Big Beautiful Battle

“I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s where the fun is. And if it can’t be fun, what’s the point?”

—Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal

Right now, President Trump’s “present” is the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” (or OBBB) that he just signed into law. A whirlwind of over 900 pages of tax policy, legislation, and massive cuts to social safety-net programs that will massively impact the November 2026 midterms has just landed on the American public. The president certainly seemed to have fun passing it. But what does it mean? And will Republicans or Democrats be having fun in 16 months when Americans head to the polls?

What Just Happened

Trump may play for the future, but he also admits to learning from the past. He certainly did so when he looked at previous presidents’ big legislative bills. He knows that the momentum from winning elections can help pass massive legislation within the first year. Franklin Delano Roosevelt most famously did so in 1933 when he passed 76 laws in his first 100 days.

More recent presidents have faced a divided Congress and have therefore sought to dump policy, tax legislation, and relief spending together in massive bills. Examples are President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act after the 2008 recession, and President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill following Covid-19 in 2020. Both Obama and Biden followed these bills with other giant packages of legislation.

The best analogy for this modern dynamic is to imagine you’re taking a dozen feuding toddlers to the grocery store. Would you rather deal with the whole shopping list once a month, or daily? When dealing with an ornery Congress, presidents prefer to cram as much as they can into one bill and use all their credibility to pass it. Trump has done the same thing; he’s just far better at naming his legislation than his predecessors.