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WASHINGTON — After an overnight session and hours of floor debate, the House voted Thursday to approve the “Big Beautiful Bill” — clearing its final hurdle in a landmark achievement for President Trump, who wrangled Republican lawmakers to pass the most expensive legislation in history by the Fourth of July.

The 218 to 214 vote, which saw two Republican members side with the Democrats in opposition, was delayed by a record-breaking speech on the House floor by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that lasted eight hours and 44 minutes. “I’m going to take my time,” Jeffries said before launching into a marathon excoriation of the legislation, its Medicaid cuts and its Republican backers. “Shame on this institution if this bill passes.”

The bill encompasses Trump’s domestic agenda, extending tax breaks to millions of American households and businesses that are projected to add trillions to the national debt. The legislation also introduces new tax relief for senior citizens, tip and overtime workers, and new parents.

To offset a fraction of those costs, Republicans approved new barriers to access for Medicaid and cut funding streams under the Affordable Care Act, placing the healthcare of nearly 12 million in jeopardy over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food stamps, was also cut.

It has been a controversial bill within the Republican Party ever since it was conceived at the beginning of Trump’s second term, with fiscal hawks decrying its record contributions to annual deficits, and moderate Republicans fearing its cuts to healthcare would come back to haunt them in future elections.

Speaking with reporters after the vote, senior White House officials said Trump was the “omnipresent force behind the legislation,” crediting his personal relationships with lawmakers on the Hill for its ultimate success.

“I’ve lost count of the number of meetings the president has had,” one White House official said, adding that the bill “satisfies virtually every campaign promise the president made.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that Republicans defied the “doubters and the panicans” to secure passage of legislation that would “add funding for at least 1 million deportations per year.”

Beyond tax relief and healthcare cuts, the bill increases defense spending and adds a historic $150 billion to fund border security and mass deportations, exponentially increasing the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a fund larger than many national armies.

The president, Leavitt said, would host a “big, beautiful signing ceremony” Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern, marked by fireworks on the National Mall celebrating Independence Day — a deadline he imposed on the Republican caucus to secure passage of the legislation.

It also includes a host of parochial provisions. The bill provides $1 billion for security, planning and other costs for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, and $30 million for the construction of a sculpture-laden “American Garden of Heroes” to be built at an undetermined location.

In total, the Congressional Budget Office projects the bill could add up to $3.3 trillion to the debt by 2034. Republicans dispute the figure as inflated, arguing the CBO assumes status economic growth, while still other groups say the projection is conservative.

In a statement after the vote, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which has advocated fiscal responsibility for decades, warned the bill “would add more than $4 trillion to the debt, accelerate the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, and leave us even more vulnerable to the whims of the Treasury markets.”

“In a massive fiscal capitulation, Congress has passed the single most expensive, dishonest, and reckless budget reconciliation bill ever — and, it comes amidst an already alarming fiscal situation,” the group said. “Never before has a piece of legislation been jammed through with such disregard for our fiscal outlook, the budget process, and the impact it will have on the well-being of the country and future generations.”

And yet, despite issuing scathing criticisms of the Senate language for its historic contributions to the debt, opposition from the House Freedom Caucus, also founded to advocate for fiscal responsibility, all but melted away in the early hours of Thursday under intense pressure from the White House.

Several of the Medicaid provisions kick in only after the 2026 midterms, buying Republicans time to sell the bill without facing its real-world consequences before the next election. But Democrats are already campaigning against the legislation as the greatest attack on healthcare since Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, which prompted a Democratic wave in midterms the following year.

The legislation introduces a work requirement for Medicaid enrollment that will require extensive new paperwork for applicants, and restricts state taxes on healthcare providers, known as the “provider tax,” an essential tool for many states in their efforts to supplement Medicaid funding.

Several Republican lawmakers fear that provision could have devastating effects on rural hospitals. The Senate added a rural hospital fund to the bill to help mitigate some of the impacts of the funding cuts.

The bill also rolls back green energy tax credits that have fueled an entire manufacturing workforce in wind and solar energy in states across the country.

The bill passed through the Senate despite bipartisan opposition, with three Republicans joining Democrats to vote against it. House approval of the Senate text Thursday morning occurred barely 24 hours after the upper chamber’s vote.

