President Donald Trump was only a few hours into a marathon flight from Abu Dhabi on Friday when he sent a crystal-clear message to Capitol Hill: Tidy up the house, kids, because dad’s coming home from his big work trip.
Or, translated into Trump-ese, “Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’ … STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”
It soon became clear Air Force One couldn’t land fast enough.
While Trump spent the week hob-nobbing with crown princes, emirs and titans of industry, Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans were watching Trump’s legislative agenda run slowly aground. Less than two hours after Trump sent his message, a clutch of hard-line conservatives joined with Democrats to tank a key House Budget Committee vote on Trump’s big tax, border and defense bill.
It was the latest demonstration that while Johnson and fellow GOP leaders might be within striking distance of advancing the “big, beautiful bill,” Trump remains the essential ingredient to getting anything done on Capitol Hill.
So after a five-day, eight-time-zone hiatus, expect the closer to start closing. The coming week, no doubt, will see a flurry of holdouts shuffling back and forth from the Capitol to the White House, not to mention an angry phone call or 20.
“My assumption is Trump’s going to get involved — I don’t know what that looks like yet,” a senior GOP aide, who like others was granted anonymity to speak frankly about behind-the-scenes conversations, told me Friday afternoon.
Don’t expect the president to be happy about it. The view on Air Force One, according to a senior White House aide, was that Johnson & Co. need to step up their own game and get their membership in line. The person said in a text that the president is “always willing to make calls” but that “Republicans on the Hill need to figure their shit out.”
Frustrations inside the MAGA-sphere have been mounting for some time at Johnson’s seeming inability to find a path forward without leaning on Trump. It’s long been assumed that Johnson won’t have the political juice to push this legislation through on his own.
“You think the president likes being the president and the speaker’s babysitter?” as Ohio Rep. Max Miller, a former Trump aide, told NOTUS amid last month’s budget haggling.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said as much in a stern statement issued shortly after the failed budget vote, betraying little patience for the antics from the handful of hard-right holdouts: “The White House expects ALL Republicans to vote for this bill and successfully pass it through Committee in the near future.”
To be fair to Johnson, he’s dealing with a historically small House majority and a staggeringly complex piece of legislation. Just about any time he tries to assuage conservatives who are ideologically closer to the House GOP’s center of gravity, he repels moderates who gave Republicans their majority, and vice versa. Furthermore, presidents have always served as dealmakers of last resort in any tricky Hill negotiation
But there was real annoyance Friday at how this particular implosion had played out. It was long expected that ultraconservatives would flex their muscle — likely in the House Rules Committee, where they hold a key bloc of votes.
Instead, the showdown that was expected next week, with Trump back in town, played out as the president was wrapping up his Middle East tour. To many Republicans’ chagrin, Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) pressed forward with the failed vote Friday in spite of the obvious opposition, believing it would be best to put the holdouts on the record.
One senior Republican official expressed frustration that the episode not only made the conservatives look bad for blocking the bill, but also Trump and Johnson for suggesting they don’t have control over the process.
Friday’s budget-panel implosion was, in some ways, months in the making. As I wrote in January, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and fellow fiscal hawks have been on a collision course with a president who cares more about notching wins than curbing deficits. While hard-liners view the megabill as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reduce spending, Trump sees it as a vehicle to deliver on his campaign promises — including tax cuts and money for the Pentagon and immigration enforcement — ahead of a midterm cycle he’s increasingly obsessed with.
Trump should be worried that Roy & Co. are making demands that will be hard to meet and hard to walk back. Roy said Friday the bill “falls profoundly short” and “does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits.”
“I’m not going to sit here and say that everything is hunky-dory when this is the Budget Committee,” he steamed. “We are supposed to do something to actually result in a balanced budget. But we’re not.”
He’s set against centrists and even some MAGA loyalists who are extremely wary of cutting too deeply into the social safety net. Sen. Josh Hawley — not exactly a moderate squish — blasted the House bill and vowed not to support legislation that harms working-class families.
“They’re not on Medicaid because they want to be — they’re on Medicaid because they cannot afford health insurance in the private market,” Hawley told CNN this week, contradicting careful GOP messaging about how the cuts would only affect the “able-bodied” who should not be on benefit rolls.
Aside from Medicaid, GOP leaders are scrambling to deal with blue-district Republicans who are insisting on hiking the cap on the state-and-local-tax deduction, red-state members who fear their state budgets are at risk and farm-state types who want to preserve at least some Biden-era clean energy incentives.
This has mostly been Johnson’s problem to solve, and he and other GOP leaders have tried to be sensitive to not pulling Trump in too early to fix their problems. There’s an internal understanding that they need to do most of the cleanup on their own before calling dad and tattling on the naughty kids.
There’s other levers they can pull on, too. Vice President JD Vance has helped resolve some thorny Hill matters, and members of the president’s inner circle have perfected the art of dogging Republicans who stand in their way with online pressure campaigns.
Don’t be surprised in the coming days when the White House activates allies on the outside while Trump employs the inside game to move people to “yes.” Indeed, the Trump administration official whom I texted with Friday warned obstructionists they’ll pay a price.
“Voters gave them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass a good bill,” the person said. “And for those who vote against, they should know their careers are in jeopardy.”
