Donald Trump blows up at Bill Cassidy over Iran war powers resolution

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President Trump blew up at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) during an intense meeting behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday after the Republican senator accused the president of not being forthright with the American people about the Iran war.

The argument got so loud and intense between Trump and Cassidy that a senator next to the Louisiana senator had to pull him back down into his seat.

The fireworks started when Trump expressed his frustration over the Senate approving a war powers resolution on Tuesday directing him to withdraw U.S. troops from hostilities against Iran, sending a powerful rebuke to the president.

Trump asked “why would anybody vote for the war powers” resolution, according to Cassidy, who later recounted his tense debate with the president.

“I stood and said, ‘Is that a rhetorical question or would you like to really know?’” Cassidy said.

When Trump said he really wanted to know why Cassidy and three other Republicans — Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — voted with Democrats to attempt to curtail his authority as commander in chief, Cassidy stood up and ripped into Trump’s handling of the unpopular war.

“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,’” Cassidy said, recounting the heated back-and-forth.

Trump, infuriated over the Cassidy’s defiance in front of the entire Senate GOP conference, started yelling at the senator and Cassidy yelled back – matching the president’s tone and anger.

“He did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice. I lost my temper, that’s not appropriate – it’s the Irish in me,” Cassidy said. “I matched his tone and his volume and it went back and forth.”

Cassidy said Trump then got personal, insulting him over his primary election loss.

“What does President Trump say? ‘Oh, you lost the election,’ that sort of thing, whatever comes to mind to demean another person,” Cassidy said.

Cassidy said he sat down at the urging of the senator next to him in an attempt to “de-escalate.”

But the Louisiana Republican said he’s not sorry about clashing with Trump because he argued “the American people need to know” and “the Senate needs to know” more about what’s happening with the conflict with Iran.

Trump on Sunday again threatened to bomb Iran if it did not rein in its proxies in Southern Lebanon, a threat of force that violated the memorandum of understanding his administration signed with Iran.

“It does not appear … that the course of this is going the way we were told. So I make no apologies for standing up to the president, trying to demand that more information be shared with the Senate and more information be shared with the American people,” Cassidy said.

“If someone tries to bully me into not asking that question, I’m not going to accept that either,” he said.

Trump still appeared angry when he walked out of the room.

“I don’t like a few people, but I think you know who they are,” Trump fumed to reporters as he left the meeting.

Cassidy has become one of the more vocal critics of the administration since losing his primary last month to a Trump-backed challenger.

He had been the target of Trump’s ire since 2021, when he was one of only a few Republican senators who voted to convict Trump over his role in the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021. But Cassidy had generally tried to toe the line since then, confirming Trump’s nominees despite his reservations and voting with the president nearly all the time during this Congress.

That all changed on May 16. Since coming in third in a runoff election where one of the top candidates had Trump’s endorsement, Cassidy has voted with Democrats on several key pieces of legislation and has spoken out against a number of administration moves, including ballroom funding, the so-called anti-weaponization fund and his appointment of Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.

Cassidy isn’t the only GOP senator who has become more willing to speak out against Trump in the past few months, and Wednesday’s closed-door meeting took place againt a background of widspread frustration among the GOP conference with the president’s moves.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has criticized Trump’s deal with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, described the tense meeting as a “spirited conversation.”

Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said “we talked a lot about Iran and the need to stick together and make sure that we finish and achieve our objectives.”

“We spent most of our time on that,” he said describing a long discussion about the Iran conflict.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Trump also vented his frustrations over the Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act, which is stymied by a Democratic filibuster.

Tillis said Republican leaders simply don’t have the votes to abolish the Senate filibuster, as Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has repeatedly reiterated.

“I know there’s frustration over the Save Act passage, but we simply don’t have the votes because we’re not going to nuke the filibuster. So it’s more a matter, how do we move forward, get FISA done, and areas to work together?” he said.

“We’ve made it clear multiple times that if the SAVE act requires nuking the filibuster, it’s simply not gonna happen. And that’s been obvious long before today,” he added.

Trump last week threatened not to sign an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) lapsed authorities unless Congress also passes the SAVE America Act.

The president then doubled down on Wednesday morning when he cancelled a ceremony to sign a popular bill to address housing affordability, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, unless Congress approves the election reform bill.

Trump’s preferred version of the legislation couldn’t even pass with a simple majority as four GOP senators, including Tillis, voted against it earlier this month.

Tillis said tensions simmered down when the president and GOP senators agreed to work more closely together on messaging and strategy.

“There’s a general consensus that we on Capitol Hill have to start getting in lockstep [with] the White house vice versa. We both have to coordinate, make sure our messaging and timing is in better sync,” he said.

Updated at 3:47 p.m.

Tags

Bill Cassidy

Bill Pulte

Donald Trump

John Hoeven

Lisa Murkowski

Rand Paul

Susan Collins

Ted Cruz

Thom Tillis

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