Here's the latest
• GOP tensions: President Donald Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy, who recently lost a primary after Trump endorsed an opponent, clashed sharply over the war in Iran during a closed-door meeting at the Capitol, according to multiple people in the room.
• Trump nixes housing bill signing: The lunch came just hours after Trump dropped a bombshell by canceling plans to sign a bipartisan landmark housing affordability bill until he gets action on his controversial elections overhaul legislation.
• NATO meeting: This afternoon, Trump is meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at the White House. The US president has repeatedly trashed the alliance, which is set to meet in Turkey next month.
• Later on: This evening, Trump is set to host the opening ceremony for the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall for the US’ 250th after several performing artists pulled out of the event.
Cassidy describes confrontation with Trump on Iran war
In the month since President Donald Trump helped put an end to Sen. Bill Cassidy’s career in Congress, the Louisiana senator has become one of the president’s sharpest critics.
So when the two stood face to face in a Wednesday meeting in the Capitol, the ingredients were there for a blowup.
The testy back-and-forth began, according to Cassidy, as Trump demanded to know why members of his own party — including Cassidy — voted with Democrats a day earlier to rebuke the president’s military authority in Iran.
“He asked, ‘why would anybody vote for the War Powers Act?’” Cassidy recalled after the meeting. “I stood and said, ‘you have not told the American people what’s going on. It was supposed to last four weeks, it’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.’”
From there, according to multiple sources in the room, a furious Trump went after Cassidy, raising his voice. Cassidy recalled that he “lost his temper” and said he was shouting back with the same “tone and volume” of the president.
Cassidy said the friction was so intense that, “at some point my guys next to me said ‘ok, Bill, sit down,’ and so I sat down and tried to de-escalate.” Cassidy blamed his “Irish” temper for the outburst but made clear he was not regretful about his demands for information on Iran.
“I make no apologies for standing up to the president, if you will, trying to demand that more information be shared with the Senate and more information be shared with the American people,” Cassidy said. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”
Cornyn says Trump preached unity but talked “about things which were not exactly unified”
Sen. John Cornyn, who lost a primary weeks ago to Trump-backed Ken Paxton, was in the middle of recounting the lunch to an interested Democratic colleague when reporters mobbed him to get a readout of the closed-door meeting with the president.
“The president closed by preaching unity,” Cornyn said. “But he spent the entire hour talking about things which were not exactly unified.”
Rick Scott told Trump the votes aren't currently there for election bill in private meeting
One of the major questions going into President Donald Trump’s meeting with Senate Republicans was whether it would be conveyed to Trump directly that there simply are not the votes to pass the election overhaul legislation that the president has stalled all other action in Congress over.
GOP Sen. Rick Scott told CNN he was the one to deliver that message during the closed-door lunch meeting.
“I said this is this is where we are today” Scott said. “I’m a business guy. You have to live in reality.”
Scott, who supports passing the legislation and was the one to initially invite Trump to the lunch, then laid out the different options Republicans have at their disposal to try and get it passed, including breaking the legislation down into pieces, pushing it through a complex process known as reconciliation or even eliminating the filibuster.
Scott relayed that Trump is not focused on how Republicans pass it, just that it becomes law.
“He’s not saying how you have to get something done, but he wants to get the Save America Act passed. He really believes it’s a key to this fall,” Scott said.
Although senators did not walk out with a clear resolution, Scott said the meeting “created a venue for people to have a conversation.”
Johnson will meet with Trump on Thursday amid mounting crisis over "SAVE America Act" demands
Speaker Mike Johnson will meet with President Donald Trump on Thursday to discuss the growing legislative crisis facing congressional Republicans over the White House’s “SAVE America Act” demands, according to a person familiar with the meeting.
With Trump suddenly escalating his demands for the elections overhaul bill, he’s put Johnson and GOP leaders in a difficult position: They can’t get anything major done in either chamber because the president’s voter overhaul bill has no way of passing Congress.
That includes Trump’s abrupt announcement on Wednesday that he would not sign Congress’s bipartisan housing bill until the “SAVE America Act” is passed.
