President Donald Trump left a meeting with the Republican caucus Tuesday morning predicting a great victory.
His trek to the U.S. Capitol came as GOP leaders try to get his “big, beautiful bill” passed in the House this week.
Speaker Mike Johnson, whose party holds a slim majority, has been trying to stitch together a bill that can deliver on Trump’s agenda while threading the needle between his far right faction, his swing seat members, and others in the caucus, as the different factions seek opposing changes to the bill.
“Anybody that didn’t support [the bill] as a Republican, I would consider to be a fool,” Trump told the press as he left the Capitol. “It’s a great bill.”
Many Republicans came out of the meeting saying Trump did a good job in trying to close the deal with the two main differing factions.
Colorado Springs Rep. Jeff Crank said Trump’s message was one of unity, “talking about how we got to get this done.”
Crank was hopeful that it moved some of the Republican holdouts. “I hope people understand that it’s important to the country. We don’t want a tax increase on the American people. We want to make sure that we cut waste, fraud and abuse out of the system. And the president was pretty clear, he doesn't want to cut benefits to Medicaid recipients either.”
The package would extend the Trump tax cuts to individuals, institute new ones, roll back Biden-era clean energy tax incentives, make cuts to social safety net programs like SNAP and Medicaid, and raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion dollars. It also increases both the deficit and the debt.
House Freedom Caucus members and other fiscal hawks have complained that the bill raises the deficit and doesn’t do enough to lower spending. Members of the Freedom Caucus, in particular, have been pushing for structural changes to Medicaid.
Meanwhile, blue state Republicans have been pushing for a large increase to the state and local tax deduction, currently capped at $10,000.
“President Trump is very firm on this bill passing and it being a good product,” said Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert as she left the meeting.
Boebert added Trump had two clear messages to the holdouts. “He said he doesn’t want to lift the SALT cap at all. He said, ‘Don't touch it.’”
The other message: don’t touch Medicaid. The changes and cuts proposed in the bill have already been used to attack Republicans, as it is expected to boot millions of current recipients off the program. Trump seemed to push back on any further reductions that would cause even more people to lose coverage.
Boebert said the bill will go after “waste, fraud and abuse,” without cutting off people who need it. And she described stricter work requirements as part of that effort.
"I think subsidizing able-bodied Americans is waste, fraud and abuse," she said. But Boebert did not directly answer whether she thinks the bill as it stands will satisfy her fellow House Freedom Caucus members, who have said they do not support the bill as it currently stands.
HFC Chair Rep. Andy Harris left the meeting saying more work needed to be done. “The President, I don’t think, convinced enough people that the bill is adequate the way it is. [He] called for eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid, and we have not.”
But GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, who has long been a no vote on this bill as he seeks deeper spending cuts and actual debt reduction, thinks it will pass. “I predict that the president persuaded the Freedom Caucus and the blue state Republicans to give up their fights and go along.”
Republicans can only afford three no votes to get reconciliation through the House.
Republican leaders are moving forward with the bill. The Rules Committee is scheduled to meet late tonight — technically 1 a.m. Wednesday morning — on the bill. It’s the last committee hurdle to bringing the bill to the floor, even as policy changes remain to be hammered out.
Still, Johnson was optimistic the reconciliation package could be voted on as soon as Wednesday night, and pass the chamber before his self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day.
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