President Donald Trump swooped in this week to help Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) deliver his sprawling tax legislation through the House of Representatives.
Republicans passed Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” with just one vote to spare early Thursday morning, and the president himself met with holdouts in the House on both Tuesday and Wednesday to seal the deal. A small chorus of Republicans had voiced opposition to the bill for a variety of reasons, including the federal cap on state and local tax deductions, spending reductions to Medicaid, and the overarching impact the legislation would have on the federal deficit.
The White House publicly projected confidence following both of those meetings, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that Trump “moved the ball in the right direction” during his Wednesday afternoon sitdown.
“There were a lot of good faith negotiations in the Republican conference leading up to the final passage, but as always, President Trump came in at the end to bring all sides together and get this deal done,” she added during Thursday’s White House briefing, touting the legislation’s tax cuts.
Johnson similarly called Trump’s involvement Wednesday night “incredibly helpful” and predicted that the president would be “fully engaged” in the ensuing negotiations with Senate Republicans. Johnson has been on a winning streak this year with Trump in the White House and backing him repeatedly to muscle through a series of very tough votes on the slimmest of majorities.
“President Trump is the ultimate deal maker,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement. “We are proud of The One Big Beautiful Bill’s passage today in the House and he looks forward to this momentum continuing in the Senate.”
Senior White House officials and congressional Republicans told the Washington Examiner that, behind closed doors, Trump employed both carrots and sticks to flip the requisite votes.
“The president is the best closer you can possibly have,” one White House official said of this week’s talks. “He heard their arguments, which were all fair, but at the end of the day, he stood his ground, and the bill passed. Art of the deal.”
Trump appears to have given fiscal hawk holdouts assurances that some of their concerns would be addressed at the executive level, swaying enough of the House Freedom Caucus members to support the legislation that it was able to pass on the floor early Thursday morning.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who had been one of the most vocal critics of the megabill, told the Washington Examiner that “executive actions” could “take care of the concerns” that he and other fiscal hawks had about Medicaid spending.
Roy eventually voted for the legislation in a turnaround after weeks of opposing it, and he signaled that White House conversations were a factor.
Johnson confirmed that Trump made assurances to holdouts.
“There may be executive orders relating to some of these issues in the near future,” Johnson said. “And this is a commitment the president has made.”
Prior to this week, the president had largely allowed his top fiscal aides to engage with Hill leaders on the bill. According to White House officials familiar with the negotiation timeline, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Office of Legislative Affairs Director James Baird “laid the groundwork” for Trump to come in and close the deal just ahead of the House vote.
“The president’s been a part of all of this from the beginning,” Vought told reporters Thursday morning at the White House. “This has been his vision. His priorities are reflected in it. He’s the most hands-on president, I think, in history. He’s involved in 1,000 different things, but at every critical juncture, he is there to get something across the finish line.”
Vought suggested that Trump plans on delivering on the assurances the president gave to fiscal hawks via executive action.
“Look, the House Freedom Caucus did an incredible job of getting … more savings earlier in the window, by bringing the work requirements up, by making sure there’s more of the [Inflation Reduction Act] repeal, the Green New Deal earlier in the window,” he explained. “One of their main concerns was that, with this opportunity to do something big on Medicaid, that more states did not come in and expand on their Medicaid under Obamacare.”
He added that “we’re going to do everything we can, from an executive perspective, to be able to make sure that states are not coming in under Obamacare at increased rates.”
Though Leavitt urged the Senate on Thursday to send the bill to Trump’s desk “as quickly as possible,” Republicans in the upper chamber have already vowed to tinker with the language.
Vought declined Thursday to discuss any changes Trump would find acceptable and suggested that the president would take a similar, hands-off approach until necessary.
“The president wants to sign it into law,” he said. “It’s a coalition that comes together. I think that it’s a very good template for what we think both the House will need to do again and what should inform the Senate conversation.”
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“It’s a very careful balance, and you know, it was not easy to get to where we were this morning,” Vought continued. “Long series of late nights in this week, and ultimately the president closed it out. Obviously, the Senate is going to want to put its mark on it, but there’s a certain coalition there to both accomplish what the president wants to do and have the votes that are necessary to get it through Congress, and we want to build the president’s desk by July 4.”
Trump cheered the bill’s passage Thursday morning, suggesting on Truth Social that the legislation is “arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!”