A rush transcript of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" airing on Sunday, July 6, 2024 on ABC News is below. This copy may not be in its final form, may be updated and may contain minor transcription errors. For previous show transcripts, visit the "This Week" transcript archive.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC “THIS WEEK” ANCHOR: President Trump signs his tax and spending bill into law. A political win for him. What does it mean for you?

THIS WEEK starts right now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So, you have the biggest tax cut, the biggest spending cut, the largest border security investment in American history.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Congressional Republicans meet Trump's July 4th deadline.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE REP. MIKE JOHNSON, (R) LOUISIANA: We are going to make this country stronger, safer, and more prosperous than ever before.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Democrats predict the bill will spark a backlash.

HOUSE MINORITY LEADER REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES, (D) NEW YORK: I never thought that I'd be on the House floor saying that this is a crime scene.

STEPHANOPOULOS: This morning, Rachel Scott and Selina Wang on the details of the new law. Dr. Richard Besser discusses the impacts on American health care. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on the economy. Plus, the chair of Trump's Council of Economic advisers. And Chris Christie and Donna Brazile analyze the political fallout.

Tragedy in Texas. Dozens of people have died, an unknown number missing, including 27 children at a camp in central Texas after heavy rains bring devastating flash floods.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No one knew this kind of flood was coming.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Mireya Villarreal is on the scene in Kerr County, where first responders are continuing their search for survivors.

And, a journey through American history.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This one's from May 8, 1945, V.E. Day.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Martha Raddatz with the historian working to preserve hundreds of thousands of war letters, some going back to the American Revolution.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, it's THIS WEEK. Here now, George Stephanopoulos.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Good morning and welcome to THIS WEEK.

We begin this morning with the devastation in central Texas. At least 51 killed, search and rescue operations still underway to find the missing, including several children attending a camp hit by flash floods near San Antonio. Mireya Villarreal has the latest.

Good morning, Mireya.

MIREYA VILLARREAL, ABC NEWS NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, George, just to give you a little bit of perspective. I'm about five feet tall. And when the floodwaters came through here with all their fury, all its fury, it was about ten feet above my head. So powerful the cement slab I'm standing on, there was a house here. It is now about 20 yards from where it originally was. The fury, the destruction, the power of these floodwaters, very evident here. Just one example of what is happening all over central Texas.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

VILLARREAL (voice over): This morning, a new disaster declaration in Texas now including 15 counties following the catastrophic flooding event around the Guadalupe River.

DALTON RICE, KERRVILLE, TEXAS, CITY MANAGER: This was a massive tragedy, hands down.

VILLARREAL (voice over): Forty-three confirmed fatalities in the Kerr County area, 15 of them children.

In neighboring counties, eight more deaths linked to the deluge of floodwaters that hit this area early Friday morning, then traveling down river Saturday.

Juliet Weldon is salvaging what she can inside what's left of her home.

JULIET WELDON (ph), FLOODING SURVIVOR: We came out, and it was already raging.

VILLARREAL (voice over): Juliet and her husband were swept away. They held on to branches as they called 911 for help.

VILLARREAL: What's been the hardest for you?

J. WELDON: The hardest when you want to find people and you can't find people when you're calling for help and there's nobody. It’s -- where are they?

VILLARREAL (voice over): Crews eventually reaching the couple, pulling them to safety.

J. WELDON: He held me on --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, JULIET WILDON’S HUSBAND: We’ll ride or die together. I will never leave my wife.

VILLARREAL (voice over): More than 850 people rescued in the last two days. Officials now confirmed 27 young campers missing from Camp Mystic. Photos showing the devastation at the campsite. The beds in the cabins covered in mud and debris. Overnight, hundreds in Houston attending a candlelight vigil for the safe return of 10-year-old Greta Toranzo, one of the missing Camp Mystic girls. Another among the reported missing, Officer Bailey Martin of the Odessa Police Department. But officials hesitate to give out any additional information on any other missing people, shifting the tone of the mission.

JUDGE ROBERT KELLY, KERR COUNTY, TEXAS: We know we get rains. We know the river rises. But nobody saw this coming.

VILLARREAL: What makes you feel like this has gone from rescue to potential recovery, because there is a difference?

KELLY: We will eventually get to the recovery.

GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R-TX): My instruction to every state agency involved in this is to assume everybody who is missing is alive, and there's a need for speed, because they are -- they are looking to save every last life, and we will not give up that effort.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

VILLARREAL: Behind me, George, you can see the Guadalupe River, it is very much so calmer than it once was two days ago.

The water has, you know, receded considerably. So, today, we will likely see more emergency crews actually on the river doing search and rescue. Also people, volunteers, crews along the riverbank trying to search those debris piles that have been left behind for any of the missing.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Mireya, we're also learning that there were significant staffing shortfalls to the National Weather Service’s offices in the region.

VILLARREAL: You know, George, as of right now, the local county officials really didn't want to address that just yet. What they are telling us is they expected between four and six inches of rain. That is what weather experts told them. The National Weather Service as well. They also knew that in remote locations, they might get anywhere from eight to ten inches. But this amount of rain, in such a short amount of time, it was very difficult to navigate. And when the Department of Homeland Security Secretary was here just yesterday, she acknowledged this was an issue. She was going to take these concerns to the White House as well and try and see if there was anything they could do to revamp the system. She says the president is committed to it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Mireya, thanks very much.

