The so-called Big Beautiful Bill was always destined to pass, and it’s instructive to realize why: for Republican lawmakers, this was an up-or-down vote on President Donald Trump.

The sprawling measure — which at its core was really one big, beautiful tax extender — was never about those tax rates or Medicaid or the deficit. The underlying legislation was no bill at all, but a referendum on Trump. And that left congressional Republicans a binary choice that also had nothing to do with the policy therein: They could salute the president and vote yes and or vote no and risk their careers in a primary.

It doesn’t take a political science PhD to realize where today’s GOP would land.

Don’t believe me, just ask the senior senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis.

Yes — to be sure alert! — there was much juggling between the two chambers of Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate GOP Leader John Thune and their lieutenants deserve credit for the creativity and flexibility they demonstrated by pacifying lawmakers uneasy about state and local tax deductions, rural hospitals and even the fate of Alaska Native whaling captains (somewhere, Don Young and Ted Stevens are smiling).

But, folks, the alternative was no alternative at all. Without acting, Republican lawmakers would have risked breaching the debt ceiling this summer, tempted an across-the-board tax hike when the 2017 rates expired at the end of the year and torpedoed their president’s sole legislative initiative.

The last of these merits more attention.

Perhaps the most remarkable story sitting in plain view in today’s Washington is the gap between Trump’s political and media dominance and the paucity of his legislative agenda. The president has been happy to spend the first six months of his second term signing executive orders, wielding tariffs as economic weapons and rampaging through news cycles with all manner of provocations, outbursts and threats. He’s less a traditional president than the old Kool-Aid man bursting through walls.

Which works quite well for somebody who measures success by attention and is mainly interested in the perception of winning than an LBJ-style collection of pens and parchment from bills signed.

The second-term, free-range Trump has not even pretended to be interested in the details of lawmaking and is even less interested in forging bipartisan coalitions with people he sees criticizing him on the television shows he consumes by the hours. Also, he’s mostly animated by immigration crackdowns and playing department store owner or price- fixer-in-chief, which he can mostly do on his own and battle out in the courts without consulting Congress.

Recognizing as much, and that their narrow margins in both chambers would limit their ambitions, a group of GOP lawmakers wisely decided to stuff every measure they could into one reconciliation bill they could ram through the House and Senate with bare majorities. Yes, there was more money for immigration and defense, but the most significant policy changes, except for Medicaid, were modest changes to deductions on tips, overtime and auto purchases that helped Trump fulfill campaign trail promises.

Those sweeteners helped keep Trump’s attention, relatively speaking, and let him portray the bill in which-side-are-you-on terms that rendered the language less relevant than the stakes.

The hard truth for small-government conservatives in Congress to swallow is that their primary voters care more about fidelity to Trump than reducing the size of the federal government.

Any overly loud critiques by lawmakers — no matter if rooted in principle or sound politics — were angrily dismissed by Trump as so much “grandstanding” by malcontents. He had scant interest in bill language because signing a bill is the point. Victory is in the action not the particulars. Plus, there’s only room for one grandstander in today’s Republican Party, as Tillis, Rep. Thomas Massie and Elon Musk (twice) have now learned. Every other actor is merely toiling in the engine room of the USS MAGA.

It’s fitting that this Trump-era fact of political life is most difficult for Republicans on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum to grasp. What unites Senators Rand Paul and Susan Collins, a goldbug curious libertarian and old-school New England moderate? Neither is willing to accept a purely tribal politics in which substance is secondary to a cult of personality.

In fairness to Trump, he’s matured enough politically to recognize the difference between hectoring Massie, Paul and Tillis and haranguing Collins. The first cohort represents states the president carried three times and, with the important exception of Tillis, can easily be replaced by another Republican. But the Mainer is the GOP version of Joe Manchin: Once she’s gone, the replacement will be a conventional Democrat, not a more loyal Republican.

Speaking of Manchin, he and other Democratic veterans of the last administration’s legislative wars are all too familiar with the hangover that may await today’s jubilant Republicans after the beautiful black ink on the bill is dry and the fireworks have all gone off.

Joe Biden hardly commanded a cult of personality, but the tug of tribalism was almost as strong on congressional Democrats like Manchin, who were told to fall in line and back Biden’s pricey agenda. The West Virginian eventually did so, the main legislation did little to alleviate inflation despite its name and most voters at the polls last year pointed a finger at Democrats and not global supply chains for higher costs.

