How Trump pushed Republicans to yes — again and again — on his landmark bill

The Hill

2 days ago

On a late February evening, President Trump sealed the deal for the first vote on his 'one big, beautiful bill' with a conversation that brought one House Republican to tears.
And into the wee hours of Thursday morning, Trump's conversations with GOP holdouts helped unlock the final vote on the major legislation, getting it to the president's desk by his July 4 deadline.
Over and over as House Republicans crafted, debated and headed for topsy-turvy, history-making votes on Trump's marquee legislation, holdouts on both the moderate and conservative ends of the conference threatened to derail the bill.
Some aides and members thought that even after initial successes in the House, there was a chance it could all fall apart.
But at nearly every major juncture, Trump — working closely with House GOP leaders —- came in to close the deal, often without having to make concessions or alter his strategy.
'He truly does have, to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs, a reality distortion field,' one top Republican aide said. 'People come into that field, they go beyond the limits of what they think are possible for themselves.'
Conversations with more than a dozen House GOP members, Republican aides in Congress and the White House, and other sources over the last five months demonstrated that Trump's influence was essential to get the legislation across the finish line in the razor-thin House GOP majority that is notoriously difficult to keep united.
Months before the 2024 election, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other House Republicans began preparing for the possibility of a Republican trifecta that could use the special budget reconciliation process to bypass the threat of a Democratic filibuster and deliver major Republican wish list items along party lines.
The wish list eventually turned into the most significant single Republican bill in decades that extended tax cuts, added new tax cuts, gave funding boosts for immigration enforcement and defense — offset with slashes to spending on Medicaid, food assistance, clean energy initiatives and student loans.
But when House Republicans gathered for their annual policy retreat at Trump's resort in Doral, Fla., in January, deficit hawks were highly skeptical of what they were hearing from leadership. Republicans were slow to make progress on a framework, and were divided about whether to tackle the president's agenda in one or two bills. An antsy Senate threatened to take the wheel if the House GOP couldn't get its act together.
'The catalyst for accelerating progress was the meeting with the President' in early February, said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the chair of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus — referring to a marathon meeting with House GOP leaders and an ideological cross-section of the conference. Trump opened the meeting and set the tone for the lawmakers to dig into some nitty-gritty budget details.
What really got the Freedom Caucus on board was a novel mechanism in the budget resolution — a framework that sets parameters for the final bill — to tie a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to $4 trillion in tax cuts, requiring the number of spending cuts to go up dollar-for-dollar if tax cuts went up too. Pitched to leadership in a late-night meeting in the Speaker's suite the night before a committee vote that had already been delayed, deficit hawks thought the tools would be the key to forcing the Senate — notorious for moderating legislation — to swallow the House's plans.
Not every deficit hawk was sold, though, by the time the resolution hit the House floor in late February. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio,) and Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) were sticks in the mud — and Johnson made a public 'prayer request' ahead of the vote.
At the time, Republicans could only afford to lose one GOP vote and pass the party-line measure. They were down two members who resigned after being picked for Trump administration roles. House Democrats brought back a member who had given birth a month earlier and another who was in the hospital to squeeze Republicans as much as they could.
In the cloakroom off the House floor, Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) worked to win over Davidson. Around the corner was Spartz, with House Majority Leader Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) going between her and Davidson. Once Davidson agreed to vote yes, leaders tried to get Massie to vote present rather than no to unlock the vote, to no avail.
Spartz huddled in a phone booth and spoke to Trump for around 25 minutes. The tears-prone Ukrainian-born Indiana congresswoman cried during the conversation, multiple sources said — and emerged saying she was still a no.
Leaders were devastated. They moved to punt the vote, sending members away.
But then, Spartz had another brief conversation with Trump — and suddenly changed her mind.
That sent leaders scrambling to text members telling them to come back just minutes after they had sent them away — a stunning reversal and marked one of the wildest floor votes most could remember.
Republicans adopted the budget resolution with the libertarian-leaning Massie being the only Republican 'no.' Publicly, Spartz only later said that Trump made a 'personal commitment to save healthcare.'
While fiscal hawks got to yes because they were heartened by the broad outline of the House bill, several moderate Republicans who were worried about steep cuts to Medicaid had voted yes because they believed the Senate would moderate the framework.
