Donald Trump has spent the past three months battling activist judges who are trying to overturn his electoral mandate. Now, he must contend with a familiar group of obstructionists in his own party: self-styled deficit hawks in the libertarian wing of the GOP.

This small group of grandstanding renegades wishes to blow up Trump’s legislative agenda because, they argue, it perpetuates Washington, D.C.’s familiar problem of deficit spending. The critics now include Elon Musk, a man nobody voted for, who is burning up credibility with a petulant meltdown on the internet. He labeled Trump’s legislation, which delivers on the core 2024 campaign promises, a “disgusting abomination” and is urging Republicans to “kill the bill.”

Remember when President Trump said he would eliminate the $36 trillion national debt that took decades to pile up? No? I don’t either.

Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller is right to note that libertarian deficit hawks are imposing their own vision onto Trump’s agenda—which is a larger struggle than the (very real) problem of the national debt. Trump’s concerns go goes beyond fiscal concerns, to preserving the American nation from being eradicated by mass immigration. That effort, necessarily, is costly, but it is one which we must embrace at risk of losing our nation forever.

Trump has never pretended to be a deficit hawk above all other things. Trump campaigned for and won the presidency with an agenda that was openly budget-busting—including no tax on tips and the largest mass deportation in American history. These are expensive items and all of them are addressed in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Among other things, this bill provides billions of dollars to hire more immigration agents to power the deportation drive. Our efforts on that front, up until now, have been anemic. Without serious progress, we will end up living in a California-style oligarchy ruled by Democrats in perpetuity.

The bill also provides direct tax relief for seniors and for the working-class people Trump brought into the Republican fold. Moreover, it taxes the remittance networks that encourage illegal immigrants to break into our country, and send our money overseas. Simply put, this legislation—if not slashing deficits—will at least put cash back into the pockets of ordinary Americans, drive economic growth, and give America’s people a chance of taking their country back.

Yes, it does this without defusing the budgetary time bomb that has been ticking since radio was still our dominant form of mass media. Republicans have had 80 years to end the New Deal and have failed to do it. Trump has been president, between his two terms, for less than five years. The beloved Reagan, a man Republicans still worship, tripled the national debt.

The open secret is that neither party has the will to cut the largest driver of government spending, which is America’s social safety net. This is one reason why DOGE, for all its salutary work targeting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” made barely a dent in restoring fiscal sanity. We have an aging, sick population and a growing class divide that has left many people dependent on the government just to survive. Given these realities, nobody in Congress has the stomach to do what is truly needed. Congress has spent decades kicking the can down the road and there is nothing on the horizon suggesting that it is going to stop.

Even so, the BBB includes politically sensitive Medicaid reforms that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will result in 11 million losing health coverage. Republicans insist that only able-bodied people who are gaming the system will be removed, but one way or another, Medicaid is getting cut. At least 1.4 million illegal aliens who have access to Medicaid in Democratic states will lose their benefits. This is a significant step forward for public accountability, but nothing is good enough for professional performance artists who want Trump to embark on a suicide mission.

Trump did the hard work of winning the presidency, and he has a right to advance the priorities that he promised to the American people. He survived assassination and achieved a second term against all odds, completing the most remarkable comeback in modern political history. Compared to this, his critics have sacrificed little and yet, somehow, feel entitled to complain.

Fiscal hawks are calling attention to a real problem that nobody in Congress, including them, has any will to combat on the level required to eliminate it. One of the senators pushing back on Trump’s bill, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), blanked when asked directly what programs should be cut: “You have to go through every line of the federal budget,” he said. “You have to forensically audit over 2,600 federal government programs.” This open-ended kind of response does not tell us much, except that Johnson is stalling for time. Johnson also claimed these cuts would somehow not even “be noticed” by the public. It sounds like Johnson wants to play it both ways.

The debt, probably, has already reached a point of no return. But Trump has given Americans what may be the last chance to rescue themselves from permanent national dispossession. It’s time to take it.