Now to president -- to the president's tax and spending bill, which he signed into law on July 4th. The signature achievement, as Trump's second term reaches the six-month mark. This morning, we’re going to analyze what the bill will mean for America's health care, the economy and deficits.

We begin with senior political correspondent Rachel Scott.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ladies and gentlemen, our president.

RACHEL SCOTT, ABC NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): It was the most significant legislative win for President Trump yet.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And tonight, here I am, OK, promises kept.

SCOTT (voice over): On Independence Day signing into law the cornerstone of his domestic agenda.

TRUMP: It's the biggest bill of its type in history.

SCOTT (voice over): Reporter: Republicans celebrating the sweeping legislation.

PEAKER OF THE HOUSE REP. MIKE JOHNSON, (R) LOUISIANA: This big, beautiful bill fulfills all the promises in the America First agenda.

SCOTT (voice over): But getting it over the finish line took arm-twisting and deal-making. Hard-line Republicans initially bulking at the price tag.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projecting that the bill could add $3.4 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Senator Rand Paul joining just two other Senate Republicans to vote no.

SEN. RAND PAUL, (R) KENTUCKY: This is not a fiscally conservative bill. And if you're someone who thinks the debt is a problem, I don't see how you could vote for this now.

SCOTT (voice over): The bill fulfills some of the president's key campaign pledges, like no taxes on tips and overtimes, and it extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $4 trillion, much of that going to the wealthiest Americans.

TRUMP: Just as I promised, we're making the Trump tax cuts permanent and delivering no tax on tips, no tax on overtime.

SCOTT (voice over): The bill dramatically increases funding for immigration enforce, allowing the administration to nearly double immigrant detention capacity and allocating more than $100 billion to ICE and border enforcement.

JOHNSON: If you're for a secure border, safer communities and a strong military, this bill is for you.

SCOTT (voice over): It also guts Biden-era clean energy protections and student loan forgiveness programs. And the legislation may have far-reaching consequences for some of America's most vulnerable populations. That's because to pay for it all, the legislation slashes the nation's safety net, including the supplemental nutrition program known as SNAP. As of March, more than 42 million Americans participated in the program, which provides crucial nutritional assistance to families with low-paying jobs or people with disabilities.

And despite promises from the president not to cut Medicaid --

TRUMP: Here’s what I want on Medicaid. We're not touching anything.

But we're not cutting Medicaid. We're not cutting Medicare.

SCOTT (voice over): The legislation hits the program hard. Estimated to cause 11.8 million Americans to lose their health insurance over the next decade.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Make sure your voices are being heard.

SCOTT (voice over): Republicans claim they’re looking to rout out waste, fraud and abuse within the program, imposing new work requirements on able-bodied recipients 19 to 64. But according to experts, the added paperwork and applications may lead to eligible Americans losing coverage.

HOUSE MINORITY LEADER REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES, (D) NEW YORK: This all-out assault on health care in this country. Hospitals will close. Nursing homes will shut down. People unable to get the care that they need.

SCOTT (voice over): Even some Republicans calling it a mistake, warning it could backfire in the mid-term elections.

SEN. THOM TILLIS, (R) NORTH CAROLINA: It is inescapable that this bill, in its current form, will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made. You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.

SCOTT (voice over): For THIS WEEK, Rachel Scott, ABC News, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let's get more on the health care impact now from our former colleague, Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Rich, thank you for joining us this morning.

Your -- your organization said this legislation is going to devastate the U.S. health care system. Spell out why you believe that.

DR. RICHARD BESSER, FORMER CDC ACTING DIRECTOR & ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON PRESIDENT AND CEO: Yes, I mean, George, the -- the -- the -- the piece we just heard laid out some of that. This is the biggest cut to federal support to health care in history. A trillion dollars coming out of that, you know, and it will reverse generations of improvement we had been making in terms of getting people access to health care.

The Congressional Budget Office says that over 11 million people will lose access to health care.

I worked in community clinics for over 30 years, and in those clinics, some patients had Medicaid and some had no insurance. And I saw the struggle that people would make to determine, “Should I come in for my health care,” “Should I pay for my medications,” or, “Should I use that money for rent, to put food on the table?”

This bill will make it so much harder and will put so many more people in that position.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Defenders of the president's plan said that the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, as you just cited, has a history of overestimating the coverage cuts, and that most states will find workarounds to these work requirements.

How do you respond to that?

BESSER: Well, you know, we have an example. Arkansas tried work requirements -- the idea that anyone who should be able to work should work to get benefits. And what they found was that the number of people working didn't go up at all, but over 11,000 people lost their Medicaid insurance.

And it not only affects those individuals, which is bad enough, but rural hospitals across America depend on Medicaid dollars to stay in existence.

It's predicted that there could be hundreds of rural hospitals that close. Those hospitals are also a driver for businesses. Businesses don't want to move into a community with without a hospital.

There are so many repercussions of this bill. I don't know how someone can go back to their district and face the people who voted for them after they intentionally are causing so much pain and harm across our nation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Beyond the cuts on Medicaid, there are also some changes for -- to those who are covered by the Affordable Care Act and the overall impact on health insurance costs. What should we expect?

