U.S. Sen. Susan Collins skipped former President Donald Trump’s Thursday meeting with Republicans as the party tries to put up a united front entering the November rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.
It was Trump’s first time meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill since the riots of Jan. 6, 2021. Despite pending federal charges against him for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and his recent guilty verdict in New York, he arrived emboldened as the party’s presumptive nominee.
A packed room of House Republicans sang “Happy Birthday” to Trump at a private breakfast meeting at the Republican campaign headquarters across the street from the Capitol. Trump and his most prominent Republican critic, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, shook hands and fist-bumped.
“There’s tremendous unity in the Republican Party,” Trump said in brief remarks at Senate Republican headquarters.
Many of Trump’s former critics within the party have been alienated or driven from office. Of the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over Jan. 6 and convict him on the charge of inciting the insurrection, only a few remain in office.
One of them is Collins, a Republican who said last year she is not voting for Trump in November. Neither she nor her centrist ally, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, attended the meeting. A Collins spokesperson cited a private appointment that Collins did not change because it was a campaign meeting, and she is “not involved in the presidential campaign.”
As Washington was buzzing over the Trump summit, her office sent out a news release on the senator’s meeting a day earlier with the R&B singer Usher on Type 1 diabetes screenings.
Trump spent about an hour each with House and Senate Republicans delivering free-wheeling remarks, fielding questions and discussing issues from Russia to immigration and tax cuts. During the morning session, Trump said House Speaker Mike Johnson is doing a “terrific job,” according to a Republican in the private meeting and granted anonymity to discuss it.
Many potential priorities for a new White House administration are being formulated by a constellation of outside groups, including Project 2025, laying the groundwork for executive and legislative actions, though Trump has made clear he has his own agenda.
But Trump’s private meetings with House and Senate Republicans so close to the Capitol were infused with the symbolism of his return as the U.S. president who threatened the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
“It’s frustrating,” said former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who made his own unsuccessful run for Congress as a Maryland Democrat in the aftermath of Jan. 6, the day when police engaged in hand-to-hand fighting to stop Trump supporters who stormed the building in an effort to overturn Biden’s election.
Thursday afternoon offered the first encounter in years between Trump and McConnell, who once blamed Trump for the “disgraceful” attack that he called an “insurrection” but now endorses the party’s presumptive nominee.
Trump addressed the situation directly, saying he intends to work with everyone and that McConnell had “done his best” as leader, said Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, an ally of the former president.
Making Jan. 6 a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, Trump celebrates those who stormed the Capitol as “warriors” and “patriots,” and he has vowed to pardon any number of the more than 1,200 people charged with crimes for the assault on the seat of U.S. democracy.
Moreover, Trump has vowed to seek retribution by ousting officials at the U.S. Justice Department, which is prosecuting him in a four-count indictment to overturn the election ahead of the Jan. 6 attack and another case over storing classified documents at his Florida home.
Republicans, particularly in the House but increasingly in the Senate, are vigorously following his lead, complaining of an unfair justice system. It’s having noticeable results: the House and Senate Republican campaign arms scored some of their highest fundraising periods yet after a jury found him guilty in the New York hush money case.
BDN writers Michael Shepherd and Billy Kobin and Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Farnoush Amiri, Kevin Freking, Mary Clare Jalonick and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.
