The jobs report for June (and revision for May) came out this morning, and the topline was strong: 147,000 new jobs, exceeding expectations, and a slightly lower unemployment rate at 4.1 percent. May’s jobs numbers were also revised higher. While the numbers beat expectations, there are warning signs deeper in. Per Bloomberg:

Note that the average hourly earnings has slowed more than expected, with a 0.2% gain against the 0.3% forecast, and also the average weekly hours worked has dropped, to 34.2 from 34.3. So there are a few elements indicating a continued slowdown here. . . .

Slowing wages will not be good for the economy overall, and given private payrolls were the lowest since last October, it’s hard to see the market’s knee-jerk bear flattening to be maintained for very long.

We won’t really know if we’re in a recession until the advance estimate of Q2 GDP growth comes out at the end of the month. So far, we have mixed signals and are mudding through.

No Morning Shots tomorrow. Happy Independence Day and happy Thursday.

Don’s Way or the Highway

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump has two trusty tactics for getting his way: browbeating people who aren’t doing what he wants, and issuing cloying attaboys to people who are. What he isn’t particularly good at is ordinary human persuasion, convincing people that he sees and understands things from their point of view. Witness him pitching his Big Beautiful Bill to GOP moderate holdouts yesterday. Per NOTUS:

Trump still doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp about what his signature legislative achievement does. According to three sources with direct knowledge of the comments, the president told Republicans at this meeting that there are three things Congress shouldn’t touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member responded to Trump, according to the three sources.

Such argumentative masterstrokes as this, it seems, had their desired effect. Yesterday, a plethora of House Republicans were denouncing the bill they’d gotten back from the Senate, with Freedom Caucus types opposing its deficit-busting price tag and moderates bemoaning its trillion-dollar blow to Medicaid.¹ Today, one marathon overnight session and exactly zero changes to the legislative text later, nearly all those members shuffled meekly into line. The bill is likely to pass shortly after this newsletter hits your inbox.

It’s an appropriate way for the whole unseemly saga to end. At every step along this hulking monstrosity’s lumbering journey from conception to congressional passage, plenty of Republicans realized they were going to have huge problems with it—that it would be bad law in many ways, that it would violate many of their own promises to voters. Yet over and over, they found face-saving excuses to guide this monster into the world. Maybe they got a new pet policy included. Maybe House members thought the Senate would solve their problems for them, and vice versa. Maybe they just figured they’d get another swing at fixing the thing up nice later.

That’s how it always goes in today’s GOP. Lawmakers spend huge amounts of time and energy manufacturing fig leaves for their behavior, halfway plausible explanations for why they are taking a given action, promises (to themselves, mainly) that they’ll have more opportunities to fix things down the road.

But, eventually, those opportunities run out. Last night, as the holdouts demanded more time, Trump decided they’d had plenty. He wasn’t going to let the House get away with another round of face-saving amendments, which would trigger yet another round of voting in the Senate, with another possible round of face-saving amendments to follow there, and so on and so on. He had a self-imposed July 4 signing deadline to keep.

With his blessing, House Speaker Mike Johnson held a key procedural vote open all night, then got to work twisting arms. Every fig leaf was stripped away. There was no more opportunity to change the bill, no more opportunity to delay. And in the end, Republican holdouts realized that none of their bleating about bad policy and bad process changed the central reality: They’d get in line and vote for it, or Trump would squash them like bugs in their primaries. That was that.

One other point: If both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are to be believed, no Republican lawmaker was going to escape from this legislation without facing a bruising primary challenge. Like Jack Sprat and his wife, Trump was pledging to primary anyone who opposed the bill, while Musk swore he’d primary anyone who supported it.

There was a time, not so many months ago, when folks like us would speculate that Trump might be biting off more than he could chew in making a political alliance with Musk. Here, after all, was the richest man in the world, a man with an equally rabid (though considerably smaller) personal fanbase and a massive personal megaphone on X. If the relationship went sour, as seemed inevitable, Trump might be facing real damage.

At the time, this seemed perfectly plausible. Today, it’s laughable. Republican lawmakers know whose enmity they fear: They’d risk spiting fifty Elons before crossing Trump. Musk has been cast into outer darkness, nattering fruitlessly online about the need to stand up a new political party; Trump sits in the White House, serenely spitballing about whether he’ll have Musk deported one of these days. “We might have to put DOGE on Elon,” he told reporters this week. “So tempting to escalate this,” Musk