By Lydia Polgreen / The New York Times
Journalist Michael Kinsley once defined a political gaffe as when a politician inadvertently speaks the truth. On Tuesday morning, Vice President J.D. Vance posted a classic of the form on the social platform X, part of an attempt during an all-night effort to get the Senate, a chamber his party controls by a comfortable margin, to pass President Trump’s misbegotten domestic policy agenda.
“The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” Vance wrote. “The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass.”
“Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he continued.
The bill contains about $45 billion for new immigrant detention centers and nearly $30 billion to supercharge Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose masked agents have been hunting down immigrants in the country without legal permission, sometimes suiting up in tactical gear fit for an assault on Fallujah to round up day laborers in hardware store parking lots.
In truth, that $75 billion is small beer compared with the true heart of the bill: extending roughly $3.8 trillion of tax cuts enacted in 2017 with some changes, in an overall package that would overwhelmingly benefit wealthy Americans. This bonanza comes at the cost of slashing Medicaid and food stamps for the poorest Americans. The latest Congressional Budget Office score found that the bill would cause “7.6 million more Americans to be uninsured at the end of a decade, while reducing federal spending on health care by more than $800 billion,” my New York Times newsroom colleagues reported, a relative drop in the bucket compared with the overall price tag of the tax cuts. The latest CBO estimate found that the bill would still add $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Trump ran on and won the 2024 election with a pledge to round up and deport immigrants lacking permanent legal status who have been accused of serious crimes. This proposition, according to some polls, still commands majority support. But as his vast program of deportation has ensnared people who have no criminal records, shredded due process to expel people to foreign prisons, seen the temporary detainment of U.S. citizens and begun constructing a prison camp in the fetid Everglades to disappear still more, support for the deportation regime has slumped. More than half of Americans said ICE has “gone too far” in one recent poll. In another, 61 percent opposed the $45 billion for detention centers.
So here comes Vance with a new proposition: You can only have more of these deportations you may not even want if you sell out your neighbors’ health care and food stamps to keep giving the plutocrats a tax break.
The bill has already been stripped of pretty much all its supposedly populist economic elements. Tiny bits of populist tinsel cling to this superannuated Christmas tree — as far as I can tell, that consists mainly of tax-free tips for some workers — but its main ornament is what Republicans have long pressed on an unwilling citizenry: extending huge, deficit-exploding tax cuts for the richest Americans and the companies that feed their wealth.
Indeed, Vance’s statement illuminated the real truth of Kinsey’s quip. A true Washington gaffe is always a confession, and Vance’s is this: Trumpist populism offers its adherents nothing but the demonization and expulsion of immigrants. In return, generations of Americans will be left sicker and deeper in debt.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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