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.
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