So Trump may not care about the details, but Democratic ad-makers in next year’s midterm will — and they’ll bet that the Medicaid cuts the president swore he’d never enact will do more to move voters than their tax bracket remaining the same.

President Donald Trump basked in victory Thursday, celebrating the passage of his sweeping domestic policy agenda in a demonstration of his dominance over Republicans in Congress.

The president capped what was arguably the most successful week of his second term with a campaign-style speech in Iowa, where he said the megabill would usher in a period of prosperity.

“There could be no better birthday present for America than the phenomenal victory we achieved just hours ago in Congress passing that one big, beautiful bill to make America great again,” Trump said, donning a ruby-colored USA hat and tie that matched a sea of supporters dressed in red apparel.

Just hours after House Republicans crossed the finish line on the megabill — which extends tax cuts and slashes funding for social safety programs — the president delivered a speech at the “Salute To America” event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds ahead of the 250th anniversary of America’s independence.

“I have another hat here that says ‘Donald Trump was right about everything,’ and I said, ‘No, no, that sounds a little bit too conceited,’” he said when boasting about the bill. “But it happens to be true.”

The speech was the culmination of an intense week of lobbying by the president and his allies.

Trump reportedly worked the phones on and off for 20 hours on Wednesday, making calls to GOP holdouts who objected to elements of the bill, including cuts to Medicaid benefits and the trillions it will add to the national debt.

A senior administration official said Thursday in a call with reporters after the bill passed that Trump did not make any threats to primary members of Congress — but the Republican caucus is more than aware of his clout.

“The membership well understands the president’s political power and ultimately they want his political power to be used for their benefit,” the official said. “The president always preserves his political prerogative, but he has already endorsed a number of members for reelection, and I expect he will endorse many more in coming weeks and months.”

Before departing for Iowa, Trump spoke with reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where he was asked about his political power. “I think I have more power now,” he said, referring to his first term. “I think I probably do because we have a great record of success. My first term was very, very successful. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. I think we are going to blow it away this term.”

Trump teased legislation that his administration is crafting to allow migrant workers without legal status to work on farms amid his mass deportation campaign. He gave no details but suggested they would not be subjected to enforcement actions under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people, in some way Kristi [Noem], we’re going to have to just say, that’s good,” he said.

“Serious radical right people, who I also happen to like a lot, they might not be quite as happy, but they will understand.”

During the speech, Trump praised the Republican caucus for coming together on the megabill — while not mincing words on his feelings toward Democrats. “They wouldn’t vote, only because they hate Trump,” he said. “I hate them too. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really do believe they hate our country.”

He later attacked the media for quoting him without noting that some of his remarks are intended as sarcasm. “You can’t be sarcastic as a politician,” he said. “Well, if you’re me.”

It used to be the congressional equivalent of a five-alarm fire: Members of the House Freedom Caucus were holding out, refusing to go along with Republican leaders’ plans for high-stakes legislation.

But when Speaker Mike Johnson brought the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” to the House floor this week, few were surprised when the band of hardcore conservatives threatened once again to take down the bill. And even fewer took their threats seriously.

“They do this every time — every dadgum time,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a hard-right member who himself has occasionally held out on GOP leaders.

The endgame was in fact predictable: A band of about 10 hard-right members refused to vote the party line on a series of procedural votes Wednesday night and Thursday morning, prompting an all-hands-on-deck negotiating blitz that left the House in limbo for hours.

In the end, they all ended up voting for the bill.

It was the latest episode calling the aims of the Freedom Caucus into question as President Donald Trump asserts his dominance over the Republican Party and Washington in general. Founded under a Democratic president and forged by veterans of the tea party movement, the group is now finding it hard to buck the most powerful Republican leader in generations. After the vote closed Thursday, multiple Freedom Caucus members cast their interventions as crucial in moving the centerpiece of the GOP’s domestic policy agenda to the right.

“If you go back six months ago, we were told no Medicaid,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a key Freedom Caucus leader, said, referring to Trump’s promises not to touch the joint federal-state health program. Ultimately, the bill is set to make $1 trillion worth of cuts over the coming decade.

“I wanted more — we should have done better,” Roy added. “But at the end of the day, [we got a] pretty historic bill.”

The problem their less confrontational colleagues see is that the band of hard-liners is constantly drawing red lines and delivering ultimatums, only to violate them — sometimes in a matter of hours.