On Wednesday night, a number of House Republican lawmakers had said openly they would not support a rushed process to approve the bill. But a floor vote on debate rules kept open by House Speaker Mike Johnson throughout the night kept conversations active, and ultimately swayed the holdouts.

Two Republican House members, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the final bill, citing its effects to the healthcare system and to the national debt, respectively.

“What a great night it was,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform before the final vote. “One of the most consequential Bills ever. The USA is the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, by far!!!”

In the call with reporters, one White House official also credited Vice President JD Vance for his efforts to secure a victory on the legislation, noting his huddle hours before a final Senate vote on Tuesday with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a lawmaker who secured exceptional carve-outs for her state in the bill and yet still expressed disappointment with its harshest provisions after voting to approve it.

Democrats will welcome the vice president receiving credit. Several expressed hope to The Times they can tie any successor of Trump’s to unpopular healthcare cuts in 2028.

“Well, Felix, this elects me.”

The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was at home in Albany with his friend and advisor Felix Frankfurter, monitoring radio reports of a political disaster unfolding in Herbert Hoover’s Washington.

It was 1932. Hoover had dispatched the military to break up a camp of World War I veterans who had massed to demand immediate payment of a bonus they had been promised for serving. News of the cavalry’s gassing and trampling of civilians — the slain including an infant born during the nationwide march of the so-called Bonus Army — would dominate the front pages and tar Hoover’s public image through the presidential campaign.

Flash forward 92-plus years to Donald Trump’s rally Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a bleak, lurid festival of racist hate and profane vituperation so vile that even fellow Republicans, who have turned a blind eye to Trump’s character for years, are distancing themselves from the event.

Their fear may be that with this heavily promoted event, the fundamental loathsomeness of Trump’s political persona and behavior may break through to the undecided voters he needs to win reelection.

The occasion evokes the line sometimes attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Mark Twain that “History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” For the attack on the Bonus Army and the Madison Square Garden rally share features that could bind them together as campaign turning points.

As Twain might have acknowledged, the comparison isn’t perfect — among other differences, the Bonus Army attack occurred on July 28, 1932, in the middle of the presidential campaign, while the Trump rally came only 10 days before election day and after early voting by mail and in person has already started in many states. Trump threatens to turning the military on American citizens to quell demonstrations; Hoover actually did so.

But the events do rhyme. Let’s take a look.

Start with the main characters. Hoover and Trump became president after winning their first campaigns for elective office, and both entered the White House as wealthy men. The similarities end there, however.

Hoover had made a name for himself in public service. During World War I he had served as chair of the Belgian Relief Commission, which shipped food to that German-occupied nation, and subsequently as head of the U.S. Food Administration, which aimed to keep food prices stable while the U.S. participated in the war. After war’s end, he became director of the American Relief Commission, which provided food relief to the war-torn countries of Europe.

Hoover served as Commerce Secretary for Warren Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge — in which role he oversaw the interstate negotiations that would clear the way for construction of the great dam that would bear his name. Trump’s public service prior to his election as president was nonexistent.

The two came to their wealth by different paths. Hoover was a self-made man, having earned a degree in engineering as a member of the first graduating class of Stanford University and making a fortune as a mining engineer. Trump inherited his wealth from his father, a real estate developer.

Hoover, like Trump, saw himself as a savior of the nation. “He has wrapped himself in the belief,” his secretary of state, Henry Stimson, wrote in his diary, “that the state of the country really depended on his reelection.” Trump often claims to be the only person who can save America from war and economic depression. Neither, obviously, saw themselves clearly.

On the Democratic side, Roosevelt and Kamala Harris were scorned by critics as intellectual lightweights, despite having had successful careers in government — Roosevelt as a New York state senator, assistant Navy secretary under Woodrow Wilson, and governor of New York; Harris as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. senator and vice president.

Despite that, FDR was disdained by former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as having “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.” Walter Lippmann, the reigning public intellectual of his era, deprecated FDR as “a highly impressionable person, without a firm grasp of public affairs. … A pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.”

Trump and his cohorts incessantly demean Harris as — to quote the ever-fading Tucker Carlson at the Sunday Trump rally — a “low-IQ former California prosecutor.”

