In 2019, a group of New York condominium owners voted overwhelmingly to take Donald Trump’s name off their building. While the name Trump Place had once been a marker of status, his actions as president had tarnished the brand, especially in New York City, and they wanted to move on.
Congressional Republicans apparently know the feeling.
In a recent closed-door briefing, three top officials from the Trump campaign told them to stop referring to his signature accomplishment as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and instead call it the “Working Families Tax Cut Bill,” according to a New York Times article citing unnamed lawmakers who were at the meeting.
In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 46% of U.S. adults disapproved of what was described as the ‘budget and tax law passed by Congress’ while only 32% approved.
But it’s a lot easier to tear a sign off a building than it is to convince the public that it’s wrong about an unpopular piece of legislation.
And let’s be clear: This bill is a clunker.
In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 46% of U.S. adults disapproved of what was described as the “budget and tax law passed by Congress” while only 32% approved. What’s more, three times as many strongly disapproved as strongly approved. And in this and other polls, most of the favorable ratings are coming from Republicans, while Democrats generally hate the bill and only a fraction of independents like it.
In fact, the American public has generally been sour on most recent landmark laws, whether that’s the Affordable Care Act or Trump’s first-term tax cuts. That’s most likely because right now most of those bills pass along party lines, which predisposes half of the country to dislike them. The exceptions, such as the bipartisan infrastructure law or the CHIPS Act signed by President Joe Biden, were backed by both parties, but also tended to give little benefit to the incumbent for that same reason.
So what’s a political party to do? One solution is to pass a law that will actually help people, and then wait for them to come to appreciate it. That happened with the Affordable Care Act, which never really became popular until it looked like Republicans might repeal it, but it took years to get to that point.
In the case of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, there’s little reason to believe its standing will improve, even under a different name. Some of the provisions that might be helping its reputation — such as no taxes on tips or the Trump Accounts for newborns — are much smaller than advertised. The president has taken to claiming that another popular promise, no taxes on Social Security, is in the law, even though it is not, while other Republicans have led voters to believe they’ll be getting a DOGE dividend check or a tariff rebate check in the mail. (They won’t get either.) This sort of rebranding never works. But it’s definitely not going to work on 1) the single biggest piece of legislation of Trump’s second term that 2) he gave an especially memorable name and which 3) is not going to provide voters with many noticeable benefits. Trump’s campaign team likely knows this already. That’s why the president successfully lobbied Texas to take the unprecedented move of further gerrymandering its maps five years ahead of schedule. It’s why he’s pressuring state lawmakers in Florida, Indiana and Missouri to follow suit. And it’s why he’s already raising the specter of voter fraud to try to discredit any midterm losses his party will most certainly suffer. Many Republican incumbents are living on borrowed time. We don’t know yet how next year’s midterms will turn out, but it’s likely that the die is already cast against the GOP. The decisions that Trump has made so far to give tax cuts for the wealthy, levy broad and constantly shifting tariffs on just about everything and send immigration agents into schools and courthouses have already set in motion the forces that will determine next year’s elections, even if we can’t see all of them just yet. Trump can try to change the subject to crime in Chicago, Republicans in Congress can try to rebrand their signature piece of legislation, and GOP candidates can keep promising checks that will never come. But the public knows what they’ve actually done, and it’s not happy with it. No amount of carefully workshopped slogans will change that.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
