Inside Trump's last 24 hours as he willed his agenda bill over the finish line

CNN

8 hours ago

After nearly 20 hours straight of working the phones – using both threats and assurances to cajole Republicans into supporting his sweeping domestic agenda bill – President Donald Trump seemed to grow exasperated while watching coverage of the plodding floor process on television.
'What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT'S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!' Trump posted on social media at midnight, as the vote seemed stalled.
Fourteen hours later, the bill had passed, with only two Republican defections.
Trump is expected to sign it in a major ceremony on Friday afternoon at the White House – punctuated by a fly-over of the B-2 bombers who dropped bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities last month, according to a White House official.
The spectacle will only underscore what a consequential stretch of days it has been for the president, who now appears at the height of his political power roughly six months into his second term.
Last week's Supreme Court decision paved the way for even more expansive use of executive authority. His strikes on Iran's nuclear sites appear to have created new momentum toward a ceasefire deal in Gaza. A NATO summit last week, tailored to his preferences, resulted in new defense spending commitments after years of pressure from Trump.
At home, Trump is presiding over an economy that continues to create jobs, despite continued unease over the threat of tariffs. His hardline immigration enforcement tactics, decried by opponents as inhumane or illegal, have reportedly brought down unlawful crossings at the US southern border to historic lows.
'I think I have more power now, I do,' Trump said outside Air Force One Thursday, hours after his agenda bill passed the House.
To Trump's detractors, his unshakeable grip on Republicans and his strong-arming of US allies abroad add up to an authoritarian-in-waiting, unchecked by the systems in place to ensure the country doesn't descend into autocracy.
But to his supporters, the last two weeks have amounted to a thrilling culmination of his unlikely return to power and a rapid-pace fulfillment of the promises he made to his voters last year.
'He's getting his agenda passed to a greater extent than he did his first term. He has better control over the apparatus,' said Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who challenged Trump for the presidency last year.
'Part of it, I think, is that he's a second-term president, and he knows how to wield that power and use the office of the president. And you got a Supreme Court that's backed him up,' Hutchinson went on. 'It's a very powerful position that he's in. People recognize that. He also recognizes he has a very short amount of time, because he's only got four years now.'
No longer restrained by skeptical members of his own party, Trump is free to pursue his agenda and interests in ways that even some Republicans worry will come to haunt them in next year's midterm elections.
Both supporters and opponents of Trump's bill seem to agree that — for better or worse — the measure passed Thursday will now form a major part of Trump's domestic legacy.
It passed after intensive involvement from the president himself, who appeared acutely aware of the stakes for his own presidency and took to calling lawmakers into the night to convince them to vote yes. A senior White House official called Trump 'the omnipresent force behind this legislation.'
'Dinner after dinner, engagement after engagement at Mar-a-Lago — you know, those relationships, and the president's focus on relationships, carried us through in kind of a cascade here,' the official said, adding they had lost count of the number of meetings Trump held on the bill.
Democrats have already begun formulating plans to tether Trump and Republicans to the new law's changes to Medicaid, singling out individual cases of Americans' deprived of care. Their argument was encapsulated by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries' marathon speech on the House Floor on Thursday.
'Leadership requires courage, conviction, compassion — and yet what we have seen from this administration and co-conspirators on the Republican side of the aisle is cruelty, chaos and corruption,' Jeffries said in his address, which broke a record for the longest floor speech in modern history.
Polling shows Americans are broadly skeptical of the bill, creating a task for Trump in the months ahead to change perceptions of the bill he worked assiduously to get passed.
He could be aided by the bill's strategic sequencing, which enacts the tax cuts in the near-term but pushes off major changes to Medicaid and food assistance programs until after next year's midterm elections.
Yet recent history is littered with presidents who, after using congressional majorities to push through major legislation meant to burnish their legacy, later lamented not doing enough to sell the bill to the American public – after their party members paid the price at the ballot box.
Trump did, at various points over the last week, appear concerned that slashing the social safety net too deeply might pose political challenges for Republicans.
'I don't want to go too crazy with cuts,' he told CNN on Tuesday. 'I don't like cuts.'
Even in private, Trump has told Republicans that making changes to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security would be a losing political message, according to officials. In conversations with Republican lawmakers, White House officials sought to emphasize that changes to Medicaid wouldn't be felt for years, giving states and hospitals time to sort through the changes. Officials also reminded lawmakers that states had a significant role in dictating how Medicaid dollars are spent, and therefore control how and whether individuals lose coverage.
