Speaker Mike Johnson was counting on President Donald Trump to be the closer, to swoop in at the final hour, as he’s done time and again, and flip holdouts.
“The president’s a deal maker, he’s a closer, he’s a catalyst,” Rep. Nick LaLota, one of the more moderate Republicans who remains opposed to the reconciliation bill over the state and local tax deduction, said of Trump.
But if GOP leaders were counting on Trump to win over the more-than-a-dozen Republicans who say they won’t vote for this bill in its current form — and make no mistake: that’s exactly what leaders were hoping for on Tuesday — then Trump’s performance was a letdown.
Instead of settling questions and putting reservations at ease, Trump’s closed-door meeting with Republicans exacerbated concerns.
Johnson was hoping to hold a floor vote on Wednesday, believing that Trump’s private meetings and some additional concessions could get Republicans within striking distance. Now, it’s unclear when Republicans will vote, though Johnson is holding out hope that it could happen tomorrow, maybe this week, perhaps soon after.
“We gotta tie up a few loose ends, and I know where the loose ends are, so we’re going to work on that,” Johnson said Tuesday.
Among the loose ends are additional Medicaid cuts to placate conservatives and an even greater SALT deduction to appease blue-state Republicans. But both factions — the SALT Caucus and the Freedom Caucus — left Trump’s meeting on Tuesday even further from yes than before.
“Frankly, I think it pushed everybody back,” one GOP member told NOTUS. “It was like one step forward, two steps back.”
By Tuesday afternoon, it was clear Trump had failed to be the House GOP’s “closer.” In fact, with more than a dozen holdouts still publicly opposing the legislation, it wasn’t clear that Trump’s meeting had changed any minds. The conference appeared so fractured that one GOP lawmaker openly wished they had former Speaker Nancy Pelosi on their side to whip Republicans into shape.
“You got to give it to Nancy Pelosi, you really do,” Rep. Troy Nehls said. “Because it just didn’t appear that the Democrats had these types of conversations and distractions.”
“Nancy Pelosi would pretty much threaten people and say, ‘We’ll primary,’” Nehls added.
Of course, Trump has threatened to fund primary challengers for those Republicans who oppose his agenda. He reaffirmed that threat for Rep. Thomas Massie on Tuesday, and the threat has seemed to loom over Rep. Chip Roy, one of the leading Freedom Caucus negotiators, throughout this process.
During the meeting on Tuesday, Trump also name-checked moderate Rep. Mike Lawler — one of the leading SALT advocates — claiming he knows Lawler’s New York district “better than you do.”
“And if you lose because of SALT, you were going to lose anyway,” Trump said.
But that approach doesn’t seem to have worked. At least, not yet.
As Rep. Andrew Garbarino told NOTUS, lawmakers still have issues with the Medicaid provisions, the SNAP provisions and the Freedom Caucus has a number of unresolved reservations.
The problem is, Trump seemed to make a pitch for a bill that is very different from the one currently under consideration. He told Republicans he didn’t want Medicaid cuts beyond rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.
“Don’t fuck around with Medicaid,” Trump said, according to a source in the room.
But the bill would take an ax to Medicaid, cutting more than $700 billion from the program in 10 years, with conservatives advocating for hundreds of billions more in cuts.
The Republicans who want even more cuts suggested they could defensibly do so in the name of waste, fraud and abuse, with former Freedom Caucus chair Andy Biggs even arguing that cutting the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage — which governs how much the federal government covers for Medicaid recipients — was still in play because of Trump’s directive.
“I think waste and abuse are fairly broad terms,” Biggs told NOTUS.
Meanwhile, Johnson has been clear that FMAP is off the table, and moderates interpreted Trump’s words as a clear endorsement of their position that the Medicaid cuts in the bill should be toned down, not beefed up.
“Some members want to go farther on Medicaid cuts, but the president completely shut the door on that this morning,” one senior GOP aide told NOTUS. “So I don’t know how we can possibly go further.”
But Freedom Caucus members are still pushing for more.
“As long as we stay within the parameters of the ‘abuse,’ I think we’re in line with the president, what he wants to see happen,” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Ogles — who is currently opposed to the bill — told NOTUS. “Now it’s a matter of tinkering with the math to get it done.”
Republicans just aren’t on the same page. And it’s more of the same with SALT.
“When you look at California and New York, they’re abusing the system,” Ogles said. “There’s loopholes that need to be closed.”
But if one corner of the Republican conference was interpreting Trump’s statements about SALT one way, another corner was interpreting them in the completely opposite way.
Five blue-state Republicans, who LaLota dubbed as the “OG SALT folks,” published a statement Tuesday afternoon saying they “share President Trump’s fundamental call for unity.”
But LaLota told reporters, “Nothing that’s been in any bill or presented at any meeting comes close to something that we can all sell back home.”
“I hope that the president’s presence in conference today focuses my leadership to present a deal we can say yes to,” he said.
And yet, Trump seemed to express frustration with the SALT advocates, suggesting they should take the deal in front of them.
Still, leadership and its allies remain bullish that they can persuade the holdouts.
“We have seen this movie before,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden told NOTUS.
“I know how it’s going to end,” he added. “It’s going to end by this bill being passed.”
The “movie” Van Orden is referencing is the one where holdouts suggest they can’t possibly get to yes — only for Trump to come in and persuade the opposition at the last minute. That’s what happened just hours before the House took up its budget resolution in April; dozens of Republican opponents remained. But as the clock ticked toward a holiday weekend and Trump started lobbying lawmakers directly, only two members actually voted no.
And as Tuesday progressed, there seemed to be some movement with the SALT holdouts.
LaLota told reporters they had “actually gotten into some nitty gritty” numbers and things were moving in the right direction. “We’re closer than we’ve previously been,” LaLota said. “We appreciate President Trump’s involvement in having accelerated this process.”
Even on a day that hadn’t gone how leadership had planned, allies were still projecting confidence.
“I do believe we will get there,” Jodey Arrington, chair of the House Budget Committee, told NOTUS. “We’re not not talking about 100 issues; we’re talking about just a handful.”
But those handful of issues require balancing. For every change leaders make to mollify conservatives, moderates get more dissatisfied and require more concessions. That, in turn, requires more adjustments to soothe conservatives.
Leaders were hoping that Trump would tell Republicans to put their pencils down and vote yes. By wading into the policies, however, and misinterpreting what the bill actually does, Republican holdouts seem to think the House is further from a final product than before. And if that’s the case, everything is up for negotiation.
Still, leadership allies were already resorting to an old strategy: Paint the opposition as anti-Trump.
As Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said, if the holdouts “want to bring down the Trump presidency, they can.”
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Riley Rogerson, Daniella Diaz and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.