‘doesn’t Matter To Me’: Trump Refuses To Settle Gop Strategy Spat

Senate Republicans went into a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday night hoping he would settle on a strategy for enacting the heart of his legislative agenda. Instead, they left two hours later with a total lack of clarity.

Emerging from a Capitol meeting room, Trump told reporters that it “doesn’t matter to me” which strategy Republicans take to pass a sweeping tax, energy and border package.

“Whether it’s one bill or two bills, it’s going to get done one way or the other,” he said. “The end result is the same.”

Behind closed doors, Trump told Republicans that he wanted “one big, beautiful bill,” but made it clear he was open to whatever strategy can pass, according to one GOP senator in the meeting.

It’s the latest sign that Trump is reluctant to wade into picayune legislative disputes, even when they threaten to derail his governing agenda.

House and Senate Republicans are pushing competing strategies for passing the suite of domestic policy priorities. Both use the budget reconciliation procedure to sidestep a likely Democratic filibuster, but they differ on exactly how: Speaker Mike Johnson has pushed for one sweeping bill, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune has backed separating them into two bills.

For their part, Senate Republicans told Trump that “a two-bill strategy is very much alive over here,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the No. 4 GOP leader, told reporters after the meeting.

Thune at one point asked Trump if he would consider two bills if the one-bill strategy gets bogged down, according to a person familiar with the exchange, who was granted anonymity to describe a private meeting.

After the meeting, Thune refused to commit to the House's preferred approach and called it an "ongoing conversation."

"Obviously we want to give the House as much space as possible," he told reporters. "They believe they can move and execute on getting a bill across the finish line fairly quickly. But we are prepared to move here, as well."

Coming to a quick decision is crucial because both chambers must agree on a strategy and embed it in a budget measure before they move on to actually passing the policies in question.

Johnson was briefly with Trump just before the incoming president huddled with Senate Republicans and told POLITICO on Wednesday that he expected Republicans would make a decision on the strategy by Thursday.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters after the meeting that they were not yet unified on a reconciliation strategy.

“I think he made the point that he wants to get the bill done,” he said. “From my standpoint, the question is, what can the House pass?”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that Trump is “open” to either option but that it appears he thinks the “practicalities” means one bill.

The one-bill-versus-two-bill strategy was not the only subject of the meeting, where more than a dozen other questions were put to Trump, attendees said.

They included some of the other thorny policy questions that will have to be settled in the coming months, including how to pay for tax cuts, border security measures and other costly provisions.

Paul said Trump talked about “big, beautiful tariffs” as a way to offset those costs, an idea that the Kentucky Republican immediately panned: “I still don’t think tariffs are a good idea. I think international trade has made the entire world increasingly prosperous.”

But in sum, senators’ accounts of the meeting — the first Senate Republicans had with Trump since officially taking back the majority — all confirmed that the president-elect did not do what they had hoped going in: make a play call after days of leaving the door open to the competing approaches.

“I think it’s really important for him to be engaged early in the process,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told reporters ahead of the meeting. “I think he’ll actually provide some stability, and even if pivots are made along the way, he’s pretty good at bringing people along.”

The weekslong dispute over how to package the GOP priorities is an early demonstration of the struggles Republican leaders will face this year as they try to unify nearly every GOP lawmaker, in both chambers, around sweeping policy ambitions without Democratic support.

Republicans want to approve the budget blueprint with instructions for how to write the reconciliation package in February and then Johnson wants to pass the actual bill through the House in April. Though he wants the bill on Trump’s desk by the end of April, he has also acknowledged that it could slip into May.

Crafting one large party-line bill would likely lower the GOP’s risk of failing to build enough support for extending tax cuts before they expire on New Year’s Eve. But it would almost certainly prevent Trump from notching a meaningful legislative victory in his first 100 days in office.