There’s a lot of noise out there drowning out an important signal most Americans should probably know about (yes, even MAGA! Perhaps especially MAGA given the disproportionate effects this Republican budget bill is likely to have on their red state communities). That is by design — retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth refers to it as “narrative warfare” in the Russian tradition; Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone with shit;” and psychologists simply call it narcissistic personality disorder. By whatever name, today’s political information ecosystem is being manipulated to obscure the actual business of government, because the culture wars are staggeringly popular while the actual GOP agenda goes over like a lead balloon in terms of popular opinion.

So much so that the House Rules Committee plans to take up the “big, beautiful bill” for consideration, recently passed out of the Budget Committee on late Sunday night, at 1:00am in the morning. Nothing says pride like a dead of night hearing!

The Medicaid cuts that are in the Republican budget bill are especially toxic to the GOP — reportedly 75% of Americans on both sides of the aisle oppose the deep cuts to critical services that the right-wing seems hell-bent on enacting despite better ways to extract savings, like preventing private insurers from “upcoding” care to make it more expensive.

The reckless cuts to public services are meant to offset the cost of what Republicans and their billionaire donors want on the other side of the ledger: the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for their corporate donors and wealthiest Americans. Nevermind, apparently, that these tax cuts are primarily responsible (along with the George W. Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s) for the increasing debt ratio that the GOP falls all over themselves to theatrically complain about — while single-handedly and relentlessly continuing to make it worse.

This 1,116-page piece of legislation is undoubtedly the very best — if not the only — shot the Republicans have to squeeze through their plans to blow another $4.6 trillion hole in the deficit. The budget reconciliation process gets special treatment in Congress, as one of the only legislative processes not subject to the usual filibuster rules which end up de facto requiring 60 votes in the Senate for anything to pass. Instead, the “big, beautiful bill” will only require a simple majority vote — although it will struggle to even get out of the House given that Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford to lose 3 votes on the measure and his caucus is deeply divided, from members who fear the cuts are so drastic that their constituents might actually notice (even amidst all the shiny squirrels so conveniently pointed out by Trump), to members who believe the cuts don’t go far enough.

Nevermind that the right-wing ideological shibboleth of trickle-down economics has never, ever worked in any of the ways they claim it will. The GOP can simply rely on the asymmetrical advantage they enjoy in the political arena — that their voter base does not seem to care about factual reality, preferring instead to live in the delusional fantasy world constructed over decades by the formerly conservative, now reactionary landscape of the right-wing media ecosystem and echo chamber.

However, financial professionals and investors around the world seem to understand just fine the implications of the Republican budget bill — causing Moody’s Ratings, the lone holdout amongst major credit ratings agencies, to downgrade the US sovereign credit rating a notch from the highest possible Aaa score we have benefitted from since 1917. Explaining their reasoning, Moody’s cited specifically the forward momentum behind this “big, beautiful bill” the GOP is intent on ramming through:

“If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case, it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade.”

“As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation,” Moody’s said. ″We anticipate that the federal debt burden will rise to about 134% of GDP by 2035, compared to 98% in 2024.″⁣

The Moody’s downgrade is yet another signpost along the Mad Max-ian fury road the Trumpists are travelling towards the careless destruction of the post-World War II order that has curbed the most violent and horrifying excesses of nation-states for decades. In this now daily collision between the MAGA fantasy bubble and the “reality-based community,” my money is on Reality as the best long game to back. Caveat credentis.