Speaker Mike Johnson has been steadfast in his belief that the House would pass President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” by Memorial Day weekend, even as holdouts in his conference called for more time for negotiations and said his timeline was unrealistic.
Turns out, Johnson was right — he just needed Trump’s help to get there.
House Republicans took a victory lap after the bill passed the House early Thursday morning, and they were visibly exhausted as they fled the Capitol. But they all managed to credit one person for getting the bill through: Trump.
“I think we can just say, ‘The Art of the Deal,’” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told NOTUS.
However, “the deal” almost fell flat 24 hours earlier. Between Tuesday and Thursday, there were countless meetings between factions of the Republican conference and the White House. Trump forced the House Freedom Caucus to bend to his will, calling the group’s chair “stupid” at one point. Johnson prayed. No one really slept.
When Trump visited the Capitol on Tuesday, his presence seemed to push members further away from supporting the bill. The bill’s naysayers left the meeting seeming more dug in than ever, making the future uncertain.
Johnson acknowledged as much when he took the podium Thursday morning.
“I’m just going to be very blunt about it: There was a few moments over the last week when it looked like things might fall apart,” Johnson said.
“I went to a little chapel over here, got on my knees and prayed that these guys would have wisdom and stamina and discernment,” he said.
Less than a day earlier, members of the Freedom Caucus stood in that same room, calling for a 10-day delay. They wanted more time for talks with the White House and more time to work out additional spending cuts.
“The bill actually got worse overnight, there is no way it passes today,” Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris told Newsmax on Wednesday morning.
Late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, members of the Freedom Caucus — including Harris — worked with the White House to try to get more spending cuts and policy wins they could boast about. Two White House officials told NOTUS the administration presented the Freedom Caucus with a “menu” of cuts the White House would be willing to review if the votes were there.
When Johnson was informed of the items on the menu, he made clear to the White House he didn’t have the votes for those proposals, one member briefed on the conversation told NOTUS.
Johnson had reached an agreement with the blue state Republicans on the state and local tax deduction, increasing the deduction from $10,000 to $40,000, with a $500,000 income cap, but the extra spending angered conservatives as much as it placated the SALT caucus — more moderate Republicans from blue states.
“Everybody played a role, and the speaker has been a shepherd of sorts trying to get parties within the conference with different interests to agree, and that we got the bill passed today as a credit to his leadership as well as the president’s,” Rep. Nick LaLota told NOTUS after the bill’s passage.
There was no such deal coming for conservatives, and it would take Trump to get them in line.
When Freedom Caucus holdouts met with Trump and GOP leadership at the White House once again Wednesday afternoon, Trump made clear it was time for them to join the team. One White House official told NOTUS Trump was “extremely direct that he wanted this bill to pass.”
According to three sources briefed on the meeting, Trump saved special focus for Harris. At one point, he began pointing his finger and cursing at him, adamant that the Freedom Caucus chair fall in line.
“You’re stupid if you vote against this bill,” Trump told Harris at one point, according to one of the sources.
In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NOTUS that Trump “strongly emphasized his expectation that Republicans work together, respect their fellow members and recognize this is a slim majority, which means every vote counts and the party must remain unified.” Leavitt added that “the President made clear he expects ALL Republicans to work together in good faith.”
When asked about the events in the White House, a spokesperson for the Freedom Caucus and Harris said, “Congressman Harris has an excellent relationship with the President and he expects that to be part of any high stakes negotiations.”
In the end, conservatives were able to get provisions to nix a firearm suppressor tax in the manager’s amendment — something they had asked for repeatedly — and they were able to codify some earlier adjustments that leaders had agreed to in theory. Most notably, they moved up the Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied recipients from January 2029 to December 2026, and they pushed up a wind down of Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for wind, solar and battery power.
But leading up to the early morning vote, members of the Freedom Caucus were still trying to tank the bill. These conservatives were calling and texting other members, including moderates who had voiced skepticism about the bill due to Medicaid cuts and other provisions, trying to see if there was an appetite for sinking the legislation, one GOP member and another source familiar with the matter told NOTUS. There was none.
“Freedom Caucus Members are the biggest supporters of the President, and I am unaware of any of that going on,” the Freedom Caucus spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement.
Harris would tell Politico after the vote that the Freedom Caucus also got Trump to agree to “executive order efforts” to combat “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.
But other than those concessions, it became clear during the White House meeting that major changes to the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, which governs how much the federal government covers for Medicaid enrollees, would not be touched, and per capita caps on Medicaid weren’t happening either. The Freedom Caucus wanted both.
Trump and GOP leaders wouldn’t budge and the president made it clear he expected the Freedom Caucus to support the bill anyway.
When lawmakers came back to the Hill, leaders suggested they were moving ahead with a vote as soon as they could. The Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, was quiet.
Conservatives met in Harris’ office and to discuss their options. As one senior GOP aide told NOTUS, “Basically, the HFC is meeting right now to decide what they are going to say got them to ‘yes.’”
Rep. Chip Roy, one of the most outspoken opponents to the reconciliation bill, left the meeting without saying anything at all.
It was clear then just by the tone of GOP leaders — and the silence of the Freedom Caucus — that most members were now onboard.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters he was “very confident that we’re going to keep this bill moving tonight.”
In the end, Republicans did just that, passing the bill 215-214 just before 7 a.m., with only two Republican “no” votes and one “present” vote from Rep. Andy Harris.
Harris said his “present” vote was solely to “move the bill along in the process for the president.”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who had predicted earlier in the week that the Freedom Caucus would cave, slammed his Republican colleagues for their earlier vocal opposition.
“Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, some other folks, need to understand they’re not the president. They’re just not. And Donald J.Trump is,” he told NOTUS.
“Same actors, same movie, same ending. That was political theater,” Van Orden said.
Rep. Keith Self, one of the Freedom Caucus holdouts who slammed the legislation earlier in the day on CNN, was the last person to cast his vote before the gavel went down.
“We all made our individual decisions and talked about it, and frankly said, ‘We’ve made a great difference here. We have! We have fought the good fight,’” he said.
“At the end of the day, we got as much as we could get. We supported the president’s agenda,” Self told NOTUS.
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Daniella Diaz and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.