Trump called GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy a "lunatic" in tense exchange, source says
In a tense confrontation at a Capitol Hill lunch meeting, President Donald Trump told GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy to sit down, but Cassidy responded that he wouldn’t, according to a source familiar with the encounter.
Trump called him a “lunatic,” the source said.
The new details provide a more vivid description of the clash between the two men that CNN had previously reported was driven by disagreement over the Iran war.
Cassidy raised his voice — the source said he was shouting — and referred to Trump as his “brother.”
Trump told him he wasn’t his “brother,” the source said. Cassidy eventually sat down.
Trump and Cassidy clash over Iran in intense lunch at the Senate, sources say
President Donald Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana clashed sharply over the administration’s war in Iran during a closed-door meeting at the Capitol on Wednesday, according to multiple people in the room.
One of the sources said the lunch was very intense. Trump, the source said, was furious about the Senate’s vote yesterday to limit his war powers, that was a huge focus of the lunch meeting.
The president got into a shouting match with Cassidy over the war powers vote, with each talking over each other as Cassidy criticized Trump’s war decision and Trump pushed back, multiple sources said.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a close Trump ally, confirmed to reporters that the two men “had a difference of opinion on Iran.” GOP Sen. Jon Husted described the clash as “memorable.”
Cassidy had voted just one day earlier to formally rebuke the president’s handling of Iran. Once a staunch leadership ally, Cassidy has become an increasingly vocal critic of the president and his own party since the Louisiana Republican lost his primary challenge to a Trump-backed opponent.
Sen. John Cornyn, another outgoing Senate Republican who lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger, quipped upon leaving: “Quite the unity message.”
Trump says GOP is still unified after Senate lunch, but admits "I don't like a few people"
President Donald Trump called the GOP a “really well-unified party” following a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans, even has he conceded that he didn’t like some of the lawmakers in the room.
“I think we had a really great meeting and we’re very proud of the party,” Trump told reporters on Capitol Hill. “We like everybody, really, in the room. I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay, I think you know who they are.”
Trump declined to specify which senators he was talking about or provide detail on the topics of discussion, saying only that he’d told the GOP senators that “we have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
“We want to keep it that way,” he said. He did not take questions from reporters.
House GOP leaders pausing House votes as hardliners make SAVE Act push
President Donald Trump has upended his party’s agenda in Congress in recent days to drum up national attention for his federal elections overhaul bill. Now, some of his his conservative acolytes in Congress are doing the same.
A band of hardline GOP conservatives have shut down the House floor — for now — as they demand that Congress take up the elections overhaul bill, known as the SAVE America Act, according to three people familiar with discussions.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday was forced to abruptly postpone this afternoon’s planned votes after those GOP hardliners — including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who has been vocal on the issue — refused to back down on their own SAVE Act demands.
Luna communicated to leadership that she would vote against a procedural step later today and had enough support to sink it, one source told CNN.
GOP leaders are now having conversations with the conference about the best path forward, underscoring the deep divisions that remain and how some conservatives are taking a page out of the president’s playbook.
With Johnson’s slim margins, he needs help from nearly every Republican to move anything on the floor without Democratic support. So GOP leaders are stuck until they can strike some kind of compromise with Luna and other members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus.
Trump’s push for the SAVE Act has derailed plans for a bipartisan housing bill to be signed into law, has led to the lapse of a surveillance power key to national security and, now, has gummed up the House floor.
What happened after Trump's sudden refusal to sign bipartisan housing bill
President Donald Trump is on Capitol Hill this afternoon, not to sign into law a landmark housing bill that passed with bipartisan support, but to lobby for the “SAVE America Act.”
Just yesterday, the housing bill was at the center of the president’s affordability agenda — an issue that is top of mind for voters as midterm elections approach.
What’s in the bill
Called the “21st Century Road to Housing Act,” the legislation has provisions aimed at loosening restrictions to make it easier to build more homes.
The White House went from touting the bill as a monumental achievement to downplaying its importance in less than 24 hours.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Trump made the decision to cancel the signing while he was talking to him on the phone this morning. Johnson was walking Trump through how he believes the election bill could be passed through a process called reconciliation, he said.
