Trump is overseeing another economic boom,” it concluded.

The seemingly strong data spurred soul-searching among journalists and economists. “The Economy Seems Healthy. Were the Warnings About Tariffs Overblown?” read a representative New York Times headline. Commentators scrambled to explain how the experts could have gotten things so wrong. Maybe it was because companies had stocked up on imported goods before the tariffs had come into effect; maybe the economy was simply so strong that it was impervious to Trump’s machinations; maybe economists were suffering from “tariff derangement syndrome.” Either way, the possibility that Trump had been right, and the economists wrong, had to be taken seriously.

The sky’s refusal to fall likely influenced the Trump administration’s decision to press ahead with more tariffs. In recent months, Trump has imposed 25 percent tariffs on car parts and 50 percent tariffs on copper, steel, and aluminum. He has threatened 200 percent tariffs on pharmaceuticals. Over the past week, Trump announced trade deals under which the European Union, Japan, and South Korea agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on exports to the United States. Finally, this morning, he announced a sweeping set of new tariffs, a sort of Liberation Day redux, including a 39 percent levy on Switzerland, 25 percent on India, and 20 percent on Vietnam. These are scheduled to take effect on August 7 unless those countries can negotiate a deal.

Then came the new economic data. This morning, the BLS released its monthly jobs report, showing that the economy added just 73,000 new jobs last month—well below the 104,000 that forecasters had expected—and that unemployment rose slightly, to 4.2 percent. More important, the new report showed that jobs numbers for the previous two months had been revised down considerably after the agency received a more complete set of responses from the businesses it surveys monthly. What had been reported as a strong two-month gain of 291,000 jobs was revised down to a paltry 33,000. What had once looked like a massive jobs boom ended up being a historically weak quarter of growth. 

Even that might be too rosy a picture. All the net gains of the past three months came from a single sector, health care, without which the labor market would have lost nearly 100,000 jobs. That’s concerning because health care is one of the few sectors that is mostly insulated from broader economic conditions: People always need it, even during bad times. (The manufacturing sector, which tariffs are supposed to be boosting, has shed jobs for three straight months.) Moreover, the new numbers followed an inflation report released by the Commerce Department yesterday that found that the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of price growth had picked up in June and remained well above the central bank’s 2 percent target. (The prior month’s inflation report was also revised upward to show a slight increase in May.) Economic growth and consumer spending also turned out to have fallen considerably compared with the first half of 2024. Taken together, these economic reports are consistent with the stagflationary environment that economists were predicting a few months ago: mediocre growth, a weakening labor market, and rising prices.

The striking thing about these trends is how heavily they diverge from how the economy was projected to perform before Trump took office. As the economist Jason Furman recently pointed out, the actual economic growth rate in the first six months of 2025 was barely more than half what the Bureau of Economic Analysis had projected in November 2024, while core inflation came in at about a third higher than projections.

The worst might be yet to come. Many companies did in fact stock up on imported goods before the tariffs kicked in; others have been eating the cost of tariffs to avoid raising prices in the hopes that the duties would soon go away. Now that tariffs seem to be here to stay, more and more companies will likely be forced to either raise prices or slash their costs—including labor costs. A return to the 1970s-style combination of rising inflation and unemployment is looking a lot more likely.

The Trump administration has found itself caught between deflecting blame for the weak economic numbers and denying the numbers’ validity. In an interview with CNN this morning, Miran admitted that the new jobs report “isn’t ideal” but went on to attribute it to various “anomalous factors,” including data quirks and reduced immigration. (Someone should ask Miran why immigration is down.) And this afternoon, Trump posted a rant on Truth Social accusing the BLS commissioner of cooking the books to make him look bad. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.” He then went on to argue, not for the first time, that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell should be fired for hamstringing the economy with high interest rates. These defenses are, of course, mutually exclusive: If the bad numbers are fake, why should Trump be mad at Powell?

In these confused denials, one detects a shade of desperation on Trump’s part. Of course, everything could end up being fine. Maybe economists will be wrong, and the economy will rebound with newfound strength in the second half of the year. But that’s looking like a far worse bet than it did just 24 hours ago.