President Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) got into a shouting match during a lunch meeting Wednesday over the US war with Iran, according to sources and lawmakers who were in attendance.
GOP senators described Trump as being “mad as a murder hornet” and raising his voice at the Louisiana Republican for joining three other Republicans in a vote limiting his wartime authority.
Cassidy — who later quipped that the talks went “swimmingly” — called the president “my brother” several times during the heated exchange to lower tensions, Senate GOP sources said. The president spat back that Cassidy wasn’t his brother and told him to sit down, per CNN.
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“[Trump] did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice, I lost my temper,” Cassidy later recounted to reporters. “It’s the Irish in me.”
“But again I matched his tone and his volume, and it went back and forth,” he further explained. “So I sat down and tried to de-escalate. I guess my point is, though, that the American people need to know more than we are being told. The Senate needs to know.”
Cassidy lost his reelection to the Senate this year, when Trump backed his primary opponent in Louisiana.
“We had a really great meeting, and we’re very proud of the party. We like our leader. We like everybody. Really, in the room, we don’t like a few people, but that’s OK,” Trump told reporters afterward, refraining from naming names. “For the most part, we had a really well unified party.”
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), sarcastically told reporters the exchange was “very pleasant” before describing how Trump and Cassidy butted heads.
“Very much like a hospital board meeting when a bunch of doctors are yelling at each other, but at the end of the day, we’ll figure out a way to get along,” said Marshall, a practicing OB/GYN before entering politics. “Voices were raised. … I think the vote yesterday on the War Powers Act, the president’s very disappointed.”
“[The administration is] trying to negotiate that [Iran deal], and they feel like that vote from Republicans chopped their legs out from under them,” added the Kansas Republican.
“The president was mad as a murder hornet about the War Powers vote,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) also said.
Congressional actions disapproving of the Iran war were going to “undermine the negotiators” working on terms of a peace agreement, Marshall said.
Cassidy — and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul — later changed their votes to no and present, respectively, later Wednesday.
“Wow! The Senate just changed its vote on Iran from 50-48 against, to 50-47 for. Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy changed. Thank you to Leader John Thune, Lindsey Graham, Bernie Moreno, and all,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“This vote puts Iran on notice!”
Cassidy indicated that he changed his vote after meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff after the dustup.
“I want to thank Vice President Vance and Special Envoy Witkoff for the thorough briefing this afternoon on Iran,” he wrote on X. “I appreciate the quick invitation to the White House to address many of my concerns.”
Tensions between Trump and the Senate GOP flared long before Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who chairs the Senate Republican Steering Committee, invited him to a caucus lunch.
Before the War Powers Act vote, Trump had been incensed by the Senate’s inability to wrangle through the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote and a bunch of conservative wishlist items.
Democrats have used the 60-vote filibuster to stop the SAVE America Act in its tracks. During the Senate lunch, Trump expressed support for Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) proposal to use a talking filibuster to push the bill through.
“We made it clear multiple times that if the SAVE Act requires nuking the filibuster, it’s simply not going to happen,” retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told The Post. “That’s been obvious long before this meeting.”
Ahead of the big meeting with Senate Republicans, Trump abruptly canceled a planned signing ceremony for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing, a comprehensive bipartisan bill aimed at making housing more affordable that lawmakers labored over for weeks. The measure scraps regulatory hurdles and streamlines environmental requirements to usher in more housing development.
Many Republicans viewed it as a key victory on affordability issues heading into the midterms. But Trump declared he wasn’t signing it into law until Congress sends him the SAVE America Act.
The bill could still become law if he doesn’t ink it within 10 days of being presented. The housing bill has yet to be officially signed by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), meaning it could be held up for an even longer period than the usual 10 days.
Trump also clashed with the Senate GOP when he tapped Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, which raised bipartisan backlash and killed a bipartisan deal to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702, warrantless spy power on foreigners. FISA Section 702 expired on June 12. Trump further demanded that a FISA renewal tack on the SAVE America Act.