How lawmakers are reacting
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said it was Trump’s “call to make” to cancel the signing, but he hopes eventually “he finds a way to sign it.”
House Financial Services Chairman French Hill, who championed the bill, said he was not personally offended by Trump’s decision not to sign the bill right now, but emphasized that it was a 10-month, bipartisan effort.
Elsewhere though, canceling the signing drew quick backlash from other congressional Republicans and revealed some of the divisions within the GOP. “He’s digging a hole. Threatening Senators will backfire,” one Republican House member told CNN.
What this has to do with the “SAVE America Act”
The move is an effort by Trump to up his pressure campaign to pass his prized election overhaul legislation. Even as Republicans overwhelmingly support the goals of the SAVE Act, the measure did not even get 50 GOP votes when it was last on the Senate floor, in part because it would massively disrupt the midterms, which are just about four months away.
What could happen next
Longstanding rules say if the president does not sign a bill lawmakers passed within 10 days while Congress is in session — excluding Sundays — a bill will become law as long as Trump does not veto it.
CNN’s Tierney Sneed, Manu Raju, Ted Barrett, Adam Cancryn, Samantha Delouya, Annie Grayer, Lauren Fox and Sarah Ferris contributed reporting to this post.
Judge seeks explanation for Kennedy Center tarp
A federal judge on Wednesday demanded that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts provide an explanation for the tarp and scaffolding that has covered the building’s exterior signage for days after President Donald Trump’s name was removed.
In a new court filing, US District Judge Christopher Cooper said that the center must provide a report in the coming weeks to “indicate the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center, to the extent they remain at that time.”
Cooper ruled in May that the board of trustees violated the law when they voted to add Trump’s name to the center without authorization from Congress. After delays caused by a combination of legal wrangling and severe thunderstorms, workers assembled scaffolding and the tarp overnight on June 13.
Kennedy Center Executive Director Matt Floca has affirmed that Trump’s name was removed, but the tarp remains. A Kennedy Center official told CNN that the tarp is staying in place as crews “address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panel.”
CNN obtained new images taken behind the tarp earlier this week that confirm that Trump’s name is gone.
New images obtained by CNN show President Donald Trump's name has been removed from the Kennedy Center, marking the first visual confirmation of the change since a tarp was placed over the site.
Trump demanding passage of bill that would massively disrupt the midterms
As President Donald Trump ups his pressure campaign on Congress to pass his prized election overhaul legislation, the amount of disruption it would bring only grows as the midterms get nearer.
Even as Republicans overwhelmingly support the goals of the SAVE Act, that reality may be why the measure did not even get 50 GOP votes when it was last on the Senate floor – it’s not just a Democratic filibuster that’s standing in its way.
Crucially, the most recent draft of the SAVE America Act would require election officials to administer its sweeping changes immediately – meaning they would apply for a midterm election that’s just a little more than four months away.
What’s in the bill:
- Individuals registering to vote would have to present to election officials in person documents proving their citizenship.
- A person registering to vote online or by mail would still be required to show proof of citizenship in person.
- Voters will be required to present “valid photo identification” to cast a ballot in federal elections. The bill’s ID requirements would also create new ID hurdles for mail voters.
- States would need to take additional steps to remove ineligible individuals from the lists of people who can vote in congressional and presidential elections.
- Election officials would face criminal penalties if they register a person to vote who has not met the bill’s proof of citizenship requirement.
Election officials would have to figure out how to quickly implement these changes as they are already dealing with other wrenches that have created challenges, such as an unprecedented round of mid-decade redistricting and pending court cases that could change election rules.
Just this week, a court ruling significantly undermined SAVE America Act’s voter roll verification provisions, when a judge blocked the use of federal citizenship data system for voter purges.
CNN’s Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.
White House strongly touted the housing bill hours before Trump refused to sign it
President Donald Trump appeared on the verge of a much-needed victory after Congress passed a landmark housing bill at the center of his affordability agenda.
