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President Donald Trump’s second-term success rests in large part on signing his megabill as soon as possible. He’s acting accordingly.
At the heart of Trump’s ugly row with former right-hand man Elon Musk is the Tesla CEO’s public lambasting of the “big, beautiful” legislation. Beyond that, the president is laboring behind the scenes to quell dissent while publicly lobbying GOP senators in meetings, gaggles and his social media feed, even amidst the battle with Musk.
Trump’s team is working furiously to keep the bill going on other fronts, too: seeking to discredit Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper while savaging Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for resisting the bill and its debt ceiling increase.
After a shock-and-awe run of asserting executive power — much of it now tied up in the courts — Trump’s full attention is now on the Capitol, where lawmaking is in short supply this year. It’s an acknowledgment that his fate, and his party’s in the midterms, is now inextricably linked to the megabill.
“Failure would be not just a blow to the country and economically, but also a blow politically to all of us. We won’t fail,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., a member of party leadership, told Semafor. She spoke recently to Trump, saying of his role: “He knows his powers of persuasion are pretty strong.”
Other than rollbacks of Biden-era regulations and a handful of other bills, the Republican Congress has not produced much for Trump to sign. In part that’s by design, since Trump always wanted his top priorities stitched together into one piece of legislation.
It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy. His second-term legacy is now in the hands of the Senate’s 53-seat majority; it’s going to take a lot of muscle for him to get the bill through, whether that’s by July 4, as his team wants, or deeper into the year.
“He wants his deal closed,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who met privately with Trump earlier this week to discuss Scott’s pursuit of steeper spending cuts.
“I want to get a bill done. I want to get the economy going,” Scott said, signaling he’s ready to get to yes despite conservative frustration with the megabill’s deficit impact. “I like his agenda, but I want to balance the budget.”
Trump’s work is starting to pay some dividends on the gargantuan legislation, which touches everything from tax cuts to health care to artificial intelligence, a sprawling legislative patchwork that is both difficult to explain and easy for Democrats to attack.
The president is clearly quieting one of the loudest critics of the effort, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. Johnson spoke to Trump privately this week and attended a White House meeting on Wednesday with Senate Finance Committee Republicans.
The Wisconsinite said it’s apparent that Trump was paying close attention to his media tour trashing the bill; Trump told Finance panel Republicans that Democrats are comparatively united compared to the GOP.
“I’m taking to heart that he’d like me to be a little more positive. I think that’s appropriate. There’s a lot of good stuff in the bill; it doesn’t increase taxes,” Johnson said of finding more spending cuts. “I probably have been too negative.”
Scott said he’s open to finding spending cuts through other means, like next year’s government funding talks — though that will be tough to achieve given how much leverage Democrats are likely to have. And Johnson said he understands it’s not realistic to completely bend the deficit curve all on one bill.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa said Trump’s talks with senators are too sensitive to even talk about.
“I don’t think I can comment on any of that stuff,” Grassley said of Wednesday’s Finance panel confab. “They don’t even let us take our telephones into that meeting.”
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Among Senate Republican critics of the House-passed megabill, Trump has largely kept his fire trained on Paul. The libertarian-leaning Kentuckian has drawn rhetorical fire from Trump’s staff and Trump himself, who called Paul’s ideas “crazy.” (Paul has also amplified Musk’s criticisms of the bill.)
Trump and Paul had a private conversation last week about the bill. Asked if the tenor was more cordial than the president’s public fusillades, Paul responded it “was about the same.”
On the other side of the spectrum are Republicans who dislike some of the House-passed bill’s changes to Medicaid. That camp includes Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who speaks to Trump frequently about avoiding benefit cuts, and moderate Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
Murkowski said Thursday she’s in close contact with the administration and Senate Majority Leader John Thune about her state’s issues with implementing work requirements and eligibility verification for Medicaid.
“Folks in the administration and the president himself know that I’m going to make sure that Alaska’s interests are represented,” Murkowski said. “If it works for Alaska, he’s not going to need to pressure me.”
The View From The White House
The White House official affirmed the administration’s media strategy is almost entirely focused on the bill, from TV hits to press calls to lobbying individual members.
“The president is very confident about where this bill is headed. Obviously there’s a process that has to take place, but the entire team feels good about where this is going,” the official said.
Burgess’s view
Trump wooed House holdouts to support the bill during a visit to the Capitol and a meeting at the White House. Senators don’t succumb as easily to strong-arming; they serve six-year terms, meaning that some will next appear on a ballot after Trump leaves office.
The good news for Trump is he can lose three of them and still pass the bill. If he continues making progress on the party’s right flank, and if Thune can quell moderates’ Medicaid concerns, Trump could have the bill on his desk by August recess or even before.
Senators are split on whether they can hit the White House’s July 4 target, but leaders always try to set aspirational goals to motivate their members.
Then Republicans can move on to a similarly herculean task: Building a midterm campaign around tax cuts and defending Democrats’ attacks on their health care changes.
Room for Disagreement
No amount of presidential fury or social-media posts is likely to dislodge Paul from his central case against the megabill: it increases the debt ceiling.
“They say you’re not over the target if you’re not getting flak,” Paul told Semafor on Thursday. “There’s one inescapable fact of this bill: If you raise the debt ceiling $5 trillion, you are responsible … this is no longer Biden spending, this is Republican spending.”
A White House official said the reason the president has focused solely on Paul is it appears he’s “the only one who can’t be moved on it.” Still, Paul has left the door open to supporting the bill if Trump and GOP leaders remove the debt limit increase.
That’s a victory of sorts in itself: Paul is among the least likely Republicans to succumb to pressure from Trump. Dating back to the president’s first term, Paul was often a lonely “no” on his priorities and some of his nominees.
Shelby Talcott contributed to this report.