The sickening spectacle of the Senate, at nearly 2:00 am Saturday morning, passing a bill on essentially party lines, the full contents of which almost none of them knew, its assumptions about how much it would increase the U.S. debt based on sheer fantasy, its cynical abandonment of Republicans’ supposed concern about deficits, its dimly understood sweeping policy implications, its likely trove of potential scandals in the form of special provisions for particular interests or individuals, represented the nadir of the legislative process. The one Republican senator who went against his party, Bob Corker of Tennessee (who as the world knows won’t run again), objected particularly to the bill’s fiscal implications—increasing the debt by at least $1 trillion—and for his efforts to get that solved was considered by his Republican colleagues a major pain. (The current debt is just over $20 trillion, the highest it’s ever been; and this was one of the highest increases in the debt.) In the end, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave enough away to holdouts to get the bill passed without Corker’s vote.

In what Wall Street Journal reporters described as “a blizzard of last-minute deals,” a tax break corporations love was accidentally repealed. Frenzied lobbyists, working behind the scenes, played a probably unprecedented role in this legislation, and knew what was in the tax bill before the senators did. Senators who held out their final votes put on a show of struggling “to get to yes” if they could have just one more change, and some pronounced themselves satisfied with less than solid pledges from McConnell and other Republican leaders.

The pressure on McConnell and other Republicans to produce a bill couldn’t have been more intense. Major donors, fed up with the Republicans’ failure to repeal Obamacare or accomplish any other significant legislation, threatened to close their checkbooks as they faced the possibility that the party, led by an unpopular president, was headed into the 2018 midterm elections with none of their legislative dreams fulfilled. Furthermore, the president was facing the major embarrassment of having zero legislative achievements in his first year, traditionally the time a new president gets the most done. Donor pressure helps explain the apparent ease with which the Republicans gave most of the rewards of the bill to the wealthiest 5 percent and abandoned their base. Trump, the populist nouveaux, would have to keep his base loyal by feeding them gimcracks about kneeling (black) NFL players and “crooked Hillary Clinton.” In backing the House and Senate tax bills, Trump, who has set great store by at least appearing to remain faithful to his campaign promises when it came to the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord, and pushing for the wall, readily broke his promises that the rich wouldn’t get a tax cut and that his cuts wouldn’t increase the deficit.

Perhaps some of the base would be beguiled at first by the idea that they are to receive a tax cut, as the president and numerous TV ads keep telling them—even if it is a paltry one compared to the boons to the very, very rich. In addition to significant income tax cuts, the pending legislation was to give them such presents as a great reduction in (Senate bill) or elimination of (House bill) the estate tax (so that people like, say, Donald Trump can pass on a great deal more money to his children); elimination of the alternative minimum tax, which Trump was particularly eager for; and a tax break for private plane owners. Perhaps the Trump base would remain unaware that their tax cut would end in 2025 and then transmogrify into a tax increase. By contrast, the deep cut in corporate tax rates—the centerpiece of the bill as far as the Republicans are concerned—would remain permanent. The Senate’s tax bill would repeal provisions many middle-class and upper-middle-class families have come to rely on, such as deductions for medical expenses and for state and local taxes. The realpolitik behind the elimination of the credit for state and local taxes is that this will primarily affect residents of high-tax states that vote Democratic. This would also put the squeeze on funds for local services, such as public education and infrastructure repairs. In the mere three days devoted to the Senate’s deliberation on such significant and complex legislation, what started out weighted on the side of the wealthiest taxpayers became more so.

Behind the whole exercise lay the Ayn Randian philosophy that has inhabited the mind of House Speaker Paul Ryan for years and like views shared by conservative Republicans, who now dominate the congressional Republican Party: the goal of reducing taxes and then claiming that this necessitated the reduction or elimination of Medicare, Medicaid, and other welfare programs that they see as fostering “dependency” on government. (Such programs also lend political strength to the political party that supports them.)