But that was Tuesday. And by Wednesday morning, it had all unraveled at head-spinning speed.
The White House went from touting the bill as a monumental achievement to downplaying its importance in less than 24 hours, driven by Trump’s deepening frustration over a completely separate matter: The stalled push for a controversial federal elections overhaul. Trump himself dismissed the bill Wednesday as something “of minor importance.”
It was a sharp contrast from the message sent hours earlier by senior Trump aides who are well aware that November’s midterms could hinge on Americans’ affordability concerns:
- “One of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X Tuesday night, previewing a planned signing ceremony on Capitol Hill.
- “This was a signature commitment that President Trump laid out in the State of the Union,” James Blair, who is steering Trump’s midterm operation, posted on Wednesday morning.
Less than three hours after Blair’s celebratory post, the White House’s X account had a different view of the party’s priorities, posting: “PASS THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
Thune says Trump's decision to cancel housing bill signing was "his call to make"
Senate Majority Leader Thune told CNN President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel signing the housing bill today was his “call,” but he hopes he will eventually sign since it deals with affordability.
“That was his call to make. What I would say is that the bill has been worked on for a long time. It is a great piece of legislation. It increases the supply of housing and the availability for people to afford homes. So, it’s an affordability issue, and eventually I hope he finds a way to sign it.”
What the NATO chief hopes to accomplish in his meeting with Trump
When NATO chief Mark Rutte visits President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, he’ll greet a US leader still seething that members of the alliance failed to join him in the war against Iran.
Rutte, whose fawning praise of Trump has earned him ridicule from some fellow European officials, hopes a face-to-face meeting might pacify Trump. He’s in Washington two weeks ahead of a critical NATO summit in Turkey that Trump plans to attend.
The fear among some allies is Trump, angry at the Iran snub, will use the Turkey conference to announce major shifts in US support for the 77-year-old alliance. Already, the Pentagon has said it is conducting a six-month review of US force posture in Europe.
Rutte’s ability to cushion Trump’s hostility will be tested Wednesday. He said a day before he wants to put the Iran matter in proper context.
“We will also zoom out from this to this bigger picture of what he is doing for NATO,” he told Fox News. The meeting is set to be private.
Trump’s relationship to NATO has run hot and cold. He’s threatened to withdraw and questioned whether it’s valuable for the United States, who he argues is underwriting Europe’s security, to remain a member of the alliance.
But he’s also taken credit for boosting members’ defense spending and periodically reaffirms his commitment to NATO’s collective defense agreement.
Two weeks before the summit, however, the relationship appears at a low ebb. Any hope the end (for now) of the war would dull Trump’s fury was dashed over the weekend, when Trump lashed out at Italy’s conservative prime minister for her reluctance at participating in the bombing.
Here's what's in the housing affordability bill Trump refuses to sign into law
This week, Congress celebrated a rare bipartisan victory after overwhelmingly passing the largest housing affordability bill in a generation. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t sign it until Congress passes a bill to tighten election ID requirements.
Here are highlights from the housing bill, called the “21st Century Road to Housing Act:”
- It tapped into frustration with private equity. One provision banned large institutional investors who already own 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional properties.
- It could lead to more homes being built in factories. For the last five decades, manufactured homes have been required by federal law to be built on a permanent base with wheels, which can add up to $10,000 to the cost and restricts the homes to mobile home parks in many areas. The bill removes that requirement, meaning that more Americans would be able to access cheaper, faster home construction.
- It would make it easier to borrow or access money to fix up older homes in disrepair. Fixer-upper homes have become even more expensive due to recent inflation and Trump’s tariff policy. The bill would authorize a pilot program to offer grants and forgivable loans to address home repair needs.
- It would encourage local governments to ease zoning and permitting restrictions. Many housing experts point to local zoning and red tape as the root cause of the slowdown in homebuilding, but the bill encourages states and local governments to adopt land-use and zoning policies that better support housing development.
GOP chairman who championed housing bill not offended by Trump canceling signing
House Financial Services Chairman French Hill told reporters he is not bothered by President Donald Trump canceling the housing bill signing – even though it delays the implementation of legislation he has worked for 10 months on and has touted as vitally important.
