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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Inside the 24 hours that Trump willed his agenda bill over the finish
line
By Kevin Liptak and Kristen Holmes, CNN
Updated:
7:09 AM EDT, Fri July 4, 2025
Source: CNN
After nearly 20 hours straight of working the phones – using both
threats and assurances to cajole Republicans into supporting his
sweeping domestic agenda bill – President Donald Trump seemed to grow
exasperated while watching coverage of the plodding floor process on
television.
“What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to
prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!” Trump
posted on social media at midnight, as the vote seemed stalled.
Fourteen hours later, the bill had passed, with only two Republican
defections.
Trump is expected to sign it in a major ceremony on Friday afternoon at
the White House – punctuated by a fly-over of the B-2 bombers who
dropped bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities last month,
according to a White House official.
The spectacle will only underscore what a consequential stretch of days
it has been for the president, who now appears at the height of his
political power roughly six months into his second term.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision paved the way for even more
expansive use of executive authority. His strikes on Iran’s nuclear
sites appear to have created new momentum toward a ceasefire deal in
Gaza. A NATO summit last week, tailored to his preferences, resulted in
new defense spending commitments after years of pressure from Trump.
At home, Trump is presiding over an economy that continues to create
jobs, despite continued unease over the threat of tariffs. His hardline
immigration enforcement tactics, decried by opponents as inhumane or
illegal, have reportedly brought down unlawful crossings at the US
southern border to historic lows.
“I think I have more power now, I do,” Trump said outside Air Force
One Thursday, hours after his agenda bill passed the House.
To Trump’s detractors, his unshakeable grip on Republicans and his
strong-arming of US allies abroad add up to an
authoritarian-in-waiting, unchecked by the systems in place to ensure
the country doesn’t descend into autocracy.
But to his supporters, the last two weeks have amounted to a thrilling
culmination of his unlikely return to power and a rapid-pace
fulfillment of the promises he made to his voters last year.
“He’s getting his agenda passed to a greater extent than he did his
first term. He has better control over the apparatus,” said Asa
Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor who challenged Trump for the
presidency last year.
“Part of it, I think, is that he’s a second-term president, and he
knows how to wield that power and use the office of the president. And
you got a Supreme Court that’s backed him up,” Hutchinson went on.
“It’s a very powerful position that he’s in. People recognize
that. He also recognizes he has a very short amount of time, because
he’s only got four years now.”
No longer restrained by skeptical members of his own party, Trump is
free to pursue his agenda and interests in ways that even some
Republicans worry will come to haunt them in next year’s midterm
elections.
Both supporters and opponents of Trump’s bill seem to agree that —
for better or worse — the measure passed Thursday will now form a
major part of Trump’s domestic legacy.
‘The omnipresent force’
It passed after intensive involvement from the president himself, who
appeared acutely aware of the stakes for his own presidency and took to
calling lawmakers into the night to convince them to vote yes. A senior
White House official called Trump “the omnipresent force behind this
legislation.”
“Dinner after dinner, engagement after engagement at Mar-a-Lago —
you know, those relationships, and the president’s focus on
relationships, carried us through in kind of a cascade here,” the
official said, adding they had lost count of the number of meetings
Trump held on the bill.
Democrats have already begun formulating plans to tether Trump and
Republicans to the new law’s changes to Medicaid, singling out
individual cases of Americans’ deprived of care. Their argument was
encapsulated by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ marathon
speech on the House Floor on Thursday.
“Leadership requires courage, conviction, compassion — and yet what
we have seen from this administration and co-conspirators on the
Republican side of the aisle is cruelty, chaos and corruption,”
Jeffries said in his address, which broke a record for the longest
floor speech in modern history.
Polling shows Americans are broadly skeptical of the bill, creating a
task for Trump in the months ahead to change perceptions of the bill he
worked assiduously to get passed.
He could be aided by the bill’s strategic sequencing, which enacts
the tax cuts in the near-term but pushes off major changes to Medicaid
and food assistance programs until after next year’s midterm
elections.
Yet recent history is littered with presidents who, after using
congressional majorities to push through major legislation meant to
burnish their legacy, later lamented not doing enough to sell the bill
to the American public – after their party members paid the price at
the ballot box.
Leaving the messaging for later
Trump did, at various points over the last week, appear concerned that
slashing the social safety net too deeply might pose political
challenges for Republicans.
“I don’t want to go too crazy with cuts,” he told CNN on Tuesday.
“I don’t like cuts.”
Even in private, Trump has told Republicans that making changes to
Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security would be a losing political
message, according to officials. In conversations with Republican
lawmakers, White House officials sought to emphasize that changes to
Medicaid wouldn’t be felt for years, giving states and hospitals time
to sort through the changes. Officials also reminded lawmakers that
states had a significant role in dictating how Medicaid dollars are
spent, and therefore control how and whether individuals lose coverage.
