Donald Trump claimed that his party was “working nicely together,” just hours after House Republicans’ infighting forced them to delay a vote on a multitrillion-dollar budget bill.

“Great News! ‘The Big, Beautiful Bill’ is coming along really well. Republicans are working together nicely. Biggest Tax Cuts in USA History!!! Getting close,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday morning.

House GOP members were anything but united. The night before, Republican Representative Rich McCormick told CNN’s Manu Raju that there were still 15 Republican holdouts on the bill, which would provide the funding for Trump’s sweeping agenda, including tax cuts and bolstering immigration initiatives.

Representative Thomas Massie, who has become a regular holdout against Republican-backed government spending bills, said that a provision Republicans had added that would prevent efforts to roll back Trump’s tariffs was “illegal.”

“They used the Rules Committee resolution to circumvent U.S. law,” Massie told Raju.

On Wednesday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hadn’t decided how best to rally Republican support behind the budget blueprint.

“We have a pretty well-developed playbook, and it’s got a number of plays in it, and I just haven’t made the call on which one it is yet,” he said.

House Republicans are expected to vote again on the bill at 10:20 a.m. before setting off on a two-week recess.

Donald Trump is taking revenge against two officials from his first term.  

On Wednesday, the president issued directives stripping the security clearances of Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor and ordering the Department of Justice to open investigations against them, characterizing Taylor’s criticisms of him as “treasonous” and calling Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor.” 

Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, affirmed Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020, saying at the time that “claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent” and authorizing a statement from CISA that the election was secure. Trump subsequently fired him by tweet.

Later, Krebs was a witness for the House January 6 committee, providing information on securing the 2020 election, testifying that “Republican officials, senior officials, including the former president, lied to the American people about the security of the 2020 election.”

Krebs now works at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, and Trump’s order not only targets him but strips the security clearances of anyone at the company who works with him. As Trump signed the order against Krebs Wednesday, he let everyone know that he still isn’t over losing in 2020, calling the election “rigged.” 

“It was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out about this guy too, because this guy is a wise guy.”

Taylor famously wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed criticizing Trump in 2018 while working for the Department of Homeland Security. He left the Trump administration in 2019 and, upon revealing his identity, wrote a book detailing the chaos he observed from Trump. He went on to endorse Biden before the 2020 election, although Trump on Wednesday said, “I barely remember him.” 

“Somebody that went out and wrote a book and said all sorts of terrible things that were all lies,” Trump said. “I think he’s guilty of treason.”

The order against Taylor is so broad that it even suspends the security clearances of “individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”

On X, Taylor posted that “I said this would happen.” 

“Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point,” Taylor wrote. 

All of this shows that Trump would not only escape consequences for his actions if he was reelected but that he always planned to take revenge on his critics if he was able to return to the White House. Now the checks on his power are minimal at best.

Many were surprised Wednesday by Donald Trump’s decision to put a 90-day pause on a majority of his sweeping tariffs on other countries (with the exception of China), but only one person was in the midst of defending those very tariffs to Congress.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer sat before the House Ways and Means Committee, where he’d been testifying for nearly four hours in defense of Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy, when the president announced the pause.

Democratic Representative Steven Horsford was the first to question Greer about the pause, and asked when exactly he had been made aware that Trump planned to walk back his sweeping tariffs.

“I understood the decision was made a few minutes ago,” Greer said, noting it had been “under discussion.”

“So did you know that this was ‘under discussion,’ and why did you not include this in your opening remarks?” Horsford said.

Greer said he wouldn’t “divulge the contents” of his discussions with the president.

Horsford pressed for details from Greer, but the trade representative couldn’t provide any information on the 90-day deadline, saying he didn’t know all the details because he’d been in the hearing all day.

“So the trade representative hasn’t spoken to the president of the United States about a global reordering of trade? And yet he’s—but yet he announced it on a tweet!” Horsford said above Greer’s protests. “WTF! Who’s in charge?!”

“The president of the United States is in charge,” Greer replied.

“And what do you know about those details? It looks like your boss just pulled out the rug from under you and........

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