BESSER: Well, you know, this -- we all know that the Affordable Care Act wasn't the end game. We're the only wealthy nation in which not every person who lives here has access to health care, but the Affordable Care Act moved us in that direction.

But this does nothing to help people who have health insurance but are finding it too expensive. This makes it harder in terms of not providing people with the -- with the extra supplement to help pay for their insurance.

So, we're going to see more and more people who are not able to get the care that they need. And what that leads to is that people who were healthy become unhealthy and become unable to work.

People with disabilities, in particular, can be hit hard. One-third of people with disabilities get Medicaid and it helps keep people healthy with disabilities so they can work. That's going to be -- that's going to be a challenge with this.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How can organizations like yours fill the gap?

BESSER: Well, we can't. What we can do is work with others to put forward a vision of what should be. We should be a nation in which every single person has access to high quality, comprehensive, affordable health care.

We're going to be working on that. We're going to be putting forward that message. But we cannot fill the gap from what the government is doing.

And there's an assault on health care that's coming from all sides. You know, this bill is doing it to the health care system, to food support. We're seeing it with our secretary of health who's doing it to our vaccine system.

There are so many assaults. The National Institutes of Health, which is where our cures and future treatments come from, they're under assault.

You know, it's hard to pick one of these and philanthropy cannot fill those gaps, but we can use our voice to call out the concerns that we see for health broadly across our nation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Rich Besser, thanks very much.

For more on the budget impact of this new law, let's bring in our senior White House correspondent, Selina Wang.

Good morning, Selina.

SELINA WANG, ABC NEWS SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hey, George. Good morning.

When we talk about the massive debt that this would add to the existing debt, the concerns sound very abstract, but the consequences, George, are very real. Economists describe this to me as pouring gasoline on a house that's already burning because the pile is already so large.

So, the question is, George, why should Americans care?

Well, first of all, larger federal deficits. They tend to push up interest rates. So that means more expensive car loans, mortgages, and it crowds out business investment for more productivity and higher wages.

There are other risks here as well. The U.S. has long been seen as the gold standard, the safe bet. But the bond market did show jitters earlier this year. The fear is that if global investors lose confidence in the U.S.'s ability to pay back its debts, that we could reach a tipping point, which then would force us into painful austerity -- think very sharp tax hikes and very dramatic cutbacks to benefits.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, a week ago, you had at least three Republicans in the Senate, several more in the House, promising to kill the bill over concerns about deficits and the debt. What turned them around?

WANG: Yeah, George. Well, this is a pattern we've seen before where the fiscal hawks publicly decry something. They say they will not back it. But then President Trump puts on the pressure and they fall in line.

We know that President Trump was personally arm-twisting, cajoling, negotiating. We don’t know exactly, George, what kind of assurances they got. But senior White House officials say that there were questions about implementation and interpretation. But the bottom line here, George, is that they caved without getting changes to the bill text.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Selina Wang, thanks very much.

Want to get more on this now from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Also the former president of Harvard University.

Larry, thank you for joining us this morning.

In "The New York Times" this week, you and Robert Rubin, who also served as president -- as Treasury secretary, called this bill dangerous, said it “posed a huge risk to the economy.”

What are those risks?

FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY LARRY SUMMERS: George, just to start with, what your people have been describing is the biggest cut in the American safety net in history. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that it will kill, over 10 years, 100,000 people. That is 2,000 days of death like we've seen in Texas this weekend. In my 70 years, I’ve never been as embarrassed for my country on July 4th.

These higher interest rates, these cutbacks in subsidies to electricity, these reductions in the availability of housing, the fact that hospitals are going to have to take care of these people and pass on the costs to everybody else, and that's going to mean more inflation, more risk that the Fed has to raise interest rates and run the risk of recession, more stagflation, that's the risk facing every middle-class family in our country because of this bill.

And for what? A million dollars over 10 years to the top tenth of a percent of our population. Is that the highest priority use of federal money right now? I don't think so. This is a shameful act by our Congress and by our president that is going to set our country back.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Part of the president's argument is that economic growth sparked by the bill will alleviate the dangers that you talk about here. The chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is up next, and his council issued a report this week projecting $11 trillion in deficit reduction from growth, higher tax revenue and savings on debt payments.

How do you respond to that?

SUMMERS: It is respectfully nonsense. None of us can forecast what's going to happen to economic growth. What we can forecast is that when people have to hold government debt instead of being able to invest it in new capital goods, new machinery, new buildings, that makes the economy less productive.

What we can forecast is that when we're investing less in research and development, investing less in our schools, that there is a negative impact on economic growth. There is no economist anywhere, without a strong political agenda, who is saying that this bill is a positive for the economy. And the overwhelming view is that it is probably going to make the economy worse.

Think about it this way. How long can the world's greatest debtor remain the world's greatest power? And this is piling more debt onto the economy than any piece of tax legislation in dollar terms that we have ever had.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, Larry, as you know, experts in the past have raised alarm bells about the deficits, and the economy seems pretty resilient in the face of that.