Officials said Trump's team had taken lessons from a failed attempt to repeal Obamacare in 2017, working with Republicans on messaging and trying to present them with a clearer view into why the bill would work.
Still, Trump's priority has largely been getting his own agenda enacted, not the political fortunes of Republicans in Congress. Any worries about next year's election were mostly put to the side as Trump squeezed GOP holdouts using both charm and threats of political retribution.
White House officials privately acknowledged that the Democratic messaging on the bill has been effective, but noted that the focus from their party so far has not been on messaging, but on getting the bill passed.
'We now have to shift to explaining the bill and how it will benefit our voters,' one official said. 'We are confident once we get that messaging across, the public perception of the bill will shift.'
From the beginning, Trump and his allies framed support for the bill as a loyalty test, advising senators in an official notice last week that failure to pass the measure would amount to an 'ultimate betrayal.'
Trump treated Republican holdouts harshly, threatening to support primary challengers to Sen. Thom Tillis and Rep. Thomas Massie after the said they would oppose the bill.
Ultimately Tillis announced last week he would retire, opting out of Trump's test of fealty. He warned from the Senate floor afterward that Trump had been 'misinformed' about the effects of his bill, calling it 'inescapable this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made.'
Trump's hardline approach shifted Wednesday, when he hosted House Republicans at the White House. In those sessions, he appeared to adhere to an old adage as he worked to convince lawmakers to vote for his mega-bill: you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
In meetings in the Cabinet Room and Oval Office, a magnanimous Trump signed place cards, took photos and paid his visitors compliments on their television appearances, according to people familiar with the sessions. He handed out mementos and showed guests around the constantly redecorated Oval Office.
But he was also firm that after weeks of back-and-forth between the two chambers of Congress, there would be no more changes to the bill.
'He wanted to get this done, and that was clear,' one lawmaker who met with Trump said.
'The message he sent to all of them was very clear, that this bill has been negotiated a lot, but there's not going to be any more changes to it,' Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Majority Leader, said Thursday on Capitol Hill. 'The time for that is over, and I think it took them still a few hours after to realize he was serious.'
When discussing the bill, the president urged the lawmakers to maintain GOP unity and avoid giving Democrats a victory by denying him his signature legislation, one person familiar with the meetings said.
Outside Air Force One on Thursday evening, Trump said he offered 'no deals – what I did is we talked about how good the bill is.'
And while Trump's threat of backing primary challenges to opponents of his bill remained ever-present in many Republicans' minds, the president opted to leave the warning mostly unsaid as he cajoled members in the West Wing on Wednesday.
'The president was wonderful, as always,' Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said in a video posted after the two-hour meeting. 'Informative, funny, he told me he likes seeing me on TV, which was kind of cool.'
However, as the night went on and lawmakers argued at the Capitol, one source briefed on the conversations with conservative members said it was conveyed that if members held up this bill, they would be primaried – a message that moved some members towards a vote.
'He is in the strongest position of anybody in generations – probably ever – in terms of impacting primaries for Congress,' the source said. 'So anybody coming from a hard-right district, which is most of the conference, will have to deal with that. And he's just not going to tolerate anyone going against his agenda.'
A White House official pushed back on the notion that there were any direct primary threats but acknowledged that the prospect always loomed over conversations.
One person familiar with the meetings with House lawmakers said Trump spoke about the importance of the bill to Republicans' agenda and argued that economic growth would eclipse any concerns about expanding the deficit — arguments he and his team have been making publicly.
He also promised hardline fiscal hawks he would use his executive authorities to vigorously enforce certain phaseout provisions for green energy tax credits to convince them to vote yes.
'He did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,' Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who originally planned to vote against the legislation but ultimately supported it, said on CNBC.
Some Republicans had been vocal in their opposition to the Senate's slower timeline to phase out some energy tax credits, and Norman said it was important for them to get assurances on that from the White House. He said it was a major sticking point in the final hours of deliberations.
'Up until late in the night, we were negotiating, you know, things that could change with, you know, the tax credits, which all were put in by Joe Biden, which needed to be extinguished,' Norman said.
In the dark hours of Thursday morning, Trump's patience in convincing holdout Republicans seemed to be wearing thin.
'FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE,' he wrote at 12:45 a.m. ET. 'RIDICULOUS.'
A few phone calls later, the holdouts had relented. And Trump's signature bill was on track to pass.