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Foreign. 20:26 Late yesterday, Republicans in the Senate released their funding request for the budget reconciliation bill. It includes $1 billion for White House security, including Trump's proposed ballroom. President Donald J. Trump unexpectedly began the process of knocking down the East Wing of the White House on Oct. Oct. 20, 2025, just two days after millions of Americans turned out for the Oct. 18 no Kings rallies. Days later, Trump told reporters that the cost of the ballroom he intended to build on the site would be paid 100% by me and some friends of mine. At the time, he claimed the ballroom was necessary because presidents needed more space to host events. Since the incident of the White House Correspondents Dinner, the White House has emphasized the need for the space for security reasons. In response, Republicans proposed a measure that appropriated $400 million to build a secure ballroom. And now Republicans are advancing a measure that will appropriate $1 billion in taxpayer money for Trump's ballroom. They are doing so through budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered and so can pass the Senate with no Democratic votes. The bait and switch of the ballroom plans seems to represent the bait and switch of the Republican ideology since the 1980s. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised voters that he would restore their freedom by cutting taxes and slashing regulations. With the resulting boom in the American economy, he argued, there would continue to be money for the social programs Americans liked. Americans could have tax cuts and social programs both. In fact, Reagan's tax cuts required deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country, prompting calls for cuts to social programs in order to address the ballooning debt. Rather than create a rising tide that lifted all boats, as the saying went, the new system moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. And yet that theory still animates the Republican Party. Last July, with their budget reconciliation bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans extended the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee promised the measure would fuel an economic boom. Renewing the Trump tax cuts will be a huge boost to America's economy, leading to higher wages and more job creation, they said. Not a single Democrat voted for the measure. Among other things, Democrats noted its failure to extend the premium tax credits that enabled individuals and families to buy health care insurance on the Affordable Care act markets would mean Americans would lose health insurance and the slashing of about $186 billion in federal spending, about 20% of it from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over 10 years, would hurt Americans who live with food insecurity. The numbers are starting to come in. Last Friday, Reid Abelson and Margo Sanger Katz of the New York Times reported the conclusion of insurers and analysts that at least 20% of those covered by the Affordable Care act or Obamacare are dropping their coverage, with analysts expecting that number will continue to rise another 6%. Already, at least 5 million of the 24 million people who were covered last year have dropped their coverage. In Georgia, enrollment has fallen by more than a third. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month that the drop in coverage has come from the administration's crackdown on fraud. As Melissa golden of the Associated Press reported yesterday, there is a similar story about SNAP recipients. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins recently told the Fox News Channel that we have now moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program. A lot of that is fraud. A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn't have been, and a lot of it is just a better economy, so people don't need food stamps. In fact, as golden notes, experts say that fraud in SNAP is rare, with less than 1% of those who enroll disqualified from the program for fraud. People appear to have dropped off the SNAP rolls because the new rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill act made it harder to enroll. While Republicans don't intend to fund health care or nutrition programs, the Senate's proposed budget reconciliation bill appropriates $72 billion to fund immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE and Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for border patrol, through 2029. Extending the funding until then means that Democrats will not be able to use funding as leverage to try to reform ICE and Border Patrol after their aggressive sweeps targeting immigrants led to dramatic abuses, including the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preddy. In February, G. Elliot Morris, of Strength in Numbers, crunched the polls and found that reforms to ICE are extraordinarily popular. 92% of Americans want ICE agents to wear body cameras, for example, and 80% wanted an independent investigation into the killings of Good and Preddy. Morris noted that between 60% and 90% of voters, a super majority that includes Republicans and a majority of independents say they want transparency, accountability, rules and oversight for federal agents. Today at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump's White House advisor on border security, Tom Holman, assured Republicans that mass deportation is coming and that the administration will flood immigration officers into jurisdictions that aren't cooperative. Michael Williams of CNN reported that Homan told Republicans angry that the administration is not deporting enough people. You ain't seen s yet. This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming, he added. You're going to see more ICE agents than you ever seen before. The administration's disregard for the will of the American people also shows in its approach to its war on Iran. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the operation is over. Epic fury as the president notified Congress, we're done with that stage of it. We're now onto this Project Freedom the attempt to open the Strait of Hormuz. The 1973 War Powers act required the president either to get congressional approval for the war or to withdraw the troops within 60 days of notifying Congress of a military action. That deadline was May 1. Now, according to Rubio, the war is now in a different phase, opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump's military adventure. But Iranian officials have responded to Trump's Project Freedom with military strikes against both the vessels attempting the transit and other Gulf countries. This afternoon, Trump backed down. He posted on social media based on the request of Pakistan and other countries the tremendous military success that we have had during the campaign against the country of Iran and additionally the fact that great progress has been made toward a complete and final agreement with representatives of Iran. We have mutually agreed that while the blockade will remain in full force and effect, Project Freedom, the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the agreement can be finalized and signed.
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Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.