If you don’t have anything nice to say, just make something up instead.

That’s the strategy Republican politicians have adopted in hopes of selling their regressive, unpopular budget bill to voters, as an even harsher version of the legislation now makes its way through the Senate.

The One Big Beautiful Bill is already deeply underwater, voter-wise. Multiple polls now show that about twice as many Americans oppose the bill as support it.

This should not be a surprise, given that this legislation is effectively a mash-up of multiple past GOP initiatives that, individually, had each been among the worst-polling major bills in recent history.

For example, the OBBB includes tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy; when Republicans last did this, with their 2017 tax overhaul, the legislation garnered more opposition than support in virtually every poll.

The OBBB also includes a sort of backdoor Obamacare repeal by slashing Medicaid and other measures.

As battle-scarred Republicans might remember, their last attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act so enraged voters that the party suffered a watershed wipeout in the subsequent midterms.

If you combine these historically unpopular provisions — paying for regressive tax cuts by slashing major health care and other safety-net programs for the poor — of course voters will hate it.

Here, voters’ revulsion happens to be grounded in data (which, candidly, is not always the case).

As I’ve noted before, the OBBB could easily become the largest single transfer of wealth from poor to rich in U.S. history.

The Congressional Budget Office, the legislature’s nonpartisan scorekeeper, estimated that those in the bottom tenth of households by income would become about 4% poorer as a result of the bill.

By contrast, the typical household at the rich end of the income spectrum would become 2.3% richer.

Layering on other parts of the Trump agenda (such as tariffs, which also disproportionately hurt the poor) makes those numbers look even more regressive.

Those figures are for the House-passed version of the OBBB.

This week, the Senate introduced its own version of the legislation. Many moderate House Republicans appear to have been banking on the Senate making their legislation better — that is, less punishing for the poor through less draconian cuts to the safety net.

After all, some GOP senators, including Josh Hawley of Missouri, have warned that Medicaid cuts would devastate rural communities, home to plenty of Republican voters.

But that moderation and mercy did not arrive, at least not in this initial draft from the Senate.

“In some key areas, the bill is even harsher,” says Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an anti-poverty research organization.

For example, the red-tape Medicaid “work requirements” have gotten worse; they have been extended to more Americans, such as parents with teenage children.

As I’ve written before, Medicaid work requirements are a solution in search of a problem, as nearly all Medicaid enrollees are either already working or have a recognized exemption (such as a disability, caregiver status or full-time school enrollment). But the effect would be to boot millions of eligible Americans off their insurance anyway, due to added paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles.

Cruel, unpopular ideas from Republicans are a political gift to Democrats, of course.

So how are Republicans responding? Not by defending their agenda on its merits, but by lying about or misrepresenting what they plan to do.

For example, the CBO estimates that about 11 million people would become uninsured as a direct result of the bill.

Republican officials have responded by asserting: 1. no one will lose their insurance (a completely false claim from Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought); 2. don’t worry, only undeserving freeloaders will lose their insurance, not hardworking Americans like you (per House Speaker Mike Johnson, among others); or 3. hey, we’re all going to die anyway (guess you can’t argue with that take, via Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst).

Republican politicians have also repeatedly attacked the ref by impugning the integrity of the hardworking, independent professionals at the CBO. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claims they’re all in the tank for Democrats (the CBO is nonpartisan — and not that it should matter, but the current director held senior roles in the George W. Bush administration). Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) also recently criticized the CBO for forecasts it supposedly made … 50 years before it existed.

Elsewhere, some promotional campaigns for the bill wholly fabricate more palatable things the legislation doesn’t do.

For example, a national ad campaign from a GOP-aligned 501(c)(4) organization suggests the bill cuts taxes on Social Security benefits.

Trump did promise to do so on the campaign trail, but it’s nowhere in this bill. (Senate parliamentary rules make it hard to touch Social Security if lawmakers want to pass legislation with a slim margin, as Republicans are attempting.)

People can reasonably disagree about whether it’s wise to gut the social safety net in service of trillions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts.

But Republicans should defend that agenda, rather than singing the praises of a bill that doesn’t exist.

Email: crampell@washpost.com.