SUMMERS: George, the best period we have had in the economy was the economy that -- was the period that Secretary Rubin and I wrote about when we served President Clinton and by acting responsibly on the deficit by listening to the CBO rather than expressing contempt for it, we reduced the deficit, set off a virtual -- virtues circle of increased investment, more growth, lower deficits, lower interest rates, and then around the cycle again.

Experts warn about risks. And I can't tell you whether the financial crisis is going to come this year or whether the financial crisis is going to come five years from now. And I'm not going to do cry wolf rhetoric. By the way, I was the one who was saying for a decade after 2010 that deficit reduction didn't need to be a national priority.

But anybody who looks at the numbers sees that we've never had deficits remotely like this or the prospect of debts remotely like this at a moment when the economy was strong and we were at peace anytime in our history. This is a risk that we don't need to run, and for what? To give $1 million a year to the top-tenth of a percent while, in effect, sentencing 100,000 poor Americans to death over the next 10 years because they can't get access to necessary medical procedures, because they can't get driven to a hospital, because their family members can't get supported? This is just wrong.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally --

SUMMERS: Look, there are lots of things, George, that you argue about, and Democrats, Republicans have different perspectives. This is that very rare instance where everybody outside of a mainstream sees something very dangerous happen.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, the president's team argued that tariff revenue is going to help make up some of the shortfall. What's your response?

SUMMERS: Yeah, it probably will collect some revenue at the cost of higher inflation for American consumers, less competitiveness for American producers. 60 times as many people use -- work in industries that use steel as work in the steel industry, and every one of them is less competitive because of the president's tariffs. So, higher prices, less competitiveness, and not really that much revenue relative to what's being given to the very wealthy in this bill.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Larry Summers, thanks very much.

Let's get a response now from Stephen Miran, the Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Steve, thanks for coming in this morning. You just heard Mr. Summers right there. He starts out saying the bill is dangerous, huge risks.

STEPHEN MIRAN, CHAIR, WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS: Thanks for having me. Look, I think that there's been a lot of -- a lot of doom mongering, a lot of scare mongering, and this isn't the first time, by the way. During the president's first term, lots of folks said that the president's historic tariffs on China during the first term were going to be terrible for the economy. And there was no lasting evidence of that whatsoever. There was no meaningful economic inflation, no meaningful economic slowdown. Everything was actually pretty OK in response to the tariffs last time.

And thus far again, this time, we've had a repeat of the same performance, whereby lots of folks predicted that it would end the world, there would be some sort of disastrous outcome. And once again, tariff revenue is pouring in. There's no sign of any economically significant inflation whatsoever, and job creation remains healthy.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Job creation does remain healthy. But let's talk about the Bill to begin. I want to get back to tariffs in a second. This increase in the debt, he says that every major economist who doesn't have a political agenda, agrees that this is going to pose a danger to the economy because of the increased debt service payments.

MIRAN: Yeah, I don't think that's -- I don't think that that's true at all. And I think the historical record is on our side. It's the same combination of policies, tax cuts, deregulation, trade renegotiation, and energy abundance that gave us astounding economic growth in the president's first term, 2.8 percent until the pandemic. And that's exactly what we forecast again, very similar numbers.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That was one year.

MIRAN: No, no, no, 2017 to 2019. The annualized rate over those three years was 2.8 percent. Right? Very high economic growth as a result of these same policies. And that's just a statistical fact. And so, what the people who predict big deficits don't understand is that economic growth is going to soar in response to these policies. If you give massive incentives for investment, huge incentives for new factories, full expensing on new factories, full expensing on equipment, full expensing on R&D expenditures, that incentivizes more of this stuff.

You're going to get more people investing in factories as a result of these tax benefits. More investment means more income. More income means more tax revenue. And as a result, deficits go down.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why should we not believe the CBO when they say that something approaching a little more than 11 million people are going to be -- are going to lose their healthcare coverage because of the Medicaid cuts?

MIRAN: Well, because they've been wrong in the past. When Republicans repealed the individual mandate penalty during the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the president's first term, CBO predicted that there was going to be about 5 million people losing their insurance by 2019. And you know what? The number was not very significantly changed at all. It was a tiny fraction of that. And so, they've been wrong in the past.

And look, if we don't pass the -- if we didn't pass the Bill, eight to nine million people would've lost their insurance for sure, as a result of the biggest tax act in history creating a huge recession. The best way to make sure people are insured is to grow the economy, get them jobs, get them working, get them insurance through their employer. Creating jobs, creating a booming economy is always the best way to get people insured.

STEPHANOPOULOS: On tariffs, the deadline, the president's deadline is approaching for the deals. We've only seen three deals so far. What should we expect next?

MIRAN: Well, I'm still optimistic that we're going to get a number of deals later this week. Part of that is because all the negotiating goes through a series of steps that lead to -- that lead to a culmination timed with the deadline. But it's important that countries line up to make concessions to get those deals, to convince the president that they should get lower tariff rates.

And thus far, it's been happening. The president has very successfully used leverage and the threat of tariffs to get companies to create -- to grant concessions to open their markets to U.S. goods.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But we've only seen an agreement with Britain. It's really just the framework of an agreement. We've seen the agreement with Vietnam.

Where are the other deals?

MIRAN: Well, I'm -- as I said, I'm still expecting a number to come this week.

