by Chris Brennan
President Donald Trump spent more than five months touting what he called his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a federal budget loaded with permanent tax cuts for billionaires and short-term benefits for not-so-wealthy workers.
That’s haunting Trump now, because national polling shows a broad majority of Americans only see an ugly economic outcome ahead for his signature policy bill. He needs a rebrand, pronto. And he’s got just the guy for that.
Vice President JD Vance is accomplished at reinventing himself.
Vance was a caustic critic of Trump’s first campaign for president in 2016, referring to him in a conversation with a friend that year as “America’s Hitler.” He also declared himself a “never Trumper” in a television interview.
That was before he started deleting in 2021 his social media posts that called Trump an “idiot” and “reprehensible.”
Can Vance scrub from the memory of Americans Trump’s boastful rhetoric about the One Big Beautiful Bill in the same way he rewrote his relationship with the guy who made him vice president? That’s a heavy lift. And Vance starts with an obvious disadvantage.
JD Vance has to convince Americans that helping the rich was the move
If Trump’s massive budget bill was so terrific ‒ as Trump keeps claiming ‒ then why is it so despised? Why does it need a rebrand at all?
Vance builds his case on a bogus false binary ‒ that poor and middle-class Americans now get a break on their taxes because Republicans who control Congress did not allow tax cuts during Trump’s first term to expire. Vance doesn’t talk about the billionaires who benefit much more from that extension than poor and middle-class Americans.
That’s a shady sleight of hand because the Republicans could have passed a budget that reduced taxes for the poor and the middle class but that didn’t also disproportionately benefit billionaires.
But this is Trump’s budget. And he, unsurprisingly, sided with the billionaires.
Why has Vance stopped saying the bill’s highly touted name?
Trump has sent Vance out on a tour of America ‒ when his vacation schedule allowed for it ‒ where his speeches have mostly hit on a few key points, but also noticeably dropped the phrase “One Big Beautiful Bill” from the script. Speaking in Pennsylvania on July 16, Vance used that phrase several times while touting how the budget bill would help people who file for overtime pay at their jobs.
Speaking in Ohio on July 28, Vance said “One Big Beautiful Bill” plenty while noting that legislation cuts taxes on tips for some workers.
But while speaking in Georgia on Aug. 21, Vance never uttered the phrase “One Big Beautiful Bill.” That has now been rebranded to “Working Families Tax Cut,” which Vance said five times in that speech.
Usually, the most interesting part of a politician’s speech is the stuff not spoken aloud.
What else has Vance not mentioned about the Republican bill?
Vance didn’t mention that the ability to avoid taxes on up to $12,500 in overtime pay will expire in less than three and a half years. He also left out that the ability to avoid taxes on up to $25,000 in tipped income will also expire on Dec. 31, 2028.
And he certainly didn’t point out that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, in an Aug. 11 letter, said the wealthiest 10% of Americans will see their resources increase annually by about $13,600 ‒ while American households at the other end of the income spectrum will see resources cut by about $1,200 per year.
Vance was asked about the CBO report after his speech in Georgia, and he did what everyone on Team Trump does when confronted with facts that refute their rhetoric. He accused the CBO of issuing “an atrocious report” and then ran straight back to his talking points.
Vance deployed the same tactic during his speeches in Ohio and Georgia, while trying to push back on concerns that the One Big Beautiful Bill would slash health care benefits for approximately 10 million Americans.
The CBO, in that same Aug. 11 analysis, said about 7.5 million Americans will lose Medicaid coverage in the decade to come, while 2.1 million Americans will lose health care coverage from the Affordable Care Act, and 400,000 will lose coverage through a variety of programs.
Vance, speaking on Georgia, kept insisting ‒ seven times, by my count ‒ that the budget bill will remove health care coverage only from undocumented immigrants.
Chances are that Vance’s attempt to rebrand the bill will fail
A reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution told Vance that Republican leaders in Georgia are concerned that about 100,000 Americans ‒ not undocumented immigrants ‒ could get bumped from the Medicaid rolls as a result of the law.
And here the vice president showed us why his rebranding effort is likely to fail.
Vance responded to that concern by claiming, “If you’re worried about American citizens losing access to health care, the Trump administration always has an open door policy” and is willing to work with officials in Georgia.
How’s that for a pivot?
Republicans and Democrats warned for months that the One Big Beautiful Bill would cut health care coverage for Americans who need it most. And Vance’s rebranding effort addresses that by offering to listen to those concerns, after they were denied and ignored as Trump pushed for the bill’s passage?
Vance can’t run from this. He cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to help Trump’s budget bill become law. And he’s already angling to be the Republican nominee for president in 2028.
That means he has about three years to recast his account of his role in passing a massive budget bill that a majority of Americans reject as a terrible idea. And he has already shown us he has the capacity to change his story in that sort of time frame completely.
