Republican senator denounces Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ in fiery speech

“It is inescapable this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made,” Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican senator, said on Sunday night, sandblasting the Senate version of the “big, beautiful bill” that is meant to codify the president’s agenda.

Tillis made his speech on the Senate floor on Sunday night, a few hours after announcing he would not seek re-election in politically competitive North Carolina. Observers described it as “fiery” and “savage”. But Tillis carefully avoided direct criticism of the president as he denounced proposed cuts to Medicaid, a lack of rigor in the legislative process and the Senate’s headlong drive to an artificial deadline.

Instead, in one of the most forceful Republican denunciations of the bill, Tillis attacked “amateurs” advising the president who have “no insight into how these provider tax cuts are going to be absorbed without harming people on Medicare”.

Tillis’s office published an analysis concluding that the Senate budget would have a $32bn impact on the North Carolina healthcare system and threaten insurance coverage for 663,000 Medicaid expansion beneficiaries in the state – about one in 16 North Carolinians.

“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there any more, guys?” Tillis said in his floor speech.

It has become increasingly difficult for lawmakers in the Republican party to break ranks with the president without facing withering blowback from conservative media, “Maga” diehards and Trump himself on social media.

“Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER! He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!” Trump posted on Truth Social after announcing his opposition to the bill. Trump pledged to back a primary challenger to Tillis. When Tillis subsequently announced he would not seek re-election, Trump called it “good news”, and threatened primary challenges against other Republican fiscal conservatives standing in the way of the bill’s passage.

Arguments critical of conservative doctrine on healthcare would fall on deaf ears. Instead, Tillis’s rhetoric emphasized the political threat to Republican lawmakers and the president himself if the bill passed in its current form.

“I’m telling the president that you have been misinformed,” he said. “You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.”

Tillis referred back to Trump’s promise not to cut Medicaid while campaigning for president.

“The last time I saw a promise broken around healthcare, with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle, is when somebody said “If you like your healthcare, you could keep it. If you like your doctor, you could keep it,” Tillis said. “We found out that wasn’t true. That made me the second Republican speaker of the House since the civil war.”

Tillis signaled he would be willing to support the House version of the reconciliation bill.

The procedural vote passed 51-49 Sunday. Budget reconciliation bills are not subject to cloture and the 60-vote threshold limiting debate. Trump has repeatedly pushed a 4 July deadline for passage.