The Vietnam deal was fantastic. It's extremely one-sided. We get to apply a significant tariff to Vietnamese exports. They're opening their markets to ours, you know, applying zero tariff to our exports. It's a fantastic deal for Americans.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, if the -- but if these other deals don't come in this week, will the president be extending the deadline?

MIRAN: Well, my expectation would be that countries that are negotiating in good faith and making the concessions that they need to, to get to a deal, but the deal is just not there yet because it needs more time, my expectation would be that those countries get a roll, get, you know, sort of, get the date rolled.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Like which countries are those?

MIRAN: Well, I mean, I think we're seeing lots of good progress on a variety of countries.

You know, I -- to be clear, I'm not a trade negotiator. I'm not involved in the details of these talks, but I hear good things about the talks with Europe. I hear good things about the talks with India, you know?

And so, I would expect that a number of countries that are in the process of making those nego -- making those concessions, you know, they might see their date rolled. For the countries that aren't making concessions, for the countries that aren't negotiating in good faith, I would expect them to sort of see higher tariffs.

But, again, the president will decide -- you know, the president will decide later this week, and in the time following, whether or not the countries are doing what it takes to get access to the American market like they've grown accustomed to.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We saw new jobs numbers come in this week. As I said, the economy seems pretty resilient. But underneath the overall numbers, there does seem to be some slowdown among private sector job creation. Concerned?

MIRAN: Well, it's not really a concern because of the huge incentives we have to unleash growth in the -- in the near future.

The One Big, Beautiful Bill is going to create growth on turbocharge.

Cutting regulations, cutting red tape so that companies can invest, build higher when and where they want instead of spending years begging permission from Washington is going to turbocharge growth.

Opening foreign markets to U.S. exports by getting concessions through trade renegotiation is going to turbocharge growth.

Low energy prices like the president is achieving, lowest gas prices since 2021 at the pump is going to turbocharge growth.

And all that's to come.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say this is all going to turbocharge growth. We have seen some experience with this back -- in Ronald Reagan's day, back in 1981. He had huge tax cuts. The growth didn't come, and they had to end up raising taxes for several years after that.

Concerned that could happen again?

MIRAN: Well, like I said before, you know, history's on our side. If you look at what happened in the president's first term, growth soared, and there was no real material, you know, meaningful long-term decline in revenue. Revenue as a share of GDP was 17.1 percent last year, the same as it was before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

So, you got this huge surge in growth as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. There was no material long-term decline in revenue. Corporate revenue even went up as a share of GDP from 1.6 to 1.9 percent. And the growth delivered. And we expect the same thing to happen this time.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Stephen Miran, thanks very much.

MIRAN: Thank you.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Up next, Chris Christie and Donna Brazile on the political fallout from the new tax and spending law. What it can mean next for next year's midterms. We're back in two minutes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAY O’BRIEN, ABC NEWS CAPITOL HILL CORRESPONDENT: The president wants this passed now. Are you standing in his way?

(LAUGH)

O’BRIEN: Sounds like you are.

REP. ANDY HARRIS, (R-MD) FREEDOM CAUCUS CHAIR: What does he want passed now? He wants Senate version or the House version?

O’BRIEN: He wants a bill on his desk to sign by Friday.

HARRIS: Well, then call the Senate back in town because it can't -- it can't get passed by Friday unless the Senate is in town.

O’BRIEN: Why did you change?

HARRIS: Because we've got a package that, I think would've turned out better than what we would've gotten had we sent this bill back.

O’BRIEN: But is that caving?

HARRIS: Winning is caving? Well, if winning is caving, then I guess we caved.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Jay O’Brien with Freedom Caucus Chair, Andy Harris, and we're joined now to talk about all this with our analyst, Donna Brazile and Chris Christie. And Chris, let me begin with you. President is on -- really on a roll right now. Last couple of weeks, victories in the courts, victories overseas with Iran and NATO, and now with Congress.

CHRIS CHRISTIE, (R) FORMER NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR & ABC NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: You know, look, this is what happens when you have events as the president has pushed them, in a way that he wanted to see it done and you've got a very compliant majority in the Congress, as we saw on the bill that got passed this week. I think the president, as I said a few weeks ago, did the right thing in Iran. I hope that he continues and doesn't stop now regarding Iran.

And I think on the Supreme Court, this is the single biggest legacy from his first term, are those three appointments that he made to the Supreme Court and it is making the things he wants to do in the second term possible, George. So, this is a great couple of weeks for the president in terms of what he wants to accomplish, short-term wins, I'm sure we'll get to it, long-term concerns though. There are real storm clouds over the horizon, I think.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What are the long-term concerns?

CHRISTIE: The long-term concerns are the Medicaid changes that he's put into place, give the Democrats a message when they didn't have one. They've been scrambling around trying to find a message. Now, they got one, and he handed it to them. And we'll see how effective it's going to be. I think it can be very effective.

And secondly, you saw with the last interview you had, tariffs. Look, he's got a choice to make come July 9th. We're only three days away. Is -- does he re-impose tariffs, which I think will have enormous harm to the economy, or does he look like he chickened out again? He'll -- you know he'll hate that. And so, I think he's going to try to thread the needle somehow. And you saw some of the groundwork being laid by the Council of Economic Advisers Chairman. Well, if they're making progress, we'll give them some more time.

