Lots Of Insane Ideas Flying Around At Alligator Alcatraz

President Trump and his entourage’s visit to Ron DeSantis’ new swamp-adjacent immigrant detention center — billed as a “one-stop shop for immigration enforcement” by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier — was about as unhinged and ghoulish as its name, “Alligator Alcatraz,” suggested it would be.

As I noted yesterday, DeSantis and Trump decided the opening of the new immigrant detention and processing facility was a good time to set aside their differences and come together on their shared goal of upending the lives of undocumented immigrants in increasingly humiliating and dehumanizing ways. The trolling is part of the MAGA schtick; a finishing glaze of social media-type trolling applied thickly to most of the Trump administration’s actions, an approach to politics that DeSantis has also successfully embodied.

Trump traveled to Florida with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday for the grand opening of the facility. The visit functioned as a photo op and media moment that Trump ended up using to propose a lot of insane ideas. Let me break it down.

Trump said he approved of DeSantis’ plan to use members of the Florida National Guard — those in the state’s Judge Advocate General Corps — to function as immigration judges in order to speed up deportations. DeSantis has reportedly been pushing this scheme for some time, according to the Miami Herald.
Trump then suggested at one point that CNN could be “prosecuted” for its reporting on at least two different storylines the administration didn’t like: its coverage of an app called ICEBlock that allows users to warn of ICE activity near them and its reporting on whether the Trump administration actually wiped out the facilities it targeted in Iran.
In response to a befuddling question from a reporter — it is unclear which news outlet this came from — about whether Noem’s predecessor Alejandro Mayorkas should be arrested, Trump instructed Noem to, essentially, investigate the former Biden administration official.
“Because what he did is, it’s beyond incompetent, something had to be going on,” Trump said. “Now, with that being said, he took orders from other people, and he was really doing the orders. Why don’t you take a look at it, Kristi? … Somebody told Mayorkas to do that, and he followed orders, but that doesn’t necessarily hold him harmless, so take a look at it,” he said.
To top it all off, he threw out the idea that he might have to arrest NYC Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani and potentially deport him. “We’re going to be watching that very carefully, and a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. … We’re going to look at everything.”

Musk Feels Bad

Amid his ongoing feud with President Trump about the contents of Republicans’ mega spending bill, Elon Musk is claiming to have some regrets about that whole DOGE thing.

At least, he claims to have some regrets about how cavalier he was in marketing his team’s lawless rampage through the federal government, as he shut down important federal programs and rescinded funds without Congress’ permission. Per Bloomberg:

Elon Musk is expressing some regret for waving a chainsaw to rile up the crowd during a conservative conference back in February, as his feud with Donald Trump over the president’s tax and spending bill reignites.

“Milei gave me the chainsaw backstage and I ran with it, but, in retrospect, it lacked empathy,” Musk said in a post on X, referring to the Argentine President who was on stage with him at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Murkowski’s Delusion

Much of Senate Republican leadership’s work in recent days — before the bill passed the upper chamber this afternoon — has centered around trying to get Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to “yes” on the megabill.

She — very justifiably! — has had concerns about the impact the Medicaid cuts and the cuts to federal nutrition programs like SNAP might have in her state. At one point, leadership thought they’d successfully secured Murkowski’s support by editing language in the bill that would shield Alaska from some of the provisions that will put states in the position of finding additional funds to cover the costs of Medicaid for their constituents. But the Senate parliamentarian rejected leadership’s changes.

In the end, it appears that Thune was able to get Murkowski to “yes” by working with the Senate parliamentarian to, among other things, revise the waivers for SNAP cuts to include 10 states with the highest payment-error rates. That, combined with the increased spending on the rural hospital fund and the removal of the tax on solar and wind energy projects, reportedly helped the Alaskan senator get there. A tax break for whale-boat captains, aimed specifically at the Alaska senator, also made the cut, per the American Prospect.

Murkowski ended up voting “yes” to help pass the bill.

After its passage she called the decision “agonizing” and acted naive about the very tight timeline her Senate colleagues and House Republicans are scrambling to meet. Her remarks also suggest a level of delusion about the stranglehold Trump, who imposed the timeline, has on the House Republicans conference.

MURKOWSKI tells reporters she wants the House to send OBBB back to the Senate to continue the work. She voted for it.

“My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” Murkowski said

— Brendan Pedersen (@BrendanPedersen) July 1, 2025

The devastatingly harmful bill now, of course, is back in the House’s court. It is unclear when House Republican leadership will bring it to the floor for a vote; first it has to make it out of the Rules Committee. At least two Republican members of that panel have expressed some qualms about voting it out of committee without changes.

How Did Senate Republicans End Up More Far Right Than the House?

An excellent point from my colleague Emine Yücel — who has for months been covering all the painful details of the reconciliation package, and the steps Republicans have taken to get it as far as they have:

I think it’s important to point out that not a lot of people expected the Senate to be the chamber that moved the reconciliation bill further right.

Republican senators included deeper Medicaid cuts and a quicker timeline for phasing out wind and solar energy tax credits. They also added significantly more — hundreds of billions of dollars — to the deficit compared to the House’s bill.

Usually it is the ungovernable far-right members, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, who end up tying to force these kind of extreme provisions down the throats of everyone else, relying on the slim majority Republicans hold in the House. But with Senate Republicans so focused on finding a way to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permeant, this time, the roles were switched.

You can catch up on the rest of our live coverage of the bill’s passage in the Senate today here.