President Trump headed to Capitol Hill Tuesday to push squabbling Republican members of Congress in person to set aside differences and pass his sprawling budget bill including deep cuts in spending and taxes.
Insisting the GOP is unified, Trump promised to put the hard sell on warring factions of GOP lawmakers who are still haggling over key portions of his “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
“We have a tremendously unified party. I don’t think we’ve ever had a party like this,” Trump said before heading into a face-to-face meeting with lawmakers. “There are some people who want a couple of things …that they’re not going to get.”
“We gotta get it done,” he added.
Standing alongside a grinning House Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump said the deep spending cuts in the bill don’t amount to actual changes in the social safety net programs, even though they could cost tens of millions of Americans the benefits they depend on.
“We’re cutting three things: waste fraud and abuse,” Trump said. “We’re not changing Medicaid. We’re not changing Medicare. And we’re not changing Social Security.”
Trump slapped down a small group of blue state Republican lawmakers, mostly from the New York suburbs, who are pushing for a big increase in the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT.
He accused those GOP lawmakers of acting as little more than a fig leaf for Democratic state leaders who have raised taxes and spending higher than red states.
“The biggest beneficiary, if we do that, are governors from New York, Illinois and California,” said Trump, effectively flip-flopping on his vow to raise the SALT cap during a presidential campaign rally on Long Island. “We’re going to be explaining that these are all very blue states.”
Republicans are seeking to push the bill through the House, where the GOP has a narrow seven-vote majority, before Memorial Day.
It would then head to the Senate, which needs to pass the identical bill to skirt a Democratic filibuster through budget reconciliation.
The bill extends Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts and includes other revenue-cutting goodies like no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, with a potential price tag of more than $4.5 trillion.
Despite Trump’s claim, it also includes draconian cuts to federal programs, especially the Medicaid program that provides health coverage to about 70 million mostly lower-income and disabled Americans.
Although Republicans overwhelmingly support Trump, they are bitterly divided into factions including fiscal hawks demanding far deeper cuts and moderates who fear voters will punish them if they cut benefits too much.
The SALT Republicans including Rep. Mike Lawler and Long Island’s Rep. Nick Lalota have already rejected Johnson’s offer to increase the annual cap on SALT to $30,000 from the current $10,000, but he has refused to budge so far.
Trump reportedly called out Lawler by name at the closed-door meeting, instructing the Westchester County lawmaker to stop haggling over SALT.
“End it, Mike. Just end it,” Trump said, CNN reported.