The fact is, he knows his tariff policy is awful. It's awful for the economy. It's awful for America's standing in the world, George. And last point is this. You can't have it both ways. Either you're going to have to do real harm to our economy with these tariffs to get some of the revenue they're saying will reduce debt, or you have to get rid of the tariffs, and you don't get the revenue either. Those are all things that are coming between now and November 26th that I think will make the president look back on a very good two weeks as the good old days.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Chris talks about the long term. In the short term, Democrats seem completely powerless to stop President Trump.

DONNA BRAZILE, FORMER DNC CHAIR & ABC NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Absolutely, George. Look, when you don't control the Congress, as you well know, and you have slim majorities in both the House and, of course, in the Senate, there's no way the Democrats can come up with a different recipe when all of the ingredients are put forward by President Trump. This may be winning in the short term, if you define winning as people losing their healthcare, you define winning by children not being able to have a good meal at lunch, if you define winning by short-changing the American people in terms of pollution and climate change, it's not winning in the long term.

It is a short-term gain for what Donald Trump campaigned on. So elections have consequences. Chris, you're absolutely right. Democrats should continue to focus on this healthcare. This is really going to be the belly of the beast when it comes to what this bill will do to our country. In my home state of Louisiana, 267,000 Americans will be forced off their Medicaid. 60 -- over 60 percent of them meet the work requirements, but 30 percent are in nursing homes. They're disabled; they're not able to go to work. And yet, this bill makes no provision.

So, while it may be an incremental way in which this budget will go in effect, but long term, it's going to hurt America, it's going to set us back. And it's not winning.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I guess, one of those questions on the midterms, Chris, is that, will these cuts take hold in time? One of the things we've seen that Medicaid cuts are delayed for a couple of years.

CHRISTIE: I was just going to say that a lot of this argument is theoretical, and we'll see whether people respond to the theoretical argument. Because the fact is that most of these tax cuts, no one's going to feel, because they're just continuations of what's in place.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's just keeping what's already in place, yeah.

CHRISTIE: And you can't make the argument to people all, but we hadn't done that, your taxes would have gone up. People don't feel that. So, there'll be some small ones like we see on overtime and tips, which were capped when the president said no tax on overtime, no tax on tips. Well, based upon certain amount you make a year and capped at a certain amount, $25,000 and I think $12,500, right?

So -- and the cuts are theoretical because of the way Congress did it was to push the cuts off to post midterms.

So, this is going to be an exercise in the business that you and I were both in for a long time, George. This is going to be politically, how do the Democrats make their argument on health care and make it real, and how do the Republicans make their argument on taxes and cost of living and make it real?

The one place where I’ll disagree with Donna is, look, on the energy front, the fact of the matter is that people don't feel, despite some other indications, the climate change issue in the way that Democrats would like them to. What they do recognize -- they do recognize the price at the pump.

BRAZILE: Oh.

CHRISTIE: Now, Donna, I'm not saying there aren’t -- there isn’t evidence of it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And so -- right, (INAUDIBLE).

CHRISTIE: But I'm saying they don't feel it. And what matters in politics is, what do you feel?

BRAZILE: All right. You don't feel it? I feel it every day. I feel it -- I feel it, whether I'm walking in the streets, or I feel it when I watch the news. You feel it. Chris, you feel it in the electricity bills that are going to go up, utility bills will go up for every American. They are going to feel it. And all these extreme weather events, all across America, 20 years ago, Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast. We're going to see more Katrinas as you've seen over the last ten years.

You were a governor during Sandy.

CHRISTIE: Yes.

BRAZILE: You know that these weather events are getting worse by the day.

CHRISTIE: Well, I -- first -- first of all --

BRAZILE: A heat dome that sits on America for days at a time. People are feeling it, Chris.

CHRISTIE: Well, for -- they -- they’re not feeling it politically, Donna. And, first of all, I'll never believe that Sandy was created by climate change.

But, secondly, on the issue of electricity bills, let me tell you why electricity bills are going up in my state of New Jersey. The reason they’re going up is a failed energy master plan that the governor put in place there that is giving us the biggest increases we're going to see in a long time in New Jersey because they've been unwilling to tap natural gas from Pennsylvania to come to New Jersey over the last eight years. We have to be practical about this. Am I -- am I -- am I --

BRAZILE: What's your beef with solar? What’s your beef with solar energy? Wind energy? What -- what’s your beef with renewables?

CHRISTIE: Listen, let me tell you something -- well, let me -- Donna, let me say this. Look, here’s my beef. My beef is, for eight years, I put more solar energy in place in New Jersey than any governor before me. And you know what, it cost -- it took care of about 2 percent of the load that we need to get to turn air conditioning on in the summer. The fact is that we continue to work on renewables, and I think we should. But they are nowhere near ready to take the capacity that America needs economically and from a social perspective to keep people safe. So -- so --

BRAZILE: But this bill will set us back even on those standards. And batteries. We are going to give China just another gift with regards to renewable energy, with solar energy. This is a very important issue.

CHRISTIE: China.