“I’m telling you what we’ve done is work for 10 months to find a bicameral, bipartisan where you get supermajorities in the House and Senate to pass a bill that I think from an economic policy view does follow the administration’s goals,” Hill added.
Inside the GOP conference, shockwaves as Trump steps on affordability message
President Donald Trump’s insistence on the “SAVE America Act” — threatening to tank a major political win on affordability — drew quick backlash from some congressional Republicans. Some wondered why the president was sabotaging their carefully coordinated strategy to show voters that they are working on cost-of-living issues ahead of the midterms.
One GOP lawmaker told CNN it was a “shocker” the president would opt to upend a perfectly good chance to tout affordability ahead of the midterms and another argued Trump was “digging a hole.”
“He’s digging a hole. Threatening Senators will backfire,” one GOP house member told CNN.
Asked about Trump’s about-face, one congressional aide responded with a meme of the actor Neil Patrick Harris miming a gun with his hands and pretending to shoot himself in the mouth.
And it revealed some of the nasty divisions within GOP party leadership that have lingered for months. While Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly allowed Trump to believe that there is still a path for his voter ID bill, many other Republicans say the speaker is not being clear-eyed about the limitations of a narrowly divided Congress.
Despite Trump’s insistence to pass the bill, the votes aren’t there to pass it in the Senate and while the speaker has argued it can be done through a complicated budget process known as reconciliation, there are serious doubts in the Senate it could be done without running afoul to Senate rules. More importantly, the bill doesn’t even have the 51 Republican votes needed to pass with even a simple majority in the Senate.
Why Trump's refusal to sign the housing bill is unlikely to win him more leverage
President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign a major housing affordability bill is aimed at pressuring congressional Republicans to pass the controversial federal elections overhaul he’s demanded. But in reality, it’s likely an empty threat.
The bipartisan housing bill is set to eventually become law whether Trump officially signs it or not. Longstanding rules say if the president does not sign a bill lawmakers passed within 10 days while Congress is in session — excluding Sundays — a bill will become law.
House Speaker Mike Johnson nodded toward that eventuality during a Wednesday press conference, telling reporters that Trump “has a window of time before he has to sign a bill, and he’s going to use a little bit more of that window of time.”
Trump, of course, could still attempt to stop the housing bill by vetoing it altogether, effectively rejecting a measure that his own party has touted as key to its affordability agenda.
But Congress could override that veto by passing the legislation again with a two-thirds supermajority in the House and Senate — a threshold that the bill already cleared in its initial trip through both chambers of Congress.
Johnson says he understands Trump nixing bill signing, which came as GOP leaders touted it
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters he understands President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel the housing bill signing until lawmakers move on his elections overhaul legislation — a decision that was announced just as GOP leaders were touting wins in the housing measure.
Johnson said that he spoke to the president on the phone for 20 minutes this morning and walked Trump through how he believes the election bill could be passed through a process called reconciliation. In that scenario, it would require only Republican votes to pass and could avoid the 60-vote threshold needed to dodge a Senate filibuster.
In the 20-minute phone call, Johnson said that Trump decided to scrap the housing bill signing until more progress was made on the election legislation.
The speaker said: “He decided. I didn’t announce it. I wanted him to announce it. But we’re delaying this — as you know, he has a window of time, before he has to sign a bill, and he’s gonna use a little bit more of that window of time. And we’re gonna go through this together.”
Johnson called the housing bill a “great product” and estimated Trump will sign it sometime in the next 10 days.
Here's what is on Trump's schedule today
President Donald Trump will be on the move a few times today, visiting Capitol Hill and making remarks later this evening on the National Mall.
This is his public schedule for Wednesday:
Trump will attend a lunch with senators on Capitol Hill at 1 p.m. ET, which is closed to the press.
Trump then returns to the White House to meet with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at 3:30 p.m. ET. This is also closed to the press.
Later on, at 8:30 p.m. ET, Trump will speak at the “Great American State Fair” kickoff event.
We’ll let you know any updates as we get them.
