TRUMP ON SCHUMER, SPEAKER JOHNSON, AND “HARD NO” REPUBLICANS. No matter what else President Donald Trump has on his to-do list — negotiate peace in Ukraine, impose or not impose tariffs, ride herd on the Department of Government Efficiency — there is still a huge question in his near future: What about the Big Beautiful Bill? Some version of a reconciliation measure has to pass Congress for Trump’s 2017 tax cuts to be extended, for money for a border wall to be approved, for energy production — a lot of things that are important to the Trump agenda.
It was on the president’s mind during a lunchtime conversation at the White House on Tuesday, even after spending the morning negotiating Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But before getting to the big bill, there was the matter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who has had to cancel his book tour to avoid facing protesters angry about his acquiescence to a Republican spending bill.
“I think the Democrats have lost their confidence,” Trump said. “And I must tell you, the Schumer thing shocks me.” When I asked whether Trump was shocked by the Democratic flip-out over or by the fact that Schumer caved on the bill, Trump responded, “I don’t think he caved. I think he did what was actually a very good thing to do from the standpoint of the country. And I think the other side is more radical than him.”
Trump said he knew instantly that Schumer was risking his job given the “maniacs” and “lunatics” in the left wing of the Democratic Party. But beyond that, in Schumer’s troubles, Trump saw his own agenda suddenly become more difficult to enact. “It’s going to make it much harder for us to do deals in the future because he got clobbered,” Trump said. “And sadly, it’s a really bad thing for the country. Because of that, I think it’s going to be harder for him to do anything. He’s not going to be able to do the right thing. It’s going to make it harder for him to do what’s right for the country.”
And then there are the House Republicans. We talked about how the GOP, which literally had a one-vote majority a few weeks ago, will soon be in a stronger position. First, I mentioned that two House Democrats had recently died, leaving those seats open for a while, and then the president noted that two Republicans would soon be elected in a special election in Florida. That will give the GOP a somewhat stronger majority.
But the party can still be susceptible to mini-revolts by small numbers of GOP members who disagree with this or that measure favored by the White House and the great majority of Republicans. Most prominent among those holdouts is Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has emerged as a thorn in the Republicans’ side, voting against the party at key moments when every vote was important. “He’s a grandstander,” Trump said of Massie. “It’s so horrible to do that because you play right into their hands, you know? I mean, not everything’s going to be perfect, but all it was was an extension. And what’s the alternative? The alternative is that they would then take over the bill and kill you. So what’s the purpose of doing it except for grandstanding?”
But these days, with Trump, grandstanding doesn’t work. What has been extraordinary about the House this session is the astonishing voting discipline among Republicans. They have won votes by staying together when they couldn’t afford to lose more than one or two members. How did that happen? Everybody agrees there is a strong Trump Effect. When a Republican lawmaker is thinking about holding out on this or that vote, he gets a call from the president and, bingo, the vote changes to a yes.
How does that happen? Is Trump strong-arming them? Making threats? Playing hardball? I asked him about the recent House vote to pass the spending bill — the one that caused so much trouble for Schumer in the Senate. “We got 100% of the Republicans, less one grandstander,” Trump said. How?
“We had 10 holdouts,” Trump recalled. “They [the GOP leadership] called them ‘hard no’s,’ but they said would you try anyway? So I called the first one. He said, ‘You’ve got my vote, sir.’ I said how do you know what I was going to ask? ‘Well, I knew what you were asking,’ he said, ‘you’ve got my vote. I’m with you all the way.’ Thank you. Call up the next one. ‘Sir, you have my vote.’ Next one, ‘Sir—’ I got all 10.”
“So you didn’t have to do a lot of persuading?” I asked. “They just wanted to be talked to,” Trump said. It was enough to build an almost unanimous majority. By the way, the president did not call Massie.
Trump had high praise for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). “The good thing about him, he’s a great guy, he’s a good politician, a smart guy,” Trump said. “He’s a truly nice person — the only one that just doesn’t have enemies.” For those who say Johnson is insufficiently conservative, the president added, “You know, you can’t be crazy on the issues when you have that majority.” Which, he noted, is soon to get a little bigger.
I asked Trump to think back to his dealings with the House at the beginning of his first term in 2017. Back then, under Speaker Paul Ryan, the GOP had a solid majority, 241 votes, which is 20 more than it has today. Yet Trump had a hard time pushing his priorities.
“Paul Ryan was a disaster for the House,” Trump said. “First of all, he promised me the wall, if I held up the year before. And he lied to me. Him and Mitch [McConnell] said, if you approve the budget, my first budget, we’ll give you the wall next year. And he lied. I had to take it out of the military.”
Now things are different. Ryan is no longer in the House. McConnell is no longer the GOP leader in the Senate. Most of the Republicans in both houses who opposed Trump the first time around are gone too. The president has assumed full leadership of the Republican Party. Of course Democrats will try to stop him. Of course he faces enormous hurdles. But Republicans are finally united behind him.