July 2, 2025: Crunch time for Trump’s megabill

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The GOP’s massive reconciliation package heads back to the House this morning after narrowly crawling to passage in the Senate yesterday. But it looks much different than the last time the chamber considered it: To get through the Senate, the bill underwent an major makeover that drastically increases the deficit and could complicate the voting math in the House. The implications — for everyday Americans, for President Donald Trump’s agenda and for the 2026 and 2028 elections — couldn’t be much bigger. POLITICO senior Congress editor Mike DeBonis joins Playbook author Jack Blanchard to talk through how it went down and what comes next.

Transcript

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0:00.0	presented by BP.
0:08.8	Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.
0:10.7	And I'm Mike DeBonis.
0:12.0	It's Wednesday, Joy, second.
0:13.5	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:15.3	And as you can hear, we have got on the podcast today, Pilatego's very own senior
0:19.4	Congress editor, a longtime friendtime friend of playbook,
0:22.1	Mike DeBonis, Mike, it's brilliant to have you. Thanks for coming along this morning.
0:25.5	Could not be more pleased. Absolutely. And I think everyone can guess why you've been dragged
0:29.7	along earlier this morning to do this, because everyone is talking about what's going on in Congress,
0:34.8	obviously the biggest story of the day, of the week.
0:38.3	It will be our main headline that we'll be talking about on this podcast in just a moment.
0:42.0	The big, beautiful bill is headed back to the House this morning.
0:45.5	If the House Republicans can actually get there through the storms to vote on it,
0:49.2	and so we'll be picking through what's likely to happen for you on the podcast this morning,
0:52.9	just a couple of other things to flag before we do that. A couple of pretty important overseas stories that were
0:59.3	breaking last night, that we should flag for you. Politico actually broke one of these,
1:03.0	that the US has halted the passage of quite a significant number of weapons to Ukraine last
1:09.0	night, saying that it needs the weapons elsewhere.
1:11.4	This is the first time we've seen a very significant move like this.
1:14.9	There will be detrimental to Ukraine's war efforts since Donald Trump came back to power and
1:19.7	feels like a big moment.
	...

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