(CNN) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday delivered his most forceful appeal yet to House Republicans to line up behind his massive domestic policy bill, but it’s still not enough to guarantee the votes for Speaker Mike Johnson.
The president’s emphatic, 90-minute address to House Republicans — in which he alternated between strong-arming his fellow Republicans and cheering them on — brought Johnson and his leadership team a big step closer to delivering that bill, according to half a dozen GOP lawmakers and senior aides.
But lawmakers emerged from the closed-door meeting with differing views on whether the president had done enough to convince them to send the bill to the Senate this week.
“He wants us to quit screwing around,” said South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson, a GOP leadership ally, adding that Trump has become “frustrated with the pace of our progress.”
That message from Trump, according to sources in the room, was directed to the hard-right House Freedom Caucus and a group of mainly Northeastern lawmakers, both of which are demanding changes to the sweeping tax and spending cuts bill.
Making the rare, personal appearance on Capitol Hill, Trump argued that Republicans are “tremendously unified” despite party infighting over key sticking points in the legislative package. But while Trump told reporters the meeting was “just a pep talk,” the stakes are high.
Tuesday marked Trump’s first in-person meeting with the full group of House Republicans since the conference began drafting his agenda. And the meeting comes at a critical time for Johnson, who is pushing to pass the legislative package before Memorial Day, despite significant opposition from some of his members.
It remains an open question whether the speaker can stave off a revolt from the factions of his conference and deliver on the president’s agenda under the ambitious timeline.
“No, we are still a ways away, but we can get there,” said House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, a conservative who has called for more time to work through negotiations.
“I don’t think he convinced enough people that the bill is adequate the way it is,” the Maryland lawmaker said.
As Johnson pushes for a Wednesday floor vote, he will spend the next day holed up with the remaining holdouts — both the hardliner conservatives, like Harris, seeking deeper cuts to Medicaid and the GOP Northeasterners who are demanding bigger tax breaks to benefit their home states.
Johnson told reporters that he believed there was a “great esprit de corps” in the meeting with Trump, and that he now planned to “tie up the remaining loose ends” in more member meetings Tuesday.
“I’m very confident we’ll be able to do that,” the Louisiana Republican said of a floor vote this week. “We are going to get this done.”
The president’s main priority Tuesday was to urge his party to stop squabbling and make progress on moving the major piece of legislation that contains his core promises from the campaign trail, White House officials told CNN ahead of the meeting.
From Trump’s point of view, the officials said, he has succeeded in getting what he wants in the package. The president cares most about his campaign-driven goals to deliver sweeping tax cuts and no taxes on tips and overtime pay, they said, and the rest is simply negotiating to the finish line.
Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett told CNN earlier this month that the president’s top priorities “have been communicated, and I have not seen anyone suggest that they’re not going to be in the bill.” He added at the time that Trump “understands that in the end, the final bill will include some priorities of members of the House and of the Senate.”
Still, Trump has a monumental task before him to bring together the factions of the party. With a slim majority in the House leaving little room for detractors, the president’s attempt to sway key holdouts marks a major test of his dealmaking abilities.
Ahead of the meeting, Trump had not directly engaged in whipping the vote of individual members, the officials said, though several of his aides have been closely involved in behind-the-scenes negotiations.
“The White House isn’t freaking out yet,” one person close to Trump told CNN. “The president has been down this road before. He and the team understand that pushing through a bill of this size is going to take time. The key is starting the clock.”
Behind closed doors, Trump was blunt with lawmakers on major points of contention, telling the conference “don’t f**k around” on Medicaid, according to two sources in the room.
The warning from the president not to touch the program, except for waste, fraud and abuse, comes as there’s been a major question over how many Americans would lose access to Medicaid benefits under Republicans’ proposed package.
Major sticking points remain unresolved
But it’s not just conservatives who are frustrated with Johnson’s strategy. The speaker is also working to win over some in the moderate wing of his party, a group that has threatened to oppose the bill without an increase in the amount that taxpayers can deduct on their state and local taxes — a tax break that conservatives loathe.
Trump repeated his message to the conference Tuesday that Democratic governors are to blame for high state and local taxes and they need to deal with it, according to a person inside the meeting. The president didn’t sound particularly warm to fighting for SALT, the person and another source said.
Underscoring the tension over the tax provision, New York Reps. Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota made clear as they headed into the meeting that they were not satisfied with the latest offer from GOP leaders to raise the SALT cap.
In one exchange during the meeting, a source in the room said Lawler made his case for a higher SALT cap. But Trump’s message in return was clear: It’s time to stop haggling and move ahead with a vote.
Afterward, LaLota said he was “fired up.”
“I’m here to fight for Long Islanders, regular middle-class people who are just trying to make a living. Those are the people who need to be included in this bill,” he said.
Conservative Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who said following the meeting that he was closer though not yet in full support of the bill, has said he’s concerned about the bill’s increase to the SALT tax deduction. He also wants to see “sufficient” work requirements for Medicaid benefits to “eliminate the fraud.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky called the White House’s insistence that the major policy bill would not raise the US deficit “a joke” — a comment that drew the president’s ire.
“I don’t think Thomas Massie understands government. I think he’s a grandstander, frankly. He’ll probably vote — we don’t even talk to him much. I think he should be voted out of office,” Trump told reporters ahead of the meeting.
Massie, asked whether he’s concerned about pressure to support the bill as it stands, told CNN: “They wrote off my vote weeks ago.”
The president called him out a number of times during the Republican meeting, but Massie said he remains immovable.
“It’s math, is what it is,” he said. “If this vote were based on intuition or likability of the president, I might vote yes. But it’s not. Not for me. There are real consequences.”
GOP leader says Trump is ‘always the closer’
The dissatisfaction from some in the party comes as House GOP leadership is trying to get the bill to the House Rules Committee by 1 a.m. ET Wednesday.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said ahead of Trump’s meeting that the president is “always the closer” and has “been very engaged and hands-on this whole process.”
“He’s called members directly, he’s had some of us over in the White House a few times to talk about different pieces of this bill, so we weren’t surprised when he said, you know, ‘OK, you’re ready now,’” the Louisiana Republican said.
Despite a push by some in the party to delay full debate on the package until sticking points are resolved, Scalise said GOP leadership’s plan is still to hold a full House vote Wednesday or Thursday.
A number of lawmakers agreed after Trump’s appearance that it was time for the party to put down its pens and vote for the bill.
Congressional Republicans, Florida Rep. Kat Cammack argued, “have to keep our eye on the bigger picture here.”
“I can’t think of a single member who doesn’t want to see something changed in the bill, but at this point we have to be Americans, right? We all can’t just hunker down in our respective delegations,” she said.
Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart similarly said, “There are parts that I like and there are parts that I don’t like, but the alternative is devastating,” adding that “the alternative is really catastrophic for the American people.”