The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 1 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Donald Trump has managed to drive Senator Thom Tillis out of the Republican Party. The North Carolina senator has been excoriating the Senate version of Trump’s big budget bill over its deep Medicaid cuts, prompting Trump to threaten him with a primary. Tillis reacted to that by announcing his retirement and continuing to speak out against the bill. It’s quite a telling moment: Daring to utter the truth about Trump’s policies apparently is now enough to get you pushed out of the GOP. Yet in key ways, this is already backfiring for Trump. It means the Senate may be more in play for Democrats—and that hasn’t shut Tillis up. Quite the opposite. We’re talking today about all of this with Timothy Noah, a staff writer at The New Republic and author of a good new piece on the epic lying that Republicans are employing to sell Trump’s budget bill. Tim, thanks for coming on.

Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: Let’s start with the reason Tillis got so angry. The Senate version of the budget bill is even worse than the House version. According to various analyses, in addition to adding $3.3 trillion to the national debt, the bill would result in over 11 million more Americans losing health insurance by 2034. It would cut $1 trillion from Medicaid. Tim, can you put the magnitude of that cut in context and explain it?

Noah: It’s the biggest cut there’s ever been to Medicaid. It’s about an 18 percent cut. And of course, the Republicans are running around saying it’s not a cut at all, which is one of many lies they’re telling about this bill. The Congressional Budget Office would beg to differ. They say that they’re cutting close to $1 trillion out of Medicaid and that there will be drastic reduction in those enrolled.

Sargent: Yeah, and the big reason for this discrepancy in opinions is that the Republican bill heaps a lot of work requirements and other bureaucratic impediments to getting Medicaid on recipients. Republicans just call that strengthening the bill because they say it’s just going after fraud, but the whole point of those things is to get people to get off the program. That’s why Republicans are able to point to it and call it “savings” to begin with, right?

Noah: Right. They don’t actually give a damn whether anybody actually gets a job. They just want to get people off the rolls, and throwing sand in the gears is a time-honored way to do it, specifically with work requirements. It works pretty well when you do it to food stamps too. And the budget analysts know this, so they make their calculations accordingly.

Sargent: Absolutely. So Tillis got furious about this because it’s going to mean hundreds of thousands of people in his home state of North Carolina losing health coverage. On Sunday, he shouted the following on the Senate floor, “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off Medicaid? Trump’s advisers in the White House are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.” That’s Thom Tillis. Tim, what’s striking to me about that is Tillis is saying straight out that Trump is getting scammed by his own advisers into believing that this bill doesn’t do what it actually does. Now, I think Trump knows perfectly well what it does, but still his advisers really are probably trying to scam him this way. Your thoughts about those quotes?

Noah: Yeah, well, there are a million ways that they’re scamming themselves on this. Josh Hawley is a counterexample to Tillis. Last month, he published an op-ed in The New York Times saying Republicans are committing suicide if they’re going to do these kinds of cuts to Medicaid. But over the weekend, he quietly signed off on the cuts and signed........

© New Republic