Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on Sunday that he would support President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ if the debt ceiling hike was removed.

Paul told CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ host Margaret Brennan that he and three other Republican senators will hold out against the bill unless it is modified. 

‘I think there are four of us at this point, and I would be very surprised if the bill at least is not modified in a good direction,’ Paul said. 

‘I want the tax cuts to be permanent. But at the same time, I don’t wanna raise the debt ceiling five trillion,’ he continued, adding, ‘The GOP will own the debt once they vote for this.’

Trump on Saturday warned Paul would be ‘playing right into the hands of the Democrats’ if he votes against the bill.

‘If Senator Rand Paul votes against our Great, Big, Beautiful Bill, he is voting for, along with the Radical Left Democrats, a 68% Tax Increase and, perhaps even more importantly, a first time ever default on U.S. Debt,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday afternoon. 

‘Rand will be playing right into the hands of the Democrats, and the GREAT people of Kentucky will never forgive him! The GROWTH we are experiencing, plus some cost cutting later on, will solve ALL problems. America will be greater than ever before!’

Next week, Senate Republicans will get their turn to parse through the colossal package and are eying changes that could be a hard sell for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who can only afford to lose three votes.

Congressional Republicans are in a dead sprint to get the megabill — filled with Trump’s policy desires on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt — onto the president’s desk by early July.

Fox News Digital’s Brie Stimson and Alex Miller contributed to this report.

White House Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett says he remains ‘very, very confident’ that courts will support President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda.

Hassett made the statement during a Sunday morning appearance on ABC’s ‘This Week,’ telling host George Stephanopoulos that the White House still expects ‘Plan A’ to work out.

‘And so we’re very thrilled. We are very confident that the judges would uphold this law. And so I think that that’s Plan A, and we’re very, very confident that Plan A is all we’re ever going to need,’ Hassett said.

‘But if, for some reason, some judge were to say that it’s not a national emergency when more Americans die from fentanyl than have ever died in all American wars combined, that’s not an emergency that the president has authority over – if that ludicrous statement is made by a judge somewhere, then we’ll have other alternatives that we can pursue as well to make sure that we make American trade fair again,’ he added.

Hassett’s appearance comes after a federal court struck down Trump’s tariffs in a ruling last week, only for an appeals court to issue a temporary stay protecting the tariffs during litigation.

The appeals court ruling paused a decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT), thus allowing Trump to continue to enact the 10% baseline tariff and the so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ that he announced April 2 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA. 

The CIT had ruled unanimously to block the tariffs the day before.

Members of the three-judge panel who were appointed by Trump, former President Barack Obama and former President Ronald Reagan, ruled unanimously that Trump had overstepped his authority under IEEPA.

They noted that, as commander in chief, Trump does not have ‘unbounded authority’ to impose tariffs under the emergency law.

For now, the burden of proof shifts to the government, which must convince the court it will suffer ‘irreparable harm’ if the injunction remains in place, a high legal standard the Trump administration must meet.

Fox News’ Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report

House Republicans eked out a win in May with their advancement of President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ filled with negotiations and compromises on thorny policy issues that barely passed muster in the lower chamber.

Next week, Senate Republicans will get their turn to parse through the colossal package and are eying changes that could be a hard sell for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who can only afford to lose three votes.

Congressional Republicans are in a dead sprint to get the megabill — filled with Trump’s policy desires on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt — onto the president’s desk by early July.

Trump has thrown his support behind the current product, but said during a press conference in the Oval Office on Friday that he expected the package to be ‘jiggered around a little bit.’

‘It’s going to be negotiated with the Senate, with the House, but the end result is it extends the Trump tax cuts,’ he said.

‘If it doesn’t get approved, you’ll have a 68% tax increase,’ the president continued. ‘You’re going to go up 68%. That’s a number that nobody has ever heard of before. You’ll have a massive tax increase.’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has an identical margin to Johnson, and will need to cultivate support from a Senate GOP that wants to put its own fingerprints on the bill.

Senators have signaled they’d like to make changes to a litany of House proposals, including reforms to Medicaid and the timeline for phasing out green energy tax credits, among others, and have grumbled about the hike to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap pushed for by moderate House Republicans.

Thune said many Republicans are largely in favor of the tax portion of the bill, which seeks to make Trump’s first-term tax policy permanent, and particularly the tax policies that are ‘stimulative, that are pro-growth, that will create greater growth in the economy.’

Much of the debate, and prospective tweaks, from the upper chamber would likely focus on whether the House’s offering has deep enough spending cuts, he said.

‘When it comes to the spending side of the equation, this is a unique moment in time and in history where we have the House and the Senate and the White House and an opportunity to do something meaningful about controlled government spending,’ Thune said.

The House package set a benchmark of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.

Some in the Senate GOP would like to see that number cranked up marginally to at least $2 trillion, largely because the tax portion of the package is expected to add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit, according to recent findings from the Joint Committee on Taxation.

‘There’s just so many great things in this bill,’ Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. ‘The only thing I would like to do is try to cut the spending, and I would love to take a little bit from a lot of places, rather than a lot from just one place.’

Others, like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., want to see the cuts in the package return to pre-pandemic spending levels, which would amount to roughly a $6 trillion slash in spending.

Johnson has remained unflinching in his opposition to the current bill, and warned that ‘no amount of pressure’ from Trump could change his mind.

‘President Trump made a bunch of promises,’ Johnson said at an event in Wisconsin on Wednesday. ‘My promise has been, consistently, we have to stop mortgaging our children’s future. OK, so I think there are enough [Republicans] to slow this process down until the president, our leadership, gets serious about returning to a pre-pandemic level.’

