Trump celebrates passage of ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ at America250 kickoff rally
President Trump celebrated his just-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” Thursday as “a declaration of independence from a national decline” while kicking off a year of events going into America’s 250th anniversary.
Trump, 79, told a large rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds that the bill makes good on his major campaign promises to slash taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits.
“With this bill, every major promise I made to the people of Iowa in 2024 became a promise kept,” Trump said as he prepared for a Fourth of July bill-signing Friday on the White House lawn.
“We had a national decline. We were a laughing stock all over the world. We had a man as president who shouldn’t have been there,” he said.
“We really have independence now over the — if you look at it — the overtaxation, where we were being taxed out of our lives, independence from over-regulation, we have independence now from radical-left bureaucrats and independence from the largest alien invasion.”
Trump said his landmark legislation “includes the largest tax cut in American history, the largest spending cut in American history and the largest border security investment in American history.”
The bill also includes $25 billion for his Golden Dome missile defense program, $12.5 billion to modernize the air-traffic control system and $100 billion for border security and immigration enforcement.
“Very simply, the one big beautiful bill would deliver the strongest border on earth, the strongest economy on Earth, the strongest military on Earth, and ensure the United States of America will remain the strongest country anywhere on this beautiful planet,” Trump said, adding that, “165 days into the Trump administration, America is on a winning streak like, frankly, nobody’s ever seen before in the history of the presidency.
“This is going to blow the first term away. And we did great. We did great – we got great marks in the first term, and this is going to blow it away. This incredible national resurgence is happening just in time for the big events in the history of our country.”
The president praised House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) for doing a “great job.”
Trump’s wide-ranging rally remarks were punctuated by apparent fireworks – prompting the president, who was shot in the ear at a campaign rally last July, to exclaim, “Don’t worry, it’s only fireworks! I hope. Famous last words. My famous last words. ‘Trump said, Don’t worry, it’s only fireworks’.”
He veered back to joking about his decision to allow illegal immigrants to retain their jobs as farm workers so long as the facility owner vouched for their social qualities.
“If the farmers don’t do a good job, we’ll throw them the hell out of the country… we’ll let the illegals stay, and we’ll throw the farmer the hell out,” he kidded.
Trump said his two-week series of successes — including inking a peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and forcing a cease-fire between Iran and Israel after bombing Tehran’s nuclear sites – was made more remarkable by his shaky legal standing last year.
“Criminals on the other side … tried to put your president in jail and went after him, just like they do in third-world countries,” Trump said.
“They’re a bunch of bad people, but we kicked their ass and we’re going to continue to do well.”