BRAZILE: But, look, I also -- also, ICE -- ICE's budget now is probably bigger than most military budgets across this -- this -- this planet. And we’re going to give ICE practically more than half of the law enforcement resources in this country. Separation of family, detention centers with no due process, that’s going to also be the short-term effect of this so-called winning strategy.

CHRISTIE: Well, the concern I have about that, George, is that we have seen reductions to the FBI. And, let me tell you, as someone who was nominated to be U.S. attorney the day before 9/11, someone who did the first terrorism case post 9/11 in this country, we've all forgotten about that.

But when you bomb Iran, which I'm in favor of, one of the ways they can retaliate is through terrorist attacks here. We shouldn't be cutting back what's happening at the FBI. We shouldn't be spending -- having the FBI spend more time on violent crime. That should be state and local law enforcement's problem. They should be continuing to work on intelligence to stop the next terrorist attack. And we’re all going to be sitting around this table, George, if we have another terror attack, saying, why did we cut the FBI?

STEPHANOPOULOS: You get the last word, Donna.

BRAZILE: It's an abomination. It's cruel. And let me tell you, Chris and I talked about it in the -- in the greenroom. We're both Catholics. And the bishops, I thought, you know, penned a very important letter to Congress. I don't know if they've read it, but they should read it before they spend the next couple of days at home because they should know that this is going to impact their communities and impact the courts. It's an abomination.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you both very much.

We'll be right back.

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STEPHANOPOULOS: You just heard Chris Christie talk about new terrorist threats. Up next, a new book detailing how Iran was targeting President Trump and his team during his last cam -- during his last term.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: Sir, why did you guys (ph) revoke security protections for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, the same reason when you, you know, have protection, you can't have it for the rest of your life. Do you want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives? I mean, there's risks to everything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Trump defending his decision to revoke the security clearance for his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as we learned from a new book that Pompeo was the target of Iranian assassination attempts during his tenure at Foggy Bottom. The book is "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America." And we're joined by one of its co-authors, Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for coming in, Josh.

JOSH DAWSEY, POLITICAL INVESTIGATIONS AND ENTERPRISE REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Thanks for having me, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, your book really does detail the extraordinary threat to Trump's 2022 campaign, so much of it fueled by Iran?

DAWSEY: Right. In the last few months of the campaign, the Iranians were very serious, as our book shows, about wanting to take out the President. They were told, the FBI and law enforcement told the Trump campaign, we think they may have kill teams on the ground. The president ended up having to take a decoy plane for a lot of his events or the candidate at the time. And the Iranians had gotten really close to killing Mike Pompeo in the past. Pompeo had to be --

STEPHANOPOULOS: When you say really close, what do you mean?

DAWSEY: He had to be evacuated from where he was in a European city because they realized overseas, in the period after he was out of office, that the Iranians had an active plot and knew where he was, and this was one of their many myriad efforts to try and take out Trump and those around him during the campaign.

STEPHANOPOULOS: This was all in response to Trump trying to take out -- taking out the leader of the Revolutionary Guards back in his first term. And of course, we had the bombing strike on Iran just two weeks ago. What do we know about the current threats in the wake of that bombing?

DAWSEY: Well, in the wake of that bombing, you certainly can imagine that the Iranians would want to continue what they were doing in the past. In the past, they had multiple teams on the ground. This time, I mean, obviously, you see the stepped up security detail around the president of the United States. I don't know precisely what the threats are to him now, but they were extraordinarily serious, more than the public knew at the time, as our book shows, about wanting to take him out.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Your book also details bombing threats, he claims to have used to deter President Putin and President Xi of China.

DAWSEY: Right. So he's talking to donors in 2024. We got a number of audio recordings for the book from the president behind closed doors with billionaires, some of the top folks from the Republican Party, who he's explaining his foreign policy. And he says, to these donors, I would bomb Moscow. I told Vladimir Putin I would bomb, "the hell out of Moscow." And he said, if there's only a 10 percent chance he believes me, then that's deterrence.

Now, what he was trying to explain to these donors was how Putin would not have gone into Ukraine in his telling in the recording we got, without -- if he would've been in office. But he also says, I would've been able to solve the war in one day. This is going to be over if I win. And you see, six months in, Putin is flummoxing him. He has not done what the president has wanted. Trump's been very aggressive about that, actually saying over and over, Putin has "changed." He's made all these comments, but it was bluster about how he would sort of be able to solve this, which has not come true so far.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And we don't really know if Trump actually said that to Putin. Given what we know about what he said to him in the past, there's reason to be skeptical.

DAWSEY: Right. Well, we know what he said publicly, and we don't know what he said privately. They had a multi-hour call, as you know, just this week.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Looking back at the campaign, you also detail how much of a burden Hunter Biden was on President Biden in his campaign.

DAWSEY: Right. So one of his scenes in the book is that the president has a big month ahead in June of 2024. He has European travel. He has the first debate with Donald Trump, as you saw, that didn't go so well. But the thing he's telling his friends is always concerned about, is that his son is not convicted in this court case. And he even offers to testify for his son. And he's talking to folks nonstop around him, as my colleague Tyler Pager wrote his book, about his son, right? And he's just -- he's just constantly worried about him.

