it. I don't think they're going to give Trump half or even three-quarters. Well, I don't think they'll give him a quarter of what he wants. I think that they will just kick the can down the road, add to the budget deficit, and lead us toward doom. I don't know what's going to stop it, but they're pretending to have this markup session in which they're going to do a bunch of good things. It's all theater. I just don't believe any of it.

But at least one subset of the Republicans — I guess this would be, I forget which group it is — but they're looking at steep cuts to Medicaid. And so I said to myself, what? Trump said no cuts to Medicaid. Why are they going to ruin his big bill and the biggest thing he said, which is no cuts to Medicaid? So it looks like they've got all these weasel freaking tricks to lower the cost of Medicaid by finding clever ways to deny it to people, basically. So one of the clever ways to deny it to people — now this is not a done deal. These are just proposals that we think we're going to see. One of them would be a work requirement. So you couldn't get Medicaid unless you were in school or doing some public service of some kind or working. And that alone would deny it to, they think, six million people.

So the Democrats will say accurately, "Wait a minute, you've just installed some clever trick to deny six million people Medicaid." Republicans will say, "All we ask is that they do something useful for the country so that the country can do something useful for them." It's not a terrible argument, but it's going to look like they cut Medicaid. So can Republicans survive that, an obvious trick to cut Medicaid? Because those people aren't all going to work. What are they going to do? Go to the hospital and still get medical care and have the hospital cover it. So there's that.

And then apparently the bill — and again this is just first drafts so it doesn't mean it's real — would require some beneficiaries to pay more for their care. I guess that would be income-based. And there were some other clever tricks in there. All of it just looks like pure weasel theatrics. I am completely disappointed in the Republicans. Just completely disappointed that to me the most important thing we had to get right was cutting the budget. It looks like nothing like that's going to happen because I don't think that Trump's going to sign off on something that definitely looks like cutting Medicaid. You know, you could argue all day, well, we have reasons. And no, no, no, we're not cutting it because anybody can get it. They just have to do some public service. But the bottom line will be the Democrats will accurately say he's cutting Medicaid for some people. It'll be a lot of people, millions.

I don't have a better idea, by the way, but it's their job to do the budget, not mine. So I think we're all going to be disappointed with whatever the Republicans have. I'm not even sure that they're going to have no tax on tips and no tax on Social Security and all those other things Trump wanted. I don't think he'll get any of that. I think that they're just going to say no on all of that. We'll see.

Apple is apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, thinking about raising the price of their iPhones but without blaming tariffs. Apple is kind of a clever company in terms of how they cover their public relations. They've always been good at it. But they don't want to blame China because that would be trouble. And they don't want to blame Trump because that would be trouble. So they want to raise their prices because of tariffs, but they want to make it look like it's not because of tariffs. So the only way to do that would be if you somehow added some extra features and you go, "Oh yeah, these extra features are worth a few hundred more." So we'll see what they do.

But my big question would be, what would Steve Jobs do in this situation? Would Steve Jobs be handling this completely differently in some out-of-the-box way that we can't imagine? I feel like he would, but of course I can't guess what he would have done because that's what made him Steve Jobs and we're not Steve Jobs. But I feel like he would have handled this whole tariff China stuff differently. I just don't know how.

Democrats are continuing their lame approach to politics. Now they've added to their oligarchs that they want to keep habeas corpus. Now if you were to do a survey of people on the street and say, "Are you a Democrat?" "Yes." "What's an oligarch?" "Well, I don't know." "What's habeas corpus?" "I never heard of it." So they're betting on words that their base doesn't even know what they mean. So I love this. Let's do more oligarchs and habeas corpus. If you can get them to talk about that all day long and then look at Trump: I cut your pharmaceutical costs. I freed a hostage. I'm going to bring a trillion dollars back in investments from the Middle East. What part of that don't you understand? It's just so simple.

And the