The Republican Parties of 1932 and 2024 were fragmented entities when they nominated their presidential candidates.

Hoover had proven during his term to be a technocrat utterly without political skills. GOP insurgents (led by Harold Ickes, who would go on to serve FDR as interior secretary) had mounted a “dump Hoover” movement at their national convention; it collapsed for lack of a candidate to take up the colors.

Trump prevailed at the 2024 GOP convention, though not without challenges from candidates fearful of his lack of appeal outside a core right-wing base — former North Carolina governor Nikki Haley collected a strong 40% of the vote in a series of primaries, but not enough to carry her to the nomination.

That brings us to what might be the turning points in both Republican campaigns.

For Hoover, it was his response to the Bonus Army. This was a national movement for early payment of a stipend Congress had voted for veterans of the war at a cost of up to $4 billion — but which was not scheduled to be redeemed until 1945. Veterans could borrow from the government against their bonus certifications, but only at a high rate of interest.

As the Depression tightened its grip on the nation in 1931 and amid soaring unemployment and the spread of shantytowns of dispossessed Americans known as “Hoovervilles,” veterans began to gather in Washington, uncorking fears of civil disorder.

Among their targets was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was steadfast against early redemption. (Among Mellon’s grandchildren is Timothy Mellon, who is the largest individual contributor to the Trump campaign and other Republicans in this election cycle.)

The Bonus Expeditionary Force, as the Bonus marchers called themselves, originated in Portland, Ore., with an unemployed ex-sergeant named Walter W. Waters as its commander. They started to move east — “hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and babies … walking, hitchhiking, hopping freights,” as Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen reported in their 2004 book about the Bonus Army.

Most of the marchers fell away en route, but by the end of June a Hooverville-like camp housing as many as 15,000 bedraggled men and their families had sprung up in the desolate, muddy Anacostia Flats area of Washington. They were fed with donated food, treated at a medical clinic set up on the grounds, and mounted a series of marches to Capitol Hill, where a bill to accelerate the bonus payments to the present day was being debated. (It passed the House but was defeated in the Senate.)

Hoover and his aides became progressively more fretful about the settlement at Anacostia Flats, especially when its organizers began to talk about making it permanent. There was talk about its having been infiltrated by Communists and rumors of planned violence. Hoover decided early in July to have the marchers evicted and placed the responsibility in the hands of the Army chief of staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

MacArthur assumed the task of deploying tanks, bayonets and tear gas on fellow citizens enthusiastically, calling the camp residents “insurrectionists.” The prospect appalled MacArthur’s adjutant, 28-year-old Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who claimed later that he tried to convince his superior that the job was beneath his dignity. MacArthur rebuffed him.

On July 28, the attack began, including cavalry troops under the command of Major George S. Patton. Two veterans were killed in the operation and 55 injured. A 12-week-old baby died after being tear-gassed. The tent camp in Anacostia was burned to the ground.

The following day, Hoover issued a statement explaining that he had acted to prevent the government from being “coerced by mob rule.” He kept petulantly defending his actions to the end of his life. In his memoirs he accused the Democrats of distorting the event, implying “that I had murdered veterans on the streets of Washington.” He charged that the Bonus march had been largely “organized and promoted by the Communists and included a large number of hoodlums and ex-convicts.”

As it happened, Roosevelt as president was no more willing to pay the bonus early than Hoover and Mellon had been. In 1936, Congress overwhelmingly passed a measure to pay the bonus immediately — over FDR’s veto.

The ramifications of the Bonus Army attack live on. It set the stage for the creation of a vast administrative infrastructure of aid for service members and veterans, starting with enactment of the GI Bill, which paid for tuition, textbooks and supplies (and $50 a month for living expenses) to grant returning veterans a college education, making American society into a meritocracy.

The bill was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in June 1944, a couple of weeks after allied troops cross the English channel on D-Day.

It also stands as a warning for Trump that taking military action against civilians will inspire a massive public backlash, which in that case contributed — no one can say how much — to Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide defeat of Hoover just over three months later. Roosevelt’s presidency established a new principle in American politics through the New Deal, that government exists to succor all its people, not just the wealthy.

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