Trump’s Capitol visit devolves into shouting match with GOP senator he helped oust in primary fight

(CNN) — In the month since President Donald Trump put a decisive end to Sen. Bill Cassidy’s congressional career, the Louisiana senator has become one of the president’s sharpest critics in the halls of the US Capitol.

But as they stood face to face in a Wednesday meeting at the Capitol, the two Republicans unleashed anger at each other in a shouting match in front of dozens of their Senate GOP colleagues.

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.

“I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on,’” Cassidy recalled after the meeting, describing what he told the president behind closed doors. “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 was shouting back at the same “tone and volume” as the president.

At one point inside the luncheon, Trump ordered Cassidy to sit down — but Cassidy refused, another source said. Trump then called him a “lunatic.” In return, Cassidy shouted at Trump, in one instance referring to Trump as his “brother.” Trump told him he wasn’t his “brother” — and eventually Cassidy sat down.

Hours later, however, the Louisiana Republican switched his vote on a similar Iran war powers resolution, voting against advancing it and allowing Republicans to effectively walk back their rebuke of the president.

His vote came after he said he’d received a “thorough briefing” on Iran from Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff. “I appreciate the quick invitation to the White House to address many of my concerns,” Cassidy wrote on X.

Still, the tense, roughly 70-minute meeting between Trump and GOP senators earlier Wednesday reflected rising tensions as the president has repeatedly upended key pieces of the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill. While Trump has spent much of his second term circumventing Congress to satisfy his own aims — from firing federal workers, blowing up budgets, even waging a war — a growing bloc within his party is willing to say they’ve had enough.

House and Senate GOP leaders are eager to move beyond some of Trump’s personal priorities — including an elections overhaul bill that lacks the votes to pass the Senate — and instead work on cost-of-living issues to tout back home. But they’re confronting a particularly unpredictable version of Trump who seems to care little about the party’s efforts at a carefully coordinated midterm strategy. Inside the Capitol, senior Republicans are exasperated by the president’s behavior over the last several weeks, with some insisting he is getting “bad advice” from his team, according to multiple GOP sources.

“They’re pretty exasperated by it all,” said one Republican who’s spoken with several vulnerable GOP lawmakers, describing them as increasingly dismayed by Trump’s declining approval ratings. “They see the same data everyone else sees, but they also don’t want to get into a position where they’re in a sniping match with the president.”

Cassidy said the friction during Wednesday’s lunch 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.” But that did little to immediately ease tensions. One White House official afterward said Cassidy had “totally embarrassed himself,” characterizing him as “unhinged” as the president tried to explain the status of ongoing talks.

One reason only Cassidy pushed back on Trump is because the president dominated the podium and didn’t leave time for senators to speak or question him, according to frustrated Republican senators and aides.

The closed-door lunch came one day after Trump publicly vented frustration with the four Republican senators, including Cassidy, who had voted to rein in his Iran war powers. “Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats,” Trump said on Truth Social Tuesday night after the Senate vote, which he called “poorly timed and meaningless.”

One person briefed on the Capitol Hill meeting said that Trump’s ire was not just directed at Cassidy, but more broadly at all of the Republicans who voted against him on Iran, and those who had missed the vote. One senator said Trump felt undermined by that symbolic vote.

Sen. John Kennedy told reporters after the closed-door lunch that, “the president was and is mad as a murder hornet about the war powers vote yesterday.”

Trump later hinted at his frustrations, even as he insisted that the meeting had gone “really great.”

“I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay,” he said. “I think you know who they are.”

Just hours earlier, Trump had torched plans to celebrate recently passed legislation — the largest housing affordability bill in a generation — at a press conference with top Republicans. Instead, he decided not to sign it at all — stepping all over any plans to tout an effort to address cost-of-living concerns.

And even with a potentially crippling midterm ahead for the GOP, Trump is refusing to acknowledge that his biggest legislative wish-list item — the “SAVE America Act” — doesn’t have the votes. Trump spent much of his remarks to the GOP senators focused on that elections bill, which Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama described as “the best speech I’ve seen him give.”

“He got emotional at times, basically talking about how Communism is taking over, this will be our last shot, if we don’t bust the filibuster,” Tuberville said, referring to the New York primary elections the night before, where a slate of candidates endorsed by democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won.

Tuberville, the celebrated former Auburn football coach, compared it to a coach’s halftime speech: “You know, ‘we don’t have much time left.’”

Trump specifically argued that the Mamdani-backed candidates winning elections in New York was a sign that they needed the SAVE America Act, according to one Republican senator in the meeting.

In the end, it was one of Trump’s loyalists, Sen. Rick Scott, who tried to convey to Trump that there are simply not enough Republican votes to pass his elections bill in Congress.

“I said, ‘This is where we are today,’” Scott of Florida said, recounting the meeting. “I’m a business guy. You have to live in reality.”

But it wasn’t clear if that message sunk in for Trump. Scott said Trump is focused on passing the bill through whatever means necessary: “He really believes it’s a key to this fall.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who Trump has grown frustrated with behind the scenes as the elections bill has stalled in the Senate, said he couldn’t tell if Trump was swayed by the senators’ own math on the vote count.

“The president made his views very clear, which we know how he feels on it. I’m not sure what the takeaway was for him regarding that, but I think it’s fair to say that we’ve made the point a number of times,” Thune said. “That is not a conclusion he would like us to draw but it’s what I have to say.”

Sen. John Cornyn — who, like Cassidy, is an outgoing Senate Republican who lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger — quipped upon leaving the meeting that Trump offered “quite the unity message.”

“The president closed by preaching unity, but he spent the entire hour talking about things which were not exactly unified,” Cornyn added.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Ted Barrett, Annie Grayer, Ellis Kim, Alison Main and Dugald McConnell contributed.