The caucus, for instance, circulated a three-page memo Wednesday detailing a litany of objections the group had identified in the Senate-passed bill, ranging from its expanded deficits to the fact it omitted gun-related provisions the group had sought and that it expanded a key tax break mainly claimed in blue states. It ended up backing that flawed product with no more than handshake assurances their concerns would be addressed.

Roy spent months insisting that the bill adhere to a fiscal compromise he struck earlier this year with Johnson and other Republican leaders. He continued to warn leaders against violating the deal, lambasting the Senate for going hundreds of billions of dollars sideways, only to come along in the end.

“There’s definitely conversations about a second reconciliation bill,” Roy said Thursday, referring to promises from Johnson and others that he would pursue more party-line legislation to reduce deficits.

Elsewhere in the GOP, the brinkmanship is wearing thin — and the overnight negotiations hardly endeared the hard-liners to their colleagues.

“They called their own bluff,” said Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), a frequent critic of the bloc. “How many times have they done this? I mean, I’ve been in Congress for two years and five seconds, and they pulled the same stunt 19 times. So they’re over. The influence of the Freedom Caucus is over.”

Beyond the second bite at a deficit-busting bill, several Freedom Caucus members said they won assurances from White House officials on other matters.

Roy said he notched a promise to dial back what he said was the “effectiveness” of an amendment preserving some clean energy tax credits negotiated by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other GOP senators in their own last-minute deal.

“I probably spent about six hours yesterday with some lawyers in the administration about what they can do, frankly, to reverse … the Murkowski language that got put in there,” he said.

What Freedom Caucus members didn’t get were any actual changes to the bill. Trump wanted the bill on his desk for a July 4 celebration and indicated to members of the bloc in a White House meeting Wednesday that he would not allow it to go back to the Senate — potentially creating weeks of delay.

“It became clear … the bill’s closed — there’s going to be no more amendments to the bill,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a brief interview Thursday morning.

Trump and GOP leaders, in fact, were all too eager to put down the rebellion. Between the White House meetings, visits from Budget Director Russ Vought and other key White House officials, and Trump calling into the Republican cloakroom overnight, they muscled the hard-liners to “yes.”

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the Freedom Caucus chair, touted “significant agreements with the administration overnight on executive actions, both inside and outside of the bill, that will make America great again.” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) said the holdouts received “fiscal” assurances from the administration, while Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said, “We had significant concerns and so you can imagine we got significant commitments.”

Earlier Wednesday, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) also appeared hell-bent on opposing the bill.

GOP leaders held open one of the procedural votes and Scalise told reporters they were waiting for two members to return after storms snarled flights into Washington. A smiling Norman insisted to reporters “it’s not the weather” delaying the vote.

But less than two hours later, Norman emerged from a meeting with Vought with a completely different attitude and suggesting his vote was back in play.

In that room and others on Wednesday, the hard-liners raised deep concerns with the Senate-passed bill and groaned about the demise of the budget plan they’d negotiated with the speaker. But GOP leaders were not sympathetic.

One Republican in the room granted anonymity to describe the private exchange recounted the leaders’ reply: “It’s as good as we’re going to get.”

Later, after voting for the bill, Norman explained his turnabout: “We got as much as we could get.”

Benjamin Guggenheim and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

House Republicans passed their domestic policy megabill Thursday after nearly 24 hours of nonstop angst, discord and hands-on pressure from President Donald Trump and allies — ultimately uniting to deliver his top legislative priority.

The 218-214 final vote is a major victory for congressional Republicans who pledged to send the bill to Trump’s desk before July 4. Speaker Mike Johnson muscled the bill through in the early-morning hours after a full day of meetings with holdouts, huddles on the House floor and gatherings of different factions at the White House.

One preliminary vote Wednesday was held open for more than nine hours — what Democrats claimed was a new House record — as GOP leaders scrambled to secure the votes. Once they did, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed final action almost another nine hours with a record-breaking floor speech attacking the 887-page bill.

The decisive vote ended up almost entirely along party lines. Only Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky joined Democrats in opposition to the bill.

What was not clear upon passage is what precisely a small band of holdouts, most of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, had secured in return for their votes. They were irate about changes that had been made to the bill in the Senate, but GOP leaders were insistent that no further tweaks would be made — which would require another time-consuming trip across Capitol Hill.

