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.
The tense, roughly 70-minute meeting between Trump and GOP senators comes amid 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.”