On a late February evening, President Trump sealed the deal for the first vote on his “one big, beautiful bill” with a conversation that brought one House Republican to tears.

And into the wee hours of Thursday morning, Trump’s conversations with GOP holdouts helped unlock the final vote on the major legislation, getting it to the president’s desk by his July 4 deadline.

Over and over as House Republicans crafted, debated and headed for topsy-turvy, history-making votes on Trump’s marquee legislation, holdouts on both the moderate and conservative ends of the conference threatened to derail the bill.

Some aides and members thought that even after initial successes in the House, there was a chance it could all fall apart.

But at nearly every major juncture, Trump — working closely with House GOP leaders —- came in to close the deal, often without having to make concessions or alter his strategy.

“He truly does have, to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs, a reality distortion field,” one top Republican aide said. “People come into that field, they go beyond the limits of what they think are possible for themselves.”

Conversations with more than a dozen House GOP members, Republican aides in Congress and the White House, and other sources over the last five months demonstrated that Trump’s influence was essential to get the legislation across the finish line in the razor-thin House GOP majority that is notoriously difficult to keep united.

Rocky from the start

Months before the 2024 election, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other House Republicans began preparing for the possibility of a Republican trifecta that could use the special budget reconciliation process to bypass the threat of a Democratic filibuster and deliver major Republican wish list items along party lines.

The wish list eventually turned into the most significant single Republican bill in decades that extended tax cuts, added new tax cuts, gave funding boosts for immigration enforcement and defense — offset with slashes to spending on Medicaid, food assistance, clean energy initiatives and student loans.

But when House Republicans gathered for their annual policy retreat at Trump’s resort in Doral, Fla., in January, deficit hawks were highly skeptical of what they were hearing from leadership. Republicans were slow to make progress on a framework, and were divided about whether to tackle the president’s agenda in one or two bills. An antsy Senate threatened to take the wheel if the House GOP couldn’t get its act together.

“The catalyst for accelerating progress was the meeting with the President” in early February, said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the chair of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus — referring to a marathon meeting with House GOP leaders and an ideological cross-section of the conference. Trump opened the meeting and set the tone for the lawmakers to dig into some nitty-gritty budget details.

What really got the Freedom Caucus on board was a novel mechanism in the budget resolution — a framework that sets parameters for the final bill — to tie a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to $4 trillion in tax cuts, requiring the number of spending cuts to go up dollar-for-dollar if tax cuts went up too. Pitched to leadership in a late-night meeting in the Speaker’s suite the night before a committee vote that had already been delayed, deficit hawks thought the tools would be the key to forcing the Senate — notorious for moderating legislation — to swallow the House’s plans.

Not every deficit hawk was sold, though, by the time the resolution hit the House floor in late February. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio,) and Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) were sticks in the mud — and Johnson made a public “prayer request” ahead of the vote.

At the time, Republicans could only afford to lose one GOP vote and pass the party-line measure. They were down two members who resigned after being picked for Trump administration roles. House Democrats brought back a member who had given birth a month earlier and another who was in the hospital to squeeze Republicans as much........

© The Hill