The holdouts had been discussing the possibility of executive actions and other promises pertaining to the implementation of the sweeping legislation. But Johnson insisted no deals were cut.

“We find out where the red lines are, and we try to navigate around them and get a product that everybody can buy into,” he told reporters.

Angry Democrats, who had been left in a holding pattern most of the day Wednesday and deep into the night, seethed at the situation.

“I have no idea what in the world the crowd that was holding out got for holding out,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) on the floor. “Does anyone know? It is a complete mystery to me and to the American people.”

To most Republicans, however, final passage came as a relief after more than six months of intensive intraparty debates and negotiations about how the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda should be structured and what should be included.

The centerpiece was always set to be an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the signature bill of Trump’s first term. But Republicans quickly sparred over whether those tax cuts — a legislative hornet’s nest — should be packaged together with other, easier-to-pass GOP priorities or lopped off to pass separately.

Trump sided with lawmakers, mainly in the House, who wanted to pass the whole domestic agenda in one piece, and what Trump would deem the “one big, beautiful bill” was born. On top of the tax package, which eventually swelled in excess of $4 trillion, were defense spending boosts, increased immigration enforcement and dramatic changes to some safety-net programs to help offset the costs.

Republicans seized on rosy projections from White House economists while most independent analysts concluded the bill’s economic impacts would be relatively modest.

House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) touted the “largest tax cut in U.S. history” Thursday morning and promised a flurry of economic benefits, despite the bill mainly continuing tax policies already in place.

“We can expect record job growth, investment, repatriation of capital back to the United States, record-low unemployment, record-high wage growth and the lowest poverty rates in recorded history,” he said.

While the tax cuts were the glue meant to hold GOP support for the bill together, it was not always clear that hard-line fiscal hawks and moderate purple-district Republicans would be able to come to terms on a single piece of legislation.

Those concerns were amplified after the Senate reshaped the bill the House passed in late May, making steeper cuts to Medicaid and speeding up the rollback of wind and solar energy tax credits, while also adding hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit than the House-passed bill did.

Key blocs of House Republicans initially blanched at the changes, leading to hours of meetings Wednesday between GOP leadership and holdouts in an effort to quell the rebellion. With further changes to the bill off the table, lawmakers talked up the possibility of future executive actions from Trump. White House Budget Director Russ Vought came to the Capitol to discuss the possibility of future spending cuts with hard-liners and how exactly the administration planned to target key programs.

Meanwhile, among purple-district Republicans nervous about a roughly $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, there were major concerns over how medical providers in their districts might be able to access a limited $50 billion fund for rural hospitals created in the Senate and whether the funding patch would be enough to compensate for cuts elsewhere.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated the Senate-passed megabill would increase the number of people without health insurance by roughly 11.8 million in 2034. That estimate was posted before a slate of last-minute changes were made to the bill before Senate passage earlier this week.

Democrats vowed Republicans would pay a steep political price for passing the megabill, with some comparing it to the health care bill Republicans abandoned in 2017 — preceding a GOP House wipeout in the subsequent midterms. In speeches throughout the day, Democratic leaders name-checked purple-district Republicans whose districts they hope to target in next year’s midterm elections.

The minority party had few tools to stop the bill’s passage, and their plans to at least slow it down were at first overtaken by the GOP’s own snail-like progress. But then Jeffries used his unlimited speaking time Thursday morning to lash into what he called “one big, ugly bill” that coddled billionaires, undermined clean energy production and slashed the social safety net, delaying passage until Thursday afternoon.

“I ask the question, if Republicans were so proud of this one big ugly bill, why did the debate begin at 3:28 a.m. in the morning?” Jeffries said at the outset of his speech, accusing Republicans of trying to “jam this bill through the House of Representatives under the cover of darkness.”

Jeffries took special aim at the bill’s health care cuts — reading story after story from Americans who rely on Medicaid for their medical needs and calling out the particular Republican lawmakers who represent them. He also mocked Trump’s insistence that he would protect the program.

“He was going to ‘love and cherish’ Medicaid,” he said. “Nothing about this bill ‘loves and cherishes’ Medicaid. It guts Medicaid.”

The bill now heads to Trump’s desk, and he’s expected to sign it on the holiday, Johnson told reporters: “We’ll do that on July 4, potentially, maybe right before the B-2s fly. I mean you just can’t script this any better.”

David Lim and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.