Officials said Trump’s team had taken lessons from a failed attempt
to repeal Obamacare in 2017, working with Republicans on messaging and
trying to present them with a clearer view into why the bill would
work.
Still, Trump’s priority has largely been getting his own agenda
enacted, not the political fortunes of Republicans in Congress. Any
worries about next year’s election were mostly put to the side as
Trump squeezed GOP holdouts using both charm and threats of political
retribution.
White House officials privately acknowledged that the Democratic
messaging on the bill has been effective, but noted that the focus from
their party so far has not been on messaging, but on getting the bill
passed.
“We now have to shift to explaining the bill and how it will benefit
our voters,” one official said. “We are confident once we get that
messaging across, the public perception of the bill will shift.”
Carrots and sticks
From the beginning, Trump and his allies framed support for the bill as
a loyalty test, advising senators in an official notice last week that
failure to pass the measure would amount to an “ultimate betrayal.”
Trump treated Republican holdouts harshly, threatening to support
primary challengers to Sen. Thom Tillis and Rep. Thomas Massie after
the said they would oppose the bill.
Ultimately Tillis announced last week he would retire, opting out of
Trump’s test of fealty. He warned from the Senate floor afterward
that Trump had been “misinformed” about the effects of his bill,
calling it “inescapable this bill will betray the promise Donald
Trump made.”
Trump’s hardline approach shifted Wednesday, when he hosted House
Republicans at the White House. In those sessions, he appeared to
adhere to an old adage as he worked to convince lawmakers to vote for
his mega-bill: you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
In meetings in the Cabinet Room and Oval Office, a magnanimous Trump
signed place cards, took photos and paid his visitors compliments on
their television appearances, according to people familiar with the
sessions. He handed out mementos and showed guests around the
constantly redecorated Oval Office.
But he was also firm that after weeks of back-and-forth between the two
chambers of Congress, there would be no more changes to the bill.
“He wanted to get this done, and that was clear,” one lawmaker who
met with Trump said.
“The message he sent to all of them was very clear, that this bill
has been negotiated a lot, but there’s not going to be any more
changes to it,” Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Majority Leader, said
Thursday on Capitol Hill. “The time for that is over, and I think it
took them still a few hours after to realize he was serious.”
When discussing the bill, the president urged the lawmakers to maintain
GOP unity and avoid giving Democrats a victory by denying him his
signature legislation, one person familiar with the meetings said.
Outside Air Force One on Thursday evening, Trump said he offered “no
deals – what I did is we talked about how good the bill is.”
And while Trump’s threat of backing primary challenges to opponents
of his bill remained ever-present in many Republicans’ minds, the
president opted to leave the warning mostly unsaid as he cajoled
members in the West Wing on Wednesday.
“The president was wonderful, as always,” Tennessee Rep. Tim
Burchett said in a video posted after the two-hour meeting.
“Informative, funny, he told me he likes seeing me on TV, which was
kind of cool.”
However, as the night went on and lawmakers argued at the Capitol, one
source briefed on the conversations with conservative members said it
was conveyed that if members held up this bill, they would be primaried
– a message that moved some members towards a vote.
“He is in the strongest position of anybody in generations –
probably ever – in terms of impacting primaries for Congress,” the
source said. “So anybody coming from a hard-right district, which is
most of the conference, will have to deal with that. And he’s just
not going to tolerate anyone going against his agenda.”
A White House official pushed back on the notion that there were any
direct primary threats but acknowledged that the prospect always loomed
over conversations.
What Trump promised hardliners
One person familiar with the meetings with House lawmakers said Trump
spoke about the importance of the bill to Republicans’ agenda and
argued that economic growth would eclipse any concerns about expanding
the deficit — arguments he and his team have been making publicly.
He also promised hardline fiscal hawks he would use his executive
authorities to vigorously enforce certain phaseout provisions for green
energy tax credits to convince them to vote yes.
“He did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he
could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill
better,” Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who originally planned
to vote against the legislation but ultimately supported it, said on
CNBC.
Some Republicans had been vocal in their opposition to the Senate’s
slower timeline to phase out some energy tax credits, and Norman said
it was important for them to get assurances on that from the White
House. He said it was a major sticking point in the final hours of
deliberations.
“Up until late in the night, we were negotiating, you know, things
that could change with, you know, the tax credits, which all were put
in by Joe Biden, which needed to be extinguished,” Norman said.
In the dark hours of Thursday morning, Trump’s patience in convincing
holdout Republicans seemed to be wearing thin.
“FOR REPUBLICANS, THIS SHOULD BE AN EASY YES VOTE,” he wrote at
12:45 a.m. ET. “RIDICULOUS.”
A few phone calls later, the holdouts had relented. And Trump’s
signature bill was on track to pass.
The headline of this story has been updated.
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