Inside the talks and phone calls that convinced Trump to go against the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader.
It was as if Mark Meadows were watching a political car crash in slow motion. In November 2018, when House Republicans lost their legislative majority, it rendered him a bit player in Donald Trump’s Washington. Then in late November and early December, a more paralyzing fear began to creep into his mind: Republicans were going to fold and keep the government open without delivering on the president’s promise to fund the border wall with Mexico. Unthinkable. Unconscionable. He had to stop it.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called each member of his Democratic Caucus to tell them that they could not let Trump get $5 billion. “There’s an endgame,” Schumer said in an interview days before the White House meeting. “January 3, Nancy is going to pass a [funding bill] without the wall, and we will be all for it, and it will be Mitch McConnell keeping the government closed.” He added: “We believe we have the upper hand.
At around 10 p.m., a few blocks away on Capitol Hill, McConnell did exactly what Meadows predicted: He took up the funding bill in the Senate, with little fanfare. The Senate was ready to give up. They passed the bill by voice vote, a rare method of passing a piece of legislation without a single senator having to cast a recorded vote. It showed just how uncontroversial this was in the Senate.
“That’s how this always works,” Ryan told the president. He explained that a compromise bill to keep the government open would, indeed, anger the talkers on Fox News, but they would eventually get over it. The speaker tried to explain to Trump that a shutdown was not in his interest, but he wasn’t making much progress. “There’s no endgame,” Ryan said of shutting down the government. “You’ll just help the Democrats.”But back at the Capitol Hill Club, Meadows and Jordan were stirring up trouble.
As his fellow Republicans raged, Ryan’s phone rang. It was the president. Ryan stepped out of the meeting and into a small office next to the party’s Capitol meeting room to take the call. It was as if his conversation with Trump from the night before had picked up exactly where it left off: Trump was once again telling Ryan that he was getting killed on television.Ryan was pissed. He knew that Meadows had gotten to the president.
Toward the end of the meeting, Meadows’s phone rang. The caller ID showed “unavailable,” so he knew it was the president. Trump told Meadows he had spoken to Ryan and got the impression it was just the Freedom Caucus—Ryan called them the “Freedom guys”—that was opposed to keeping the government open, not a broad spectrum of Republicans. Meadows told the president that Ryan wasn’t being straight with him.
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