President Donald Trump’s signature legislation for his second term has moved one step closer to becoming law. Many Democrats have been sounding alarms about how it reshapes the social safety net, among other major policy changes, but a lot of people have tuned them out, Joshua Green writes. Plus: Investors are pouring in to Korean stocks, and toxic landfills are smoldering.

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You may have heard yesterday afternoon that Senate Republicans advanced their multitrillion-dollar tax and spending bill. Or maybe you didn’t.

While the tax bill—dubbed by President Donald Trump the “big, beautiful bill”—is the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda and appears to be headed toward final passage, millions of Americans aren’t even aware of its existence.

A June 27 poll from the Democratic group Priorities USA finds that an astonishing 48% of Americans haven’t heard about Trump’s landmark legislation, which stands to reshape broad swaths of US tax, health, nutrition, immigration and energy policy.

The bill includes:

• A massive tax cut geared mainly toward the rich, which the Congressional Budget Office says will add almost $3 trillion to the deficit in the next decade.
• More than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid spending and nutrition assistance programs for the poor and elderly, which the CBO estimates will lead to 11.8 million losing health insurance coverage.
• Cuts to hundreds of billions of dollars in support for solar and wind projects, as well as consumer incentives for energy-saving appliances and electric cars.
• Tens of billions of dollars for hiring thousands of Border Patrol and customs agents, building Trump’s southern border wall and adding the detention facilities necessary to carry out the president’s pledge to deport the estimated 12 million migrants living in the country unlawfully.

House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks at the Capitol on May 22, alongside other House Republican leaders, after the bill first passed the House. Photographer: Francis Chung/Politico/AP Images

For Trump and Republicans, it’s probably just as well that half the country is unaware of what they’re trying to do. That’s because, among those who do know about it, Trump’s bill is strikingly unpopular. A flurry of recent surveys finds opposition running about 2-to-1. A representative poll from the nonpartisan group KFF found 64% of Americans opposed the bill, including 71% of independents.

Although Democratic opposition isn’t surprising, KFF also found that 71% of independents and 27% of “MAGA Republicans” objected to it too. That group includes previously hardcore Trump cheerleaders such as Elon Musk.

Over the weekend, Musk revived his feud with Trump by calling the bill “a massive strategic error” that would cripple the solar and battery industries, empower China and “leave America extremely vulnerable in the future.” He warned its passing would be “political suicide” for Republicans.

Some of them agree. “Folks, Elon Musk is 100% right, and he understands the issue better than anyone,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina wrote on X shortly before voting against the bill in the Senate.

Unfortunately for Musk and Tillis, most Republicans lawmakers either support the bill or are too cowed by Trump’s threats to risk voting against it. As if to underscore this point, Tillis announced on Sunday that he’s retiring.

On Tuesday, the bill passed the Senate 51-50, with a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance. It now heads to the House, where the typical pattern is for a handful of GOP members to loudly voice their opposition, before ultimately submitting to the president’s will in the final hour.

Democrats hold out hope that they can sound the alarm and halt the bill’s passage before Trump’s preferred July 4 deadline. Liberal groups like Indivisible have launched campaigns to bombard Republican lawmakers with phone calls beseeching them to “oppose Trump's Medicaid-Slashing, Billionaire-Enriching Megabill,” while prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton try to amplify their message on social media.

But many Americans in the second Trump era seem to be tuning out politics, especially messages from a Democratic Party that surveys show has lost credibility, even among its supporters. A March poll by the liberal group Data for Progress found that 44% of left-leaning voters would give the party a “D” or “F” grade for its handling of Trump. And support among the broader electorate isn’t any better. In April, Gallup found that confidence in Democratic congressional leadership had fallen to 25%—an all-time low.

Unlike Trump’s first term, which featured waves of Resistance marches and wall-to-wall cable news coverage, public opposition to Trump this time around is more muted and television ratings are down.

