Republican officials have been working on their domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act — for roughly eight months, and as part of the party’s efforts, GOP officials have eagerly told the public about how great the far-right legislation is.

At least for now, the American mainstream isn’t buying what Republicans are selling: The reconciliation package is woefully unpopular. In fact, by any objective measure, it’s among the most unpopular major pieces of legislation in recent American history.

Under traditional norms, presidents will use their platforms and profiles to help sell pending initiatives like these, pitching bills’ virtues to voters. The goal isn’t just to make bills more popular, it’s also to make bills easier to pass: Members of Congress are less likely to support legislation if they’re under the impression that Americans hate the proposals.

With this in mind, Donald Trump held a White House event on Thursday afternoon, delivering a sales pitch while surrounded by regular people, including truck drivers, firefighters, law enforcement, health care workers and ranchers. The message behind the theatrics were absurd: The Republicans’ megabill would redistribute wealth from the bottom up, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Any suggestion that the package is intended to benefit the nation’s working class is ridiculous.

But to make matters worse, the president’s sales pitch included obvious falsehoods. NBC News reported:

At his ‘One, Big, Beautiful Event’ at the White House … Trump said: ‘And we will deliver no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.’ The last part is false. The Republican bill backed by Trump does not impact Social Security taxes, and if it did that provision would have to be stripped out. Social Security is ineligible under Senate rules for the filibuster-proof reconciliation process that Republicans are using to pass the sweeping legislation.

Later at the same event, the president went on to say that there are “hundreds of things” in the bill — which is true, though hardly descriptive — before adding, “We’re cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill, and you’re not going to feel any of it. Your Medicaid is left alone; it’s left the same. Your Medicare and your Social Security are strengthened.”

That isn’t even close to being true: The GOP would cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years. As The New York Times recently summarized, “The bill passed by the House will reduce federal spending on Medicaid by at least $600 billion over a decade and reduce enrollment by about 10.3 million people, according to a preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. [And] most of the changes to Medicaid have little to do with waste, fraud or abuse as defined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service.”

Or put another way, as the Republicans’ bill nears the finish line and Trump tries to make the case for the package on its merits, the president is either lying about its contents, doesn’t know what’s in the bill he’s so fond of, or perhaps a bit of both.

We should find out soon enough whether such tactics are effective: Trump expects Senate Republicans to finish and pass the party’s bill in the coming days, then have the GOP-led House pass the identical passage soon after, all with the expectation that the legislation will be on the president’s desk by July 4 — just one week away.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at her latest briefing that the president is “adamant” that lawmakers stick to this schedule for reasons no one in the administration has explained. Watch this space.