President Donald Trump used a set of well-worn tactics to get the House to pass his “big, beautiful bill”: sugar in the form of praise and salt in the form of threats of primary challenges to any Republican holdouts.
But the next phase of getting his massive domestic policy bill passed could be harder, simply because Republican senators aren’t quite the same as Republican House members. They don’t have the same blind loyalty to the president. Maybe even more importantly, they have longer term limits.
“I could care less about a primary,” Sen. Ron Johnson told NOTUS just hours after the bill passed the House. “It’s just not going to work. It works in the House, it doesn’t work here. I’m concerned about my children and grandchildren. I’m not concerned about President Trump’s reaction.”
It’s that reality the White House faces as Trump and his team prepare for another round of negotiations. Officials say they believe they’re going into the next round of talks with the wind at their backs.
“Look, we’re just getting started in the Senate. Our focus has been on the House,” Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters Thursday at the White House, skirting questions of what the next steps look like.
The reconciliation bill, which is more than 1,000 pages long, makes policy changes in almost every area imaginable. Chiefly, its purpose is to permanently extend Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In the process, Republican lawmakers made cuts to Medicaid, repealed Biden’s clean energy tax credits and allocated additional funding for the border. Nonpartisan groups estimate the bill would add trillions of dollars to the deficit over 10 years, a major sticking point for fiscally conservative senators, though the White House disputes the estimates.
One White House official told NOTUS their approach to getting the bill across the finish line in the Senate won’t be dissimilar to what it was over the past few weeks as they worked to get it through the House
“Everyone feels confident about where this is heading,” they said, adding that negotiations are always part of the process with such legislation.
But after this week’s House roller coaster, where it looked like a deal was dead in the water only to be resurrected, any outcome is far from secure. What’s likely is the president leveraging his power to exert concessions from a more unpredictable group of lawmakers. Trump, in both terms, has not shied away from using the power of his presidency, the pomp of Air Force One rides and the occasional dressing-down to get high-priority bills to his desk.
“The single most effective whip we have on Capitol Hill is President Donald J. Trump,” Sen. Steve Daines said.
The Senate has already shown Trump the limits to his power. The chamber is the site of Trump’s biggest policy disappointment of his first term, when his attempt to unwind and rewrite the Affordable Care Act got stomped out by Republican opponents.
But that was 2017; Trump has only consolidated his hold over the Republican Party in the years since. Despite all of the Senate’s bluster of independence, the chamber has largely upheld the president’s most controversial actions and nominations so far — only bucking former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general while buckling under pressure to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And Republican senators have (mostly) been willing to cede Trump power on tariffs and spending cuts as the president and his allies seek to expand executive power.
The Republican senators who spoke with NOTUS said they want Trump to have an active voice in negotiations on the reconciliation bill, a reflection of the president’s hold on his party. And they want to get to a yes.
“We all have a common goal here. We don’t want taxes to go up on the American people next year, and we’ve got to be able to reduce spending. So that’s [Trump’s] goal as well,” Sen. James Lankford said.
Trump showed off his tactics with a flourish this week, as the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson sought to corral defiant Republican members who wanted conflicting changes to the reconciliation bill. In a closed-door meeting Tuesday on Capitol Hill, the president sparred with his party and told members to effectively get in line.
While there wasn’t a clear immediate breakthrough, a Trump aide told NOTUS at the time that it was going according to plan.
“He knows exactly what he’s doing,” they said.
During a separate Wednesday meeting with House conservative skeptics at the White House, two sources told NOTUS the president was laser focused on Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the House Freedom Caucus. Trump was pointing and cursing at him with one message in mind: fall in line. Harris voted “present” on the bill on Thursday morning, allowing it to pass.
After the bill passed, the White House official said Trump’s visit was the most significant moment in negotiations with Hill members to date for the simple fact that “he doesn’t make trips to the Hill often.”
Now though, some Republican senators insist the bill the House passed is going nowhere without changes, and the White House and Trump will just have to come along.
“Listen, the Senate will write its own version of this, so to speak. I’m sure there’ll be all kinds of tweaks and adjustments,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, who spoke to Trump on Wednesday night as the House continued to negotiate its version. “His comments to me were, ‘Don’t cut Medicaid.’ He said he thought we ought to revisit the carried interest loophole and close it, which I think is a wise idea. So, you know, I think he’s given us some direction there.”
Senators have no shortage of changes they want the White House and president to weigh in on as the process unwinds.
“I want [Trump] to get serious about the return to pre-pandemic-level spending, which he’s not yet. And this is literally rhetoric versus reality. I’m going to force reality into the conversation here in the Senate,” Johnson said.
Sen. Thom Tillis had a longer list, including addressing the House’s rollback of clean energy credits.
“We have work that we need to do on some of the timeline and scope on the production and investment tax credits in the IRA paid-for provisions, and we probably still need to do a little bit more work on finding savings to get closer to deficit neutral,” he said.
But Republican senators who spoke with NOTUS on Thursday maintained none of this can be done without the president.
“Well, he’s the closer,” Sen. John Cornyn said. “We’ll need him to close for us as well. But I think it’s going to take us a few days to muster our 51 votes together.”
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. Violet Jira, Em Luetkemeyer and Torrence Banks are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. NOTUS reporters Daniella Diaz, Oriana González and Reese Gorman contributed reporting.