There are still anti-Trump protest marches, such as the recent No Kings gatherings. But they haven’t managed to convey the specifics of Trump’s big legislative package. The Priorities USA poll found that only 8% of Americans could name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill.

As Republicans mount their final push to get Trump’s bill across the finish line, they’re fortunate to be facing such lackluster opposition. The next big question they’ll have to face is whether that will still be true in November 2026 when the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have started to kick in and voters head to the polls for the midterms.

RELATED: SNAP Cuts in Big Tax Bill Will Hit a Lot of Trump Voters Too

NEW ON ELON, INC.: Joshua Green joins host David Papadopoulos to discuss the predictable second round of Elon Musk’s feud with Donald Trump and why there isn’t a huge constituency for a third party. Listen and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart and the Bloomberg Terminal.

In Brief

• Sean “Diddy” Combs was acquitted on Wednesday of racketeering and sex trafficking, but convicted on lesser charges of transporting prostitutes. Previously in Businessweek: The Downfall of Diddy Inc.
• The Trump administration is halting the transfer of artillery rounds and air defenses to Ukraine, depriving the country of much-needed weapons.
• Manhattan home sales in the second quarter were stronger than they’ve been in almost two years, boosted by cash buyers.

Behind South Korea’s Rally

Illustration: Saratta Chuengsatiansup for Bloomberg Businessweek

Even as the K-pop heartthrobs of BTS wrap up their military service and plot their return to arenas worldwide, the hottest thing in South Korea lately has been its stock market. Global investors poured almost $3 billion into Korean equities in May and June, propelling the country’s benchmark index up about 28% in the first half of the year, trailing globally only Slovenia’s blue-chip index, a gauge of Zambian equities and a basket of 20 Polish stocks.

It’s a dramatic turnaround for a place that’s undergone huge political and economic turmoil in recent months: a declaration of martial law (rescinded hours later), a presidential impeachment and removal from office, and Donald Trump’s 10% tariffs—scheduled to jump to 25% on July 9—which threaten to wreak havoc on export juggernauts such as Hyundai, LG and Samsung. Despite those hurdles and the global malaise stemming from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, investors are piling into Korean stocks because, they say, the country’s business culture is poised for a sharp transformation. “Such movements are unstoppable once they start,” says Kim Ki Baek, a portfolio manager at Korea Investment Management Co.

Investors have flocked in, Youkyung Lee and Sangmi Cha write, as the new president looks likely to take up long-awaited reforms: South Korea’s Stock Market Is Having a Moment

Landfills Are Overheating

Source: Shutterstock

Last year, Brandi Howse’s annual mammogram returned a grim diagnosis: Stage 3 breast cancer. To save her life, she had her breasts removed, then her ovaries. She’s free of the disease now and continues to take medication. It was all a particular shock, says Howse, who is 50, because her mammogram the year before had been clean. Several of her neighbors on Lincoln Avenue in Val Verde, California, have similar stories of cancers, autoimmune disorders or heart problems that seemed to come out of nowhere. She and her neighbors say they can’t be sure of the cause, but given the number of people who are sick in their community of about 3,000, they have a guess.

Hidden behind a foothill about 500 yards from Howse’s front door, on the northwest edge of Los Angeles County, sits Chiquita Canyon Landfill, one of America’s largest repositories of municipal waste. While the landfill has often seemed on the verge of closure, it’s grown by more than 200% over the quarter-century Howse has lived nearby. For a lot of those years, things seemed OK. The truck traffic could be annoying, pungent odors would sometimes waft into town. But that felt like more of a nuisance than a crisis until the spring of 2023, when a new level of smell settled in.

The smell has persisted with no simple solution, because what’s driving it is something buried beneath the waste: a complex and dangerous chemical reaction whose very nature is in dispute. The state suspects garbage is smoldering underground.

Laura Bliss and Rachael Dottle write that landfills around the US have been reaching scorching temperatures, and neighbors have been getting sick: America’s Hot Garbage Problem

Big Tent

Highway Robbery

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