What’s in a name? Donald Trump, for whom appearances are everything, thinks it’s just about the only thing that matters. He called the single major piece of legislation associated with his second term “the One Big, Beautiful Bill,” a hokey bit of branding that his supporters on Capitol Hill promptly turned into the official name of the measure. There are signs that he does not know much about what’s in the $4.5 trillion megabill—during a last-minute lobbying session on Wednesday at the White House, Trump reportedly had to be reminded by a Republican member of Congress that the measure did in fact make major cuts to Medicaid despite Trump’s promises not to touch it. But the substance is never the point with Trump; the optics are.

So it was telling that the only victory on the floor that Democrats scored during the hours of drama this week leading up to Thursday’s final passage of the tax-cuts-for-the-rich, spending-cuts-for-the-poor bill was a last-ditch objection to Trump’s ill-fitting name for it. The Senate had just pulled an all-nighter to vote on an array of Democratic amendments to the measure—so many amendments, in fact, that, when the Senate took its forty-fifth vote on Tuesday morning, it broke its previous record for one of its so-called vote-a-ramas. All the Democratic-sponsored efforts to revise the legislation failed. But the Senate’s Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, insisted on one last symbolic complaint moments before the final vote was called: a parliamentary objection to Trump’s beloved name for the measure—which Schumer said was a violation of Senate budgetary rules. The parliamentarian agreed; the name was deleted from the official legislative text. “This is not a ‘big, beautiful bill’ at all,” Schumer told reporters soon after. “It is really the ‘big, ugly betrayal.’ ” And yet his parliamentary win could not have been more Pyrrhic; if there’s one thing Americans are likely to know about this sprawling bill, it’s not what’s in it—it’s the catchy title, which Trump and everyone else will continue to use. You’d think, after ten years, the opposition would have learned not to fight Trump on branding; you’d be wrong.

But this is not a story about the fecklessness of the Democrats. Essentially, their votes and their objections, no matter how vociferous or meritorious, did not matter. The bill’s passage on Thursday afternoon, just in time for the essentially arbitrary July 4th deadline that Trump had set for it, constituted not only a major victory for Trump but an illustration of the raw power he wields over today’s G.O.P. Indeed, on Wednesday night, when it looked for a few hours as though a handful of unconvinced Republicans in the House might actually have the votes to block floor consideration of the measure, it was Trump personally who demanded that they back down, and took credit when they did. “MAGA IS NOT HAPPY ,” he warned on his social-media feed soon after midnight. Before dawn, the win was his and the House had voted to approve the rule that would govern consideration of the bill. “What a great night it was,” he posted on Thursday morning.

As a matter of politics, the most notable aspect of the week’s rush to passage was the extent to which the bill prevailed despite the unresolved concerns of so many Republicans who publicly complained about everything from the huge increase in the budget deficit to the potentially devastating consequences of Medicaid cuts for rural hospitals—more than enough Republicans, in fact, to have sunk the bill in both the Senate and the House had those who objected to the measure actually voted against it. On Thursday, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, dedicated long passages in his speech opposing the bill—which lasted a record-breaking eight hours and forty-four minutes—to reciting the objections against it that had been raised by Republicans themselves. There were almost too many examples of members such as Keith Self, of Texas, who called the Senate-passed version of the plan “morally and fiscally bankrupt” and then went ahead and voted for it anyway. Even in the handful of cases where voting for the measure would seem to be an obvious case of political self-harm, many did so. California Republican David Valadao, for example, represents a district where nearly seventy per cent of his constituents rely on Medicaid for their health care. On Saturday, Valadao put out what seemed like a categorical statement—he would vote no, he insisted, if the Senate bill’s more extensive cuts to Medicaid were kept in the final measure. But, when they were, he still voted yes. Principle No. 1 for understanding the G.O.P. in the Trump era is recognizing that, in a choice between Trump and even a congressman’s most passionately professed principles, the default option is for the Republican to choose Trump.

There were many such examples of acquiescence on the Senate side, too—like that of the Republican Mike Lee, of Utah, who on June 18th warned, “the deficit will eat us alive if we don’t get it under control” and then, days later, voted to grow the deficit by trillions of dollars. As in the House, it was not that Republicans’ concerns had been assuaged but that their time to acknowledge what it means to be a Republican in Trump’s Washington had come. Swallow the bill, embrace the hypocrisy—or quit. Thom Tillis chose to quit. As in, give up his seat in Congress altogether. The North Carolina Republican had raised concerns about the trillion or so dollars in Medicaid cuts in the bill that many of his colleagues and Trump himself pretended did not exist or were, as J. D. Vance put it, “immaterial.” On Sunday, after declaring his opposition to the legislation and listening to Trump’s threats to bury him politically, Tillis announced that he would not seek reëlection next year.

The decision left Tillis free to make one of the more compelling speeches against the measure, though even then he insisted that Trump had somehow been “misinformed” about the cuts to Medicaid by the “amateurs” advising him and the harm those cuts would do—a line that reminded me of my time as a correspondent in Russia, with its long tradition of maintaining that the good tsar was never responsible for the bad actions of his courtiers. Still, Tillis could not have been clearer that Trump had broken his commitment. “It is inescapable,” he said, that “this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made.”

The decisive vote in the Senate was cast by Lisa Murkowski, who reluctantly supported the bill after Republican leaders made several concessions targeted at helping her home state of Alaska escape some of the consequences of the measure. With three other Republicans voting no, Murkowski could have singlehandedly sunk the bill; instead, she turned it into a 50—50 tie, which was then broken by Vance. Unlike some of her more ostentatiously pro-Trump colleagues, she did not pretend that she was happy about it. Indeed, it was Murkowski’s tormented visage after her vote that I will remember, along with the statement that she made, essentially disavowing the bill whose passage she had just made possible. She said, “While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it.” What’s more, she added, “my sincere hope is that this is not the final product. This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk. We need to work together to get this right.”

This is, of course, not what happened. She claimed to be voting for the bill with the hope that Republicans in the House would somehow have more courage than she herself had shown. Is anyone surprised that they did not? Barely forty-eight hours later, the House adopted the Senate version in its entirety. Minutes before it passed on Thursday, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, thanked a “bold, visionary, fearless President Donald J. Trump” for shepherding it to victory and then proferred Trump-style magical thinking to explain away the objections. “With one big, beautiful bill, we are going to make this country stronger, safer, and more prosperous than ever before,” he insisted. If he had answers to the qualms of his own members, on Medicaid or anything else, I did not hear them. It didn’t matter—in the end, of the dozens of G.O.P. lawmakers who had raised complaints, only two voted against it in the House—even fewer than in the Senate.

I’ll leave it to Tillis to offer a fitting epitaph for Murkowski, and so many other Republicans, who opted for the easy yes this week. Their spinelessness matters. A couple months ago, Murkowski made national headlines when she mentioned in an appearance back home the very real fear of retaliation that she and others felt when opposing Trump. “We are all afraid,” she had said. Is that the real explanation for her vote now? Even if it is, I found myself wondering, is it fair to privilege her fear over that of the many Americans she admits will suffer as a result? Trump is Trump, but without the Republican Party’s capitulation and active compliance, his reckless assault on American institutions and millions of its most vulnerable people would not be possible. A reporter for Punchbowl News asked the newly liberated Tillis whether there was room for disagreement in today’s Republican Party. “If you have the courage to,” Tillis replied. “And if you don’t, there isn’t.” ♦