Others are concerned over the proposed slashes to Medicaid spending, which congressional Republicans have largely pitched as reform efforts designed to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the program used by millions of Americans.

The House package would see a roughly $700 billion cut from the program, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and some Senate Republicans have signaled that they wouldn’t support the changes if benefits were cut for their constituents.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., warned in an op-ed for The New York Times last month that cutting benefits was ‘both morally wrong and politically suicidal.’ Meanwhile, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, raised concerns about what proposed cuts to the program would do to rural hospitals in her state. 

‘I cannot support proposals that would create more duress for our hospitals and providers that are already teetering on the edge of insolvency,’ she said. 

President Donald Trump shared a post on social media this weekend claiming that President Joe Biden died in 2020 and was replaced with clones.

Trump shared a link to the post from his personal account on Truth Social on Saturday. The post originated from a small account on the platform responding to discussions about Biden’s health.

‘There is no Joe Biden – executed in 2020,’ the post says. ‘Biden clones, doubles and robotic engineered soulless, mindless entities are what you see.’

‘Democrats don’t know the difference,’ it adds, before listing a litany of hashtags.

Trump added no words of his own to the post, merely sharing the link on his personal account.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Trump shared several links to Truth Social posts without offering his own commentary Saturday night. Most of the posts detailed Trump’s efforts to return steel manufacturing to the U.S.

The Saturday post comes amid new controversy over Biden’s health while in office. Speculation has exploded in the days since Biden announced he has stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer, a diagnosis that typically takes years to develop.

The nature of the diagnosis has led to speculation that members of the previous administration were aware of the cancer but withheld information about it from the public, even as they attempted to run Biden for a second term.

Trump said he and first lady Melania Trump were ‘saddened’ to learn of Biden’s diagnosis and wished him a ‘fast and successful recovery’ in a post on social media this weekend.

‘Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis,’ Trump wrote. ‘We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.’

With the early moves heating up in the 2026 battle for the House majority, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) chair argues President Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate are ‘doing incredible damage to working families and to our country.’

And with the GOP defending a razor-thin majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, Rep. Suzan DelBene, the DCCC chair, noted, ‘We only need three more seats.’

‘We have 35 districts in play across the country where we have opportunities,’ DelBene said in a Fox News Digital interview last week in the nation’s capital, pointing to the Republican-held seats the DCCC is targeting.

‘We are on offense. We are fighting for the American people and for the important issues they care about, and Democrats are united in doing that.’

While the party in power after a presidential election — currently the GOP — typically faces political headwinds and loses House seats in the following midterms, the 2026 map appears to favor Republicans.

‘The battlefield is really laying out to our advantage. There are 14 Democrats who won seats also carried by Donald Trump. There are only three Republicans in seats that were carried by [former Vice President] Kamala Harris. So, that tells me we’re going to be on offense,’ Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) chair, told Fox News Digital at the start of the 2026 cycle.

DelBene countered that ‘the reason we have opportunities is because people are outraged, because they do want to see someone come into office who is going to fight for their communities and not just be blindly loyal to a president.’

And pointing to the small bite House Democrats took out of the GOP’s majority in the 2024 elections, she added that ‘those are the types of candidates that won in our districts last cycle. It’s a reason we actually gained seats in 2024 and is absolutely the reason why we’re going to take back the majority in 2026.’

But Hudson noted he has a powerful ally as he works to keep control of the House.

‘The president understands that he’s got to keep the House majority in the midterm so that he has a four-year runway instead of a two-year runway to get his agenda enacted,’ Hudson said. ‘He’s been extremely helpful to us, and we appreciate it.’

And the Democrats are facing a polling dilemma because the party’s ratings have been sinking to historic lows in a number of national surveys so far this year.

The Democrats’ ratings in a Fox News poll stood at 41% favorable and 56% unfavorable in a survey conducted April 18-21.

That’s an all-time low for the Democrats in Fox News polling. And for the first time in a decade, the party’s standing was lower than that of the GOP, which stood at 44% favorable and 54% unfavorable.

The figures were reversed last summer, when Fox News last asked the party favorability question in one of its surveys.

But there is a silver lining for the Democrats.

The Fox News poll indicated that if the 2026 midterm elections were held today, 49% of voters would back a generic Democrat in their congressional district, with 42% supporting the generic Republican candidate.

The Democrats also have another problem — the possibility of primary challenges against longtime and older House lawmakers in safe blue districts.

Recently elected Democratic National Committee (DNC) Vice Chair David Hogg last month pledged to spend millions of dollars through his outside political group to support primary challenges against what he termed ‘asleep at the wheel’ House Democrats who he argued have not been effective in pushing back against Trump.

The move by the 25-year-old Hogg, a survivor of the shooting seven years ago at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida, to spend money against fellow Democrats ignited a firestorm within the party.

In response, DelBene said, ‘Democrats across the country are united in taking back the House.’

Asked by Fox News if the move by Hogg would force the DCCC and allied super PACs to divert money and resources from competitive districts in order to defend incumbents in safe blue districts from primary challenges, DelBene responded, ‘I think everyone knows how important it is that we take back the House, and folks are focused in helping make sure that we do that in districts all across the country.’

But the dispute is giving the GOP ammunition.

In response to the intra-Democratic Party feud, NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella argued, ‘No Democrat is safe. A political earthquake is underway, and the old guard is scrambling.’