Instead, the Senate passed a budget resolution that gave two separate sets of fiscal target instructions for each chamber — infuriating the fiscal hawks who had wanted commitments from the upper chamber about the final bill hitting at least $1.5 trillion in cuts. Even House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said in a scathing statement that the Senate resolution was 'unserious and disappointing.'
When it came back to the House for approval in April, fiscal hawks deemed it 'DEAD ON ARRIVAL,' with some Freedom Caucus members pitching ideas like sending the legislation back to the Senate with an amendment, which would add steps to the legislative process.
Trump wooed some members with an Oval Office meeting the week of the vote.
And he made another direct appeal at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser dinner: 'You just gotta get there. Close your eyes and get there.'
But when the time of the vote came, enough holdouts remained to stall the vote for hours as fiscal hawk holdouts and leadership talked in a ceremonial room of the House floor.
The air in the hallway outside grew thick with cigar smoke as other members passed the time in the neighboring room — before GOP leaders eventually pulled the vote as negotiations on possible fixes continued.
Emmer, the House GOP Whip, was furious. He wanted to call the deficit hawks' bluff and force a vote that night. Pulling it, he thought, could embolden members to make demands and make leadership look weak. He didn't think ideas like sending an amendment to the Senate was feasible, and didn't attend discussions the rest of the night as Scalise and Johnson remained.
Johnson eventually hatched the idea with the members to hold a press conference the following morning with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to calm their concerns and make public commitments.
Thune stopped short of explicitly committing to the $1.5 trillion number, but said it was his 'ambition' to do so — while some fiscal hawks claimed he made more explicit promises behind the scenes, satisfying them enough to vote to advance the bill while only delaying more clashes on policy.
After House Republicans endured weeks of marathon committee sessions crafting the specifics of their legislation, Trump made a rare and significant journey down Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of a vote on the package before a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline. The two-hour speech was more like a political rally, members said.
But both deficit hawks pushing for even more conservative policies and blue state Republicans seeking a deal to boost the state and local tax deduction (SALT) cap still had issues with the bill — which Harris, the Freedom Caucus chair, made clear to reporters immediately after the meeting.
'The president I don't think convinced enough people that the bill is adequate the way it is,' Harris said.
It wasn't Harris's first dismissal of Trump. The month before, he had turned down an opportunity to go meet with Trump at the White House, saying 'there's nothing I don't understand about this issue.'
White House officials were extremely frustrated by many of the public statements made by House conservatives throughout the process. And in May, their sense was that the Freedom Caucus members were trying to extract too much.
Trump held an intense Oval Office meeting with Freedom Caucus members the next day — where his patience ran out.
The president tore into Harris, multiple sources present and briefed on the meeting said. The president had seen Harris's comments and didn't like them — and told Republicans needed to unite and get the job done.
One member who was in the meeting jokingly described it as 'intense fellowship' — borrowing a favorite phrase of the Speaker.
'The two of us are both pretty passionate about what we believe in,' Harris later said of the exchange.
Both the SALT holdouts and the Freedom Caucus members eventually secured some deals ahead of the vote — a higher $40,000 SALT deduction cap for the blue-staters; speedier phase-in Medicaid work requirements and phase-out of green energy initiatives for the conservatives.
The bill passed with two Republican 'nays'— Massie and Davidson — while Harris, who later said the vote was the hardest one of the whole process, voted 'present.'
While the deficit hawks required the most personal touch from Trump, blue-state Republicans concerned with SALT were some of the toughest nuts to crack. But leaders had a more tangible path to win their votes: A deal to raise the SALT cap.
Weeks of intense negotiation had resulted in a deal between the SALT Republicans and House GOP leaders, but the deal had to face skeptical Senate Republicans, none of whom hail from high-tax blue states.
Trump deputized Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to negotiate with the House moderates and reach a deal that could pass muster in both chambers. Over a 24-hour period in June, members of the SALT Caucus met with Bessent three times in his conference room for 'direct' and 'blunt' conversations. In the end, the group settled on a $40,000 cap for five years, which would snap back to $10,000 after.
Still, when the Senate put its stamp on the legislation over marathon sessions in late June, neither the moderates nor the deficit hawks in the House were happy.
