Republican lawmakers are scrambling to rebrand President Trump's signature tax package after it bombed with voters this summer, desperately trying to salvage their messaging before reaching midterm election season. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and pollster Tony Fabrizio met with lawmakers privately on Capitol Hill this week to discuss how they can better convince their constituents that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will benefit their pocketbooks. The instruction: Less BBB, more tax cuts and families.
'All of the polling people that come and talk to the conference are saying 'working families now,' one senior GOP House staffer shared with the Daily Mail. He admitted his boss called the relabel '[expletive] awesome' because so many constituents are 'terrified about losing Medicaid.' 'It's a really smart play,' he added, 'we've got to stop talking about the One Big, Beautiful Bill.'
Recently, the White House has been referring to the GOP megabill as the 'Working Families Tax Cut' after polling for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act began falling and Republicans at town halls in their districts began catching flak for the legislation.
Much of the outrage has come over cuts to Medicaid, which will result in close to 8 million people losing their coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The bill could take coverage away from 16 million people in total. The $3.4 trillion GOP-backed law has found a largely negative reception from voters. Pew Research said nearly half of the 3,500 Americans it polled last month, 46 percent, disapproved of the package while just 32 percent approved. Weeks before it passed a Fox News survey found 59 percent of registered voters opposed it and 38 percent supported it. The White House officials and Fabrizio held one meeting with lawmakers and another with top Capitol Hill staffers, an aide in the staff-wide meeting told the Daily Mail.
In the session, top aides were instructed to focus on how the bill would cut taxes. Though the sprawling package includes many provisions, including cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. One lawmaker told NOTUS the meeting was to 'focus on making sure that resources get to the right people, and stop making fun of lazy folks who live in the basements.' The outlet reported that Fabrizio's polling found that the tax cuts were the most popular part of the measure.
'If you call it One Big Beautiful Bill, from a messaging standpoint, that doesn't tell constituents what the bill is,' a top House staffer who was in the meeting with the Trump team told the Daily Mail. 'We need to tell the constituents what the bill is. And from a top-line standpoint, the working families tax cut is the largest substance of the bill.'
Democrats had similar issues years ago when former President Joe Biden's signature Build Back Better package passed. That similarly monstrous measure cost $2.2. Trillion over ten years, according to the CBO.
'The issue that I'm finding here with both Build Back Better and One Big Beautiful Bill is that they're so broad that anyone can say anything about them,' a former Democratic staffer told the Daily Mail.
The ambiguous titles have led to jumbled counter-messaging, the source shared. 'Every Dem in Congress has probably had a different name for how to pejoratively call this bill. They called it the big ugly bill, the big [expletive] bill, the big beautiful betrayal.' Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his caucus have likened the legislation to a tax cut for the ultra-wealthy while crushing average Americans.
'The House Republican One Big Ugly Bill rips healthcare away from millions of people and is deeply unpopular,' he wrote this week.
Christina Reynolds, a Democratic communicator who worked for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, noted how liberals should 'keep calling it the name they're trying to move beyond.' A recent poll from the Job Creators Network Foundation found that many small business owners had gaps in awareness of what the Trump-backed bill really does.
Up to a quarter of the small business owners were unaware that the measure included tax rate reductions. Republicans, however, have picked up on how to sell the package, the Democrat source shared. 'The only thing that every Republican agrees on is tax cuts, and particularly tax cuts for the rich,' the Democrat shared.
It takes time to learn how to best message major, multi-trillion-dollar legislative packages, the senior GOP staffer who was in the meeting with Leavitt, Blair and Fabrizio said. He noted the measure needed time to 'marinate' so that pollsters like Fabrizio could get an accurate read on how Americans are perceiving the policies. 'We passed one of the most historic pieces of legislation, and we need to be able to tell people what it is,' the staffer said.