‘Don't f--k around with Medicaid’: Trump moves to steamroll megabill opposition

President Donald Trump moved Tuesday to end the quarrelling among various GOP factions and move his domestic-policy megabill toward passage, telling House Republicans behind closed doors that they need to unite immediately behind the "big, beautiful bill" their leaders have assembled.

Not all GOP lawmakers left the meeting convinced.

Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said he was not yet supporting the bill and that Republicans were "still a long ways away" from a deal.

And Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, part of a vocal group of blue-state Republicans pushing for a key tax break, said he also remained unmoved despite Trump calling him out by name inside the room.

“While I respect the president, I’m not going to budge,” Lawler said.

Together, it heralds a messy few days ahead for Speaker Mike Johnson and fellow GOP leaders, who were hoping that Trump's bluster could pacify the dueling groups of holdouts.

The president did his part to confront the various pockets of opposition to the sprawling legislative package, which couples massive tax cuts with measures addressing defense spending, border security and much more. His message was delivered in equal measure to both sides of the fractious GOP conference — sometimes in blunt language.

To conservative hard-liners, including Harris, who have been pushing for deeper cuts to Medicaid, Trump made crystal clear that he did not support additional slashing: "Don't fuck around with Medicaid," he said, according to two Republicans granted anonymity to describe the private meetings.

And to the SALT Republicans, including Lawler — the mostly blue-state members who are pushing for a higher cap on the state-and-local-tax deduction — Trump told them to "leave it alone" and take a deal already on the table.

There were some signs of softening. Harris acknowledged "we can get there," though not on the tight roughly 48-hour timeline that Johnson is envisioning. "I think we could do it two weeks from now," he added.

Another hard-liner, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), declined to say where he was at, saying he needed to read the roughly 1,100-page bill first, while a third, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), said "eventually I believe it will pass."

A key moderate, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said he was hung up on a "few things," including maintaining federal benefits for refugees. "But I think we're very close," he added. "I want to support it."

Trump's Capitol Hill visit comes less than 24 hours before Johnson wants the House Rules Committee to meet and finalize the bill for a floor vote. Johnson told reporters after the meeting that a Wednesday vote "would be optimal" but acknowledged he had to “tie up a few loose ends” with the various factions.

What's clear is that Trump himself is not interested in stretching out the talks much longer. He said in response to a question from POLITICO that the hard-liners needed to pare back their demands for deeper spending cuts: “I’m a bigger fiscal hawk," he said. "There’s nobody like me.”

Despite Trump's pledges to preserve Medicaid, the bill would have significant impacts on the program. The latest Congressional Budget Office analysis released Tuesday found that 7.6 million people would lose their Medicaid coverage if the House proposal became law. But the hard-liners want deeper, "structural" changes that target the program's expansion under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Meanwhile, addressing the SALT group, he said that the tax break — one he pledged to expand last year while campaigning — mainly served to benefit blue-state governors and that the group of holdouts needed to accept the deal to modestly increase the existing $10,000 cap on the deduction.

A senior White House official said Trump "made it clear he’s losing patience with all holdout factions of the House Republican Conference," and he "wants EVERY Republican to vote yes."

One House Republican, also granted anonymity to candidly describe Trump's attitude, summarized the president's mood as, “He’s done with this.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — a strident fiscal hawk whom Republican leaders consider unlikely to support the final bill — said Trump "probably did a pretty good job in there."

"Like, if his job was to go in there and convince the Freedom Caucus and the blue-state Republicans, I think he did a good job. And he made a decent effort at convincing me — directly,” he added. But Massie said he remained a "no."

The bill is likely to get watered down further in the Senate from the perspective of fiscal hawks. Republicans in the other chamber are even more wary of making deep safety-net cuts, and many are eyeing much deeper tax cuts.

Trump said in response to a question from POLITICO that he looked forward to the Senate's revisions: "They have things I like even better."

Katherine Tully-McManus, Ben Leonard and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.