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Plus: Trump confronts South African leader in Oval Office
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HOUSE REPUBLICANS are fighting the clock — and each other — as GOP leadership and the White House push for President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to get a vote as soon as tonight.
Conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus headed to the White House on Wednesday afternoon for another negotiating session, even as their members dig in against the legislation.
It’s been one step forward, two steps back so far.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) late Tuesday struck a deal with moderate Republicans in blue states to raise the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, winning over a key group of holdouts.
But conservative fiscal hawks oppose raising the SALT caps, which they see as a subsidy for high-tax states.
“I think we’re further away from a deal because that SALT cap increase I think upset a lot of conservatives,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said on Newsmax.
Freedom Caucus members are also seeking further cuts to Medicaid, which Trump says will not happen.
“We got some work to do, hopefully we get this Medicaid stuff done today and land the plane,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said Wednesday on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” “But it does need to change.”
Freedom Caucus members thought they had a deal to secure their support earlier this morning, but a White House official disputed that characterization, saying they’d only been offered a menu of policy options the administration would not oppose if they could garner enough support in the House.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been saying he believes a vote will happen Wednesday. Trump and the White House are ratcheting up the pressure.
“Failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal,” the White House said in a statement of administration policy.
The reconciliation bill will first need to be voted out of the House Rules Committee, which began deliberations at 1 a.m.
Republicans can only afford to lose three members for the bill to pass the full House.
CONNOLLY DIES AT 75
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) died Wednesday following a battle with esophageal cancer.
The Hill’s Mike Lilliswrites: “Connolly, 75, was a familiar figure around the halls of the Capitol, where he was known as a feisty advocate for the institutions of Washington — particularly following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — and a champion of the many federal workers hailing from his Northern Virginia district.”
Connolly was elected ranking member of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee earlier this year, overcoming a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a contest that provoked Democratic debate about age and seniority that has only grown louder amid the revelations about former President Biden’s decline in office.
Connolly is the third House Democrat to die in office this year.
💡Perspectives:
•The Hill: Working for welfare benefits isn’t punishment.
• MSNBC: The GOP’s mega-bill is terrible for farmers.
The United States on Wednesdayofficially accepted a luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One amid bipartisan concerns about ethics and national security.
The Federal Aviation Administration is reducing the number of flights coming in and out of embattled Newark Liberty International Airport to combat delays and reduce congestion.
A federal appeals court judge appointed by President Trump rebuked the Supreme Court for blocking the administration from swiftly deporting a group of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act. A different judge said the administration violated his order when it flew a group of migrants it says are violent criminals to South Sudan.
President Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in front of the cameras at the White House on Wednesday over what Trump described as a “genocide” against white farmers in the country.
Ramaphosa was ostensibly in town to discuss trade, but tensions bubbled up over Trump’s focus on a law in South Africa that allows the government to take private land for redistribution as part of an effort to address the legacy of racial apartheid.
“Generally, they’re white farmers and they’re fleeing South Africa and it’s a very sad thing to see, so I hope we can have an explanation about that,” Trump said.
Ramaphosa pushed back, saying he brought with him the minister of agriculture, who is white, as well as golfing champions Ernie Els and Retief Goosen.
“It will take President Trump listening to the voices of South Africans, some of whom are his good friends, like those here,” Ramaphosa responded.
“If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide, these gentlemen would not be here, including my minister of agriculture, he would not be here, so it will take President Trump listening to their stories, their perspectives.”
Trump then surprised his guests by having the lights dimmed to play a documentary video that he said provided evidence of genocide, which included images of mass burial sites.
“I’d like to know where that is because this I’ve never seen,” Ramaphosa said.
Trump then paged through printed out news stories.
“Death, death, horrible death,” Trump said as he flipped through the pages.
Elon Musk, a South African native and critic of Ramaphosa’s government, was also in attendance.
The U.S. has expelled South Africa’s ambassador and is accepting dozens of white Afrikaner farmers as refugees, even as it clamps down on refugees seeking asylum from other countries.
“We take from many locations if we feel there is persecution or genocide going on,” Trump said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was grilled on the issue by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.
“The United States has a right to pick and choose who they allow into the United States,” Rubio said in a heated exchange with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).
“Based on the color of somebody’s skin?” Kaine responded.
“You’re the one that’s talking about the color of their skin, not me,” Rubio shot back. “These are people whose farms were burned down and they were killed because of the color of their skin.”
A South African court has dismissed claims of a “white genocide.” News outlets have challenged the notion of a “white genocide” while acknowledging there have been killings.
Ramaphosa left the White House saying his private meeting with Trump went “very well” and that the president listened to him.
President Biden’s decline has become a campaign issue among Democrats ahead of a key election next year.
Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles and a candidate for governor in 2026, accused former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra of engaging in a “cover-up” to conceal Biden’s decline.
Harris is considering running for governor and Becerra is already in the race.
“At the highest levels of our government, those in power were intentionally complicit or told outright lies in a systematic cover-up to keep Joe Biden’s mental decline from the public,” Villaraigosa said in a statement.
“What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” he continued. “This cover-up directly led to a second Donald Trump term — and as a result, all Californians are paying the price.”
Everyday brings a drip of new details about how those around Biden tried to hide his decline from the public, even as they cast reports about his health as conspiracy theories or “cheap-fake” videos.
The latest nugget from “Original Sin” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson finds that Biden’s aides staged a closed-press town hall with his allies because they needed footage of him being sharp and in charge. The resulting footage was unusable.
Tapper went on “The Megyn Kelly” show and apologized for his past skepticism, which included fiery denunciations of conservatives, including Lara Trump, who said at the time it was obvious Biden was in decline.
“Over here in my ecosphere, we were covering all of this,” Kelly said. “It wasn’t just falling down, it was getting lost. It was some of the stuff you report in your book…There was an attempted cover-up. It could only ever work if you allowed it. If the press allowed it.”
Tapper said he apologized to Lara Trump in private.
“Alex and I are here to say the conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently 100 percent,” Tapper responded. “So, I mean, I’m not here to defend coverage that I’ve already acknowledged. I wish I could do differently.”
MORE POLITICS…
A few developments in Trump World around 2028:
President Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. said Wednesday he’d be open to running for president some day.
“The answer is, I don’t know. Maybe one day. You know, that calling is there,” he said at the Qatar Economic Forum.
Vice President Vance also weighed in on a potential 2028 run.
“If I do end up running in 2028, I’m not entitled to it,”Vance told NBC News, while talking up his relationship with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another potential 2028 contender.
💡Perspectives:
•New York Post: Dem coverup of Biden’s health goes from bad to worse.
• The Atlantic: Biden’s age wasn’t a coverup. It was observable fact.
