With no prospect that Republicans in Congress will meaningfully restrain the fascist regime this year, my hopes have rested on their inability to advance its legislative agenda. Trump insisted that the vast, vast majority of that agenda be contained in “one big, beautiful bill,” despite being warned by the GOP leaders in the Senate that this was a major risk.

When the Republican-led House of Representatives passed their version of the bill by a single vote and split town for the Memorial Day recess, it left Senate Majority Leader John Thune holding the bag. Now he has to figure out how to execute a plan he advised against even attempting. To make matters more difficult, he doesn’t just have to pass the bill through his own chamber, but he has to do so in a way that will not lose a single vote in the House, because the House will have to sign off on whatever he produces.

If there is one thing that comes close to uniting the congressional Republicans, it’s a desire not be responsible for a massive tax hike, and that’s what will happen if the 2017 Trump tax cuts are not extended before the end of the year. This unity is what led Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to prefer putting everything in one bill rather than two. Thune’s idea was that the tax portion of the bill will actually be the more difficult part to pass and that it should be separated off into a second bill to be handled after the rest of the agenda was on Trump’s desk. Johnson felt that pressure to extend the tax cuts would be key to getting members to agree to a plethora of things in the bill that they didn’t like, whether that be increased deficits, raising the debt ceiling, massive slashes to Medicaid and food assistance, or provisions related to clean energy subsidies and exemptions for the state and local taxes.

This effort was not taking place in a vacuum, however. From the outset of the fascist regime, Elon Musk was leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort to slash the size of government and find substantial savings. In theory, this parallel effort could help convince budget hawks in Congress to approve a big, beautiful bill that will increase the deficit by two-to-three trillion dollars over the next decade.

But Musk was much more successful in taking a chainsaw to the federal government’s proper functioning than he was in finding money to offset the giant cost of Congress’s bill. In the process, Musk made himself toxic in the eyes of the public, which questioned his role and authority and judgment. He also made enemies in Congress which didn’t appreciate seeing its control over government spending usurped by a cranky ketamine addict.

As Musk was quietly pushed out, he began to feel some bitterness. He didn’t like being treated as a failure and a pariah. He knew his reputation had been damaged, and it had real financial consequences.

Ultimately, the Trump-Musk union had drawbacks for both parties. For Musk, his association with Trump and DOGE’s sweeping austerity prescriptions resulted in Tesla suffering its worst quarter in three years.

As it happens, left-leaning Americans are far more likely to own electric vehicles than conservatives. But they are less likely to purchase those cars from a company synonymous with a right-wing oligarch who has used his bought influence to cut social services, environmental protections, and medical research. Some one-time Tesla owners have joined the scores of anti-Musk protests held at the automaker’s dealerships since January. State-level Democratic lawmakers also sought to fight the Trump-Musk program by imposing new taxes on Tesla and clawing back privileges the company received for being a top producer of zero-emission vehicles.

Tesla’s brand crisis became so acute that its board of directors reportedly weighed replacing Musk as chief executive.

But it also dawned on him that all his efforts would be for naught, at least in terms of improving the country’s long-term fiscal outlook, if Congress actually wound up increasing the debt by trillions more than when he began. So, he turned against the big, beautiful bill and any House Republicans who voted for it, which is almost all of them.

Elon Musk has hit out at President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending bill, describing it as a “disgusting abomination”, in a widening rift between the two.

The tech billionaire posted on X that the bill would add to the US budget deficit and saddle Americans with “crushing” debt.

The budget, which includes huge tax breaks and more defence spending, was passed by the House of Representatives last month and is now being considered by senators.

“Shame on those who voted for it,” said Musk, hinting that he may try to unseat the politicians responsible at next year’s midterm elections.

It’s not like the congressional Republicans don’t know that Musk is correct about the budgetary impact of the bill but they’re flailing around trying to convince themselves otherwise. According to the Wall Street Journal, Senate Finance Committee chairman Mike Crapo of Idaho argues that one solution is to just “say that extensions of expiring tax cuts don’t have a cost or assume faster economic growth will cover the cost of some changes.” But fraudulent accounting doesn’t deceive the accountant who is committing the fraud. It’s not even intended to accomplish that.

The same WSJ article is devoted to explaining how Republican senators are moving inexorably to make the bill even more expensive.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) says the Medicaid cuts go too far for his state, and wants some funding restored, while Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) is concerned about the bill’s effects on rural hospitals and low-income families. Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) wants slower phaseouts of clean-energy tax credits to avoid scuttling private-sector investments that responded to federal incentives. Sens. James Lankford (R., Okla.) and Steve Daines (R., Mont.) want to take some tax cuts that are temporary in the House bill and make them permanent to provide certainty for businesses.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has a laundry list of complaints about spending cuts in the bill which would devastate her state. Here are two:

She has already indicated that there are at least two major provisions in the measure that she does not support: adding stringent new work requirements to Medicaid, and the termination of clean energy tax credits established under the Biden administration, a repeal that Speaker Mike Johnson accelerated to help win the support of conservatives to muscle the legislation through the House.

To win the support of these senators, Thune will have to add to the cost of the bill, but that will only add to the ire from Musk and make it harder to pass through the House.

To be honest, the House has already fallen out of love with the bill they passed.

When Republicans muscled their sweeping domestic policy bill through the House by a single vote after an overnight debate, they breathed a sigh of relief, enjoyed a celebratory moment at sunrise and then retreated to their districts for a weeklong recess.

Not even two weeks later, the victory has, for some, given way to regret.

It turns out that the sprawling legislation to advance tax and spending cuts and to cement much of President Trump’s domestic agenda included a raft of provisions that drew little notice or debate on the House floor. And now, Republicans who rallied behind the bill are claiming buyer’s remorse about measures they swear they did not know were included.

A bunch of House Republicans have defended their vote for the bill to their outraged constituents by admitting they didn’t read the legislation carefully and were unaware of some provisions that they don’t support. Presumably, this means those provisions will have to be removed for them to vote for the bill when it comes back from the Senate.

There are three things that could still save the one big, beautiful bill.

The first is that they want to raise the debt ceiling without needing to ask for Democratic votes, but they’ve never been able to do this on a standalone vote. They need the debt ceiling hike to be concealed within a much larger must-pass bill to have any chance of accomplishing this, and they know that defaulting on America’s debts would be catastrophic.

The second is the absolute determination of Republicans not to be responsible for a massive increase in taxes, which is what will happen if the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the rich expire at the end of the year.

And the third is the fact that the fascist regime is depending on Congress to get this done. It has put all its legislative eggs in this basket, and the congressional Republicans don’t want to be responsible for making it face-plant.

But wishing doesn’t make it so. This effort has been dubious from the beginning but now that Musk has described it as a “disgusting abomination,” the task has begun to look like it might genuinely fail.

That’s what I’m hoping will happen, but I can also solace myself with this: the cost for lawmakers who do vote for this on final passage has just gone up, a lot. They will have no cover from criticisms that they exploded the debt and won’t be able to argue that DOGE helped offset the costs.