He thinks that the prosecutors are trying to break him. And as you see, ultimately, he decides to pardon his son. But what we found in the course of reporting for our book is that Hunter Biden had a major figure in the president's orbit. He was often on these calls, he would pipe in to calls. He was helping him make campaign decisions. And the president was very concerned about his son. It was one of the things that was an albatross on him as he tried to run for re-election.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Josh Dawsey, thanks very much. Up next, a scholar preserving our nation's history by collecting war letters. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, on this Independence Day weekend, a story of one historian collecting war letters from service members and their families from conflicts dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Here's “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDY CARROLL, HISTORIAN: This is my passion.

MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC “THIS WEEK” CO-ANCHOR (voice-over): Andy Carroll is a historian who makes house calls --

CARROLL: Here we are. This is it.

RADDATZ: -- traveling from D.C. to Birmingham, Alabama --

CARROLL: After all these years --

RADDATZ: -- where on this drizzly day, he will acquire the biggest single contribution to his decades-long collection of war letters. And that's saying something, because in the decade since we first met him, he's more than doubled his archive, now topping 200,000 letters.

CARROLL: Thank you so much for doing this.

RADDATZ: Today alone, Carroll will gain more than 11,000 additional letters.

MAX POPE, COLLECTOR: The letters are this way.

RADDATZ: All from the back of this unassuming law office.

CARROLL: Oh my goodness.

M. POPE: This one's from May 8th, 1945. VE Day. He said, "Howdy. So, this is officially VE Day. The Statue of Liberty got her torch lit up again at 8:00 tonight. According to the radio, there is much frolicking in the big city."

RADDATZ: Owned by local history buff, Max Pope.

M. POPE: To me, this is scandalous. There’s dancing in the streets and kissing of servicemen and et cetera, while men are still being killed and maimed in the Pacific.

RADDATZ: Pope has a treasure trove of letters.

M. POPE: This one's three folders, wrote his wife every day.

RADDATZ: Old war posters line his hallways. Shelves stuffed with maps. But in these ordinary-looking folders and file cabinets --

M. POPE: That's what I'm.

CARROLL: These are Civil War.

M. POPE: Yes.

CARROLL: October 31st, 1861. “Dear son”, so probably a mom writing to her soldier son.

RADDATZ: A written history spanning the Civil War to Vietnam --

CARROLL: “Well, peanut, you will never know how much this soldier missed his wife.”

RADDATZ: -- mostly acquired through online auctions.

His wife, Linda, unaware of the collection's existence until very recently.

LINDA POPE, WIFE OF MAX POPE: And I said, "Can we kind of categorize it a little bit?" And it was like 3,000 or 4,000. I thought, "Oh my God, I don't think I have three or thousand of anything." But then he started really looking at them, and it's 11,000 letters.

RADDATZ: Originally, Pope says he intended to track down the descendants of many of the letters, a task personal to him.

M. POPE: I'd found some of my family letters on eBay at some point in time. And I realized that people needed to get connected with their family history.

RADDATZ: Each letter containing a unique window into history, offering up the deeply personal thoughts and moments of its author.

L. POPE: Old men, old women, mothers with crying children carrying bundles and pushing carts, I just stood there and thought, if the people at home could see these people, they would never complain again. When you read a letter from a soldier and he's pouring out his heart to his mother or to his wife, you just see a personal side of people that you may not see if you just see a picture of somebody in the war.

M. POPE: It's almost an obsession about saving things.

(LAUGH)

L. POPE: As you can tell.

M. POPE: I need a cure.

(LAUGH)

RADDATZ (voice-over): An obsession, Andy Carroll shares, which is why Pope is letting go of his entire collection and entrusting it to Carroll to archive and store at The Center for American War Letters at Chapman University.

ANDREW CARROLL, DIRECTOR, THE CENTER FOR AMERICAN WAR LETTERS: I would love to be home, so that I could enjoy some of the good hot weather, so that I could go swimming, play ball, and have you in my arms.

RADDATZ (voice-over): With Carroll and Pope joining forces 11,000 more letters and the details of each soldier's sacrifice will be safely preserved.

L. POPE: Hopefully, that will open up a lot of opportunities for family members to be able to go back and know that there's a place that they can track down and look at their loved ones' or their relatives' letters.

RADDATZ (voice-over): And for Carroll, who has been doing this for almost three decades, the task of finding and sorting through these letters never grows old.

CARROLL: I always think like I must have exhausted every type of war letter, whether it's love or grief or, or longing for home, and somebody surprises me with something unusual. This is not a job. This is a labor of love. Through the goodness of God --

RADDATZ (voice-over): A love evident by the care he shows in seeing each and every letter, the excitement never waning.

CARROLL: These are hard times. And for someone like me to have someone like you who is waiting for that great day, it makes the whole thing easier.

RADDATZ (voice-over): Preserving forever, the sacrifices by those who serve for generations to come.

CARROLL: Their sense of sacrifice extends beyond the battlefield. It's not just the fear of getting hurt or wounded or killed. It's not being there when a child is born back in the States, the stress on relationships, constantly moving around. There are so many sacrifices our men and women in uniform and their families make. Their voices and their stories better help us understand those experiences and that sacrifice.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Thanks to Martha for that. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: That is all for us today. Thanks for sharing part of your Sunday with us. Check out "World News Tonight" and I'll see you tomorrow on GMA.

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