House GOP leaders are all too aware that the upcoming vote on a stopgap government funding bill won’t be kind of them. They’re hoping Donald Trump will be.
According to two sources in the room, Speaker Mike Johnson privately told a group of members Monday that Trump agrees it was a select few Republican lawmakers, not Johnson, who ruined the GOP’s chances of getting the SAVE Act attached to a continuing resolution. And Johnson said Trump agrees that Republicans would take the blame for a shutdown, these sources told NOTUS.
Johnson reiterated this sentiment at a GOP members-only conference meeting on Tuesday morning, telling members that Trump knows there are Republicans who will lose if they don’t keep the government open, according to two people in the room.
“The speaker said he talked to him about it and showed him all the purple seats that this would affect, and I guess he found it persuasive,” Rep. Don Bacon told NOTUS as he left conference on Tuesday.
Multiple people left the meetings on Monday and Tuesday with the takeaway that Trump planned to keep quiet about the CR and let members vote on it without outside pressure from him.
“I took it that he understood the speaker’s case,” Bacon said. “It seemed like there was agreement.”
Spokespeople for Trump and Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
Johnson met with Trump on Sept. 19 while the former president was in Washington, D.C., for an event focused on combating antisemitism. And, conspicuously, the former president hasn’t said anything about this latest iteration of the CR since it was released on Sunday.
But even if there was an agreement that Trump would stay quiet, it may be best if GOP leaders assume there isn’t. Trump has been known to bash legislative products that Republicans produce — even ones he signed into law as president.
Before the weekend, Trump was adamant that Republicans get the SAVE Act attached to any deal keeping the government open, insisting that anyone registering to vote provide proof of citizenship to do so. Trump repeatedly said, in fact, that if Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, they should not keep the government open. He even called certain GOP lawmakers to tell them he thought they should shut down the government if Republicans couldn’t get the SAVE Act attached to the CR, a source familiar with the president’s lobbying efforts told NOTUS.
But after a small group of GOP lawmakers torpedoed efforts to attach the SAVE Act, Johnson is moving ahead with a stopgap funding bill that almost all Democrats will likely support — and dozens of Republicans, if not a majority, will oppose.
Trump’s thoughts on the spending deal could make a difference in that vote, as plenty of Republicans are extremely sensitive about crossing the former president just over a month before Election Day.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.