Checking In on the First Major Electoral Tests of Trump 2.0

It’s officially campaign season: “The only thing beautiful about Trump’s bill will be the attack ads Democrats run talking about how Republicans cut Medicaid and SNAP from working class families to give tax breaks to rich people again,” a national Democratic strategist texted us Wednesday.

There are going to be a lot of those ads. The Democratic Governors Association on Wednesday announced $20 million in ad reservations for the New Jersey gubernatorial race, which NBC News reported was more than Gov. Phil Murphy and all his allied groups spent on ads in the 2021 race.

The cavalry has arrived for Republicans. NOTUS’ Reese Gorman reports on a $5 million nationwide ad campaign from American Action Network, the nonprofit arm of GOP leadership’s main super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund. The spot, going up in 29 congressional districts, touts Trump’s budget law as, “Giving working families the largest tax cut ever, cutting taxes on tips and overtime and strengthening our border, making our families safer.”

Medicaid is not mentioned. The battle to define this law is officially underway. And 2025 is the first big test. A cursory glance at this year’s governors’ races since the bill was signed into law on July 4 shows it has already become the central topic.

• In New Jersey, former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli posted a video on the day of the signing trying to get ahead of Democratic attacks. “The best way to protect Medicaid is to ensure that those who receive it are truly in need of it most,” he said. A top adviser to his campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

• In an interview with Newsmax this weekend, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears said the new law “does so many great things” and attacked the Democratic nominee, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, for opposing it. Earle-Sears did not say the word “Medicaid” once. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Open Tabs: Musk’s AI Company Scrubs Grok Posts (AP); Measles Cases Hit Record High (NYT); Linda Yaccarino Steps Down as CEO of X (WSJ); US Sanctions UN Human Rights Expert Over Criticism of Israel (Bloomberg); Supreme Court blocks part of Florida’s immigration law (NPR)

From the Hill

Voting for the bill but still being against it: Senate fiscal hawks are still grumbling about the reconciliation bill President Donald Trump signed into law that Republicans pretty much universally supported.

“One of the reasons I decided to vote for this is I didn’t want the bill to get more expensive,” Sen. Ron Johnson told reporters this week. “Another reason is, why I definitely had to vote ‘yes,’ or I would have just dealt myself out of being involved in that process, and I want to be highly involved.”

From the White House

About that Nobel Prize quest: “I don’t think he’s actively searching for it,” a senior White House official told Jasmine hours after Trump beamed as the leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal went down the line at a White House meeting yesterday to say they, too, believed the president deserved the Nobel Peace Prize after a reporter asked them.

Trump has complained a lot about not getting the prize, posted about it often on social media and has said, “I deserve it but they will never give it to me.”

But really he’s just flattered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent televised nomination and the African leaders’ comments, the official said — he agrees with them, but, you know, it’s not as if he thinks a lot about actually winning it.

“We’ve got bigger fish to worry about,” the official said.

THE BIG ONE

What is the future for U.S. foreign aid? Reports have chronicled deaths that trace directly back to the Trump administration unilaterally halting congressionally approved spending for USAID. Of the more than a dozen Republican lawmakers Haley Byrd Wilt spoke with about the life-or-death implications of this funding freeze, most didn’t want to answer for the death.

“Wait, wait, wait. How could that be?” Rep. Mike Kelly asked in response to a question about the children who have reportedly died in Sudan after the cuts. “There are already people dying?”

“I don’t believe that,” Kelly told NOTUS. “No.”

There is little agreement about what actually comes next. Reports of deaths after the closure of USAID are “incredibly sad,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk told Haley. “But also, my question is: Why such reliance on U.S. foreign aid, when we’re obviously heading for financial disaster in how in debt we are?”

The counter point: “When we retreat from the world,” Rep. Michael McCaul said, “our adversaries fill the vacuum.”

Can ideology win out? Former Rep. Ted Yoho is lobbying colleagues to support foreign aid as a means to pressure governments to change. “Children are always going to be starving,” Yoho told NOTUS in a phone call. “We need to address the underlying problems.”

NEW ON NOTUS

Rescissions moves to (at least) next week: The House-passed package of cuts to public broadcasting funding and foreign aid spending is a tougher sell in the Senate. “I have some reservations about it. So we’ll just see,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told reporters.

Down-ballot Democrats have the blues: A new study of 2024 Democratic candidates suggests the party has still not built out the infrastructure it needs to compete up and down the ballot, NOTUS’ Alex Roarty reports. What 1,000 Democratic candidates for office said in the survey from progressive group Pipeline Fund: 49% reported that last year they had some, very little or none of the support they needed.

A good time to be in the private prison business: The industry is clearly one of the big winners from the reconciliation’s $45 billion immigration-detention fund. Before the bill passed, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors he has “never seen the intensity and activity on ICE’s part to secure capacity” in his 33 years with the company.

More: Democratic Leaders Rip Congressman’s ‘Racist’ Attack on Ilhan Omar; Is This Preventative Health Task Force RFK Jr.’s Next Target?; Some Republicans Say Elon Musk’s America Party Could be a Real Threat; Trump: I ‘Haven’t Thought About’ Who Ordered Ukraine Weapons Pause

NOT US

• ICE Is Searching a Massive Insurance and Medical Bill Database to Find Deportation Targets, by Joseph Cox for 404 Media
• The ‘Trump Pump’: How Crypto Lobbying Won Over a President, by David Yaffe-Bellany and Kenneth P. Vogel for The New York Times
• As EU cracks down on AI, CEOs at Paris Summit say it’s the wrong move, by Rachyl Jones for Semafor

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