The Senate was forced to strip some provisions that the chamber's parliamentarian found didn't meet the requirements for the budget reconciliation process. It softened reforms on food assistance programs and lessened some rollbacks of green energy initiatives. It didn't follow the dollar-for-dollar framework on cuts. And the chamber approved late-stage deals and carve-outs to win over moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The changes infuriated conservatives.
Moderates, meanwhile, balked at the Senate taking a tougher approach on the provider tax mechanism that states use to extract more Medicaid matching dollars from the federal government. Particularly in rural areas with many Medicaid patients, moderates worried the provision 'jeopardizes the stability of hospitals.'
It was personal assurances from Trump — and from Vice President Vance — that swayed members like Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a practicing physician in rural North Carolina.
Murphy was undecided on the Senate version of the bill for much of the week, but said that Trump on Wednesday gave him assurances that a $50 billion fund intended to give relief to rural hospitals will ensure the transition to implementing reforms goes 'as smooth as possible.' That conversation, he said, helped get him to a yes.
For other moderates like Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a swing-seat member who recently announced he will retire after this term, the main thrust of the bill — tax cuts and a boost to defense spending — were good enough policies to overlook the Medicaid reforms he did not like, a testament to the one-bill strategy keeping the fractious House GOP conference together in the end.
House GOP leaders summoned members back to Washington in what was supposed to be a recess week so they could take up the bill the day after the Senate passed it, rushing to try to meet Trump's Independence Day deadline.
But the deficit hawks threatened to derail that timeline.
Wednesday morning, the Speaker tried to sway the deficit hawks at a meeting a few blocks away from the Capitol. Harris emerged saying nothing changed — warning that members would sink a procedural rule vote to tee up the bill, and that Johnson needed to send changes back to the Senate.
There was nothing else leaders could do. Trump had to close the deal.
Trump summoned the Freedom Caucus members to the White House, meeting with them for around two hours and making significant progress with some.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who that morning had pledged to sink the rule vote, said he would support the bill after assurances from Trump about how the bill would be implemented and additional money-saving actions the administration would take.
Separately, Davidson — who voted no on the initial bill — said he would support it after seeing how mad Democrats were about the bill.
A technical procedural vote stayed open for over seven hours on Wednesday, breaking the record for longest House vote in history, as members went in and out of meetings with more Trump administration officials. Bessent went over revenue projections with members; Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought talked to members about his plan to use executive authority to claw back funding.
Freedom Caucus holdouts said they wanted more time, and votes should resume in the morning. But leaders decided to call their bluff: They started the rule vote at around 9:30 p.m., pledging to hold it open for as long as it took to win over the holdouts, even if it meant all night.
Trump posted furiously on social media: 'What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT'S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!'
Breakthroughs came in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Trump called a group of the holdouts, including Massie and Spartz. Massie suggested he was ready to drop his opposition to support the procedural vote if Trump stopped attacking him (though he ultimately voted against the final bill).
The rest of the holdouts were ready to advance, too — but Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) had left to drive home to his House two hours away to get a change of clothes, and they waited for him to drive back to Washington, D.C. Suggestions from leadership that Perry skip the rule vote and vote yes on the bill were shut down; the holdouts all wanted to flip together.
Johnson prayed with the holdouts — and snapped a picture of them on the House floor.
Bill passage was on the horizon. After a record-breaking, nearly nine-hour speech from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), House Republicans sent the bill to Trump's desk with just two GOP defections: Massie and moderate Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).
The rapid change even surprised Vance, who posted: 'At times I even doubted we'd get it done by July 4!'
Even though the deficit hawks did not get any tangible changes before flipping, they insisted they got new commitments from the administration — and defended their months-long strategy.
'Six months ago, we were being told we'd be lucky to get $300 billion in savings,' said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), policy chair of the Freedom Caucus. 'We kind of threw down, and we're fiscal hawks, and we got $1.6 trillion.'
But everyone agreed that passage wouldn't have happened without the push from Trump.
'President Trump was so generous with his time answering questions himself. Vice President JD Vance was directly engaged. We had cabinet secretaries at a number of different federal agencies answering questions from members,' Johnson said after the bill passed.
One GOP leadership aide said of Trump: 'We needed him.'