Although it’s a four-year term, the president of the United States has only about one year to get anything done.

In the second year, all members of the House and a third of the Senate are up for reelection and some might face contested primaries. In the president’s party, courage will be in short supply.

But when a president is freshly elected, especially if the voters delivered a mandate, it’s more difficult for members of the president’s party to tell him to get lost. It’s extra difficult if the president has recently survived being shot.

So President Trump is at his maximum power right now, but Republicans have only a razor-thin majority in the House and Senate, barely any votes to spare. Here’s the challenge: Can Trump deliver on the key campaign promises that got him elected, while maneuvering the opposition party into the most unfavorable political position possible before the midterm elections next year? How?

Speaking of extra difficult, Trump has had to fight two opposition parties at the same time ever since he mowed down a double row of establishment Republicans in the 2016 primaries.

That’s the context for the battle over the One Big Beautiful Bill, which squeaked out of the House by one vote and now needs the approval of 51 members of the U.S. Senate.

Usually a bill needs 60 votes in the Senate to pass, because it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster. But the One Big Beautiful Bill is different. It’s a “budget reconciliation” bill that, under Senate rules, can’t be filibustered. The catch is that the same rules limit what types of provisions can be in the bill. For example, the “no tax on Social Security” campaign promise couldn’t be fulfilled in a budget reconciliation bill. For now, Trump and his team substituted a $4,000 tax deduction for Social Security income for low- and middle-income seniors.

But the One Big Beautiful (budget reconciliation) Bill does fulfill a long list of other campaign promises, including “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime.” It makes car loan interest deductible for American-made vehicles. It funds the construction of the border wall, and border security generally, with $140 billion and includes another $150 billion for defense spending focused on drones. It reduces taxes on small businesses. It boosts American energy production by easing permitting and leasing for oil and gas, while repealing Green New Deal-ish tax credits.

The bill attempts to cut fraud and abuse in the Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) programs, claiming about $900 billion in savings over 10 years. It increases tax benefits for families with children, including establishing “Trump accounts” for newborns that will be seeded with a $1,000 contribution from Uncle Sam. There’s also an increase in the estate tax exemption to $15 million, and an increase in the limit on the deduction for state and local taxes to $40,000 for incomes under $500,000.

Most significantly, the One Big Beautiful Bill permanently extends the lower tax rates in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which were set like a time bomb to expire after 10 years.

That’s what has caused all the bad publicity for the bill. The time-bomb feature means the Congressional Budget Office can assume in its “scoring” that taxes will go up after the 2017 tax cuts expire.

That assumption leads to the conclusion that the One Big Beautiful Bill increases the deficit, because without the bill, taxes would go up. Quite a lot. And the government would have all that revenue, lowering the deficit.

That’s the premise on which the CBO and its many friends in the think-tank community have analyzed the bill: More of your money going to the government is good for the budget.

But if you’re a taxpayer with your electricity bill sitting on the kitchen table waiting for this week’s Mega Millions drawing, you have every right to open the window and scream that lower tax rates are not “pork.”

Tell it to Elon Musk, who denounced “the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK” in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Yes, there’s $15 million for “feral swine eradication,” $10 million each for Everglades and Chesapeake Bay conservation and $256.6 million for the Kennedy Center, but these are relatively small outlays. The big “spending” item in the bill is $184.2 billion for “no tax on overtime,” a tax reduction for people who work long hours at their jobs.

The highly publicized Trump-Musk blow-up on Thursday was supposedly about Musk’s fury over the lack of spending cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, but maybe it wasn’t really.

The object of the One Big Beautiful Bill is to get most of Trump’s agenda for the country accomplished in the first critical year, without being stopped by a Senate filibuster and before the impending 2026 elections overtake the attention of Congress. It’s only because of the Senate’s “budget reconciliation” rules that reductions in discretionary spending can’t be included in this bill. The White House budget office has already sent the first package of proposed cuts, called “rescissions,” to Capitol Hill to formalize $9.4 billion in spending reductions identified by DOGE. By the way, rescission bills are also exempt from filibusters.

The high-profile volley of flaming insults between Trump and Musk on Thursday had the definite feel of professional wrestling, of which Trump is a well-known fan. Last October, two weeks before the presidential election, he made a three-and-a-half-minute entrance to a Michigan rally while the funereal theme music of 1990s World Wrestling Entertainment star The Undertaker boomed from massive speakers.

The fight with Musk may have been produced like a reality show to pull attention away from something else, or to set the stage for the rest of the budget battle ahead.

Meanwhile, Democrats have been maneuvered into a 2026 platform of reversing border security and opposing tax cuts for working people.

Watch. Trump will be the first president ever to win an Emmy for the midterms.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley