Trump trades public attacks for a behind-the-scenes approach to influence Congress

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump traveled to visit natural disaster areas in North Carolina and California shortly after his inauguration, his team was concerned about a possible political disaster back in Washington. To defuse it would require a type of political dexterity he hadn’t always displayed during his first term.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., had raised concerns about defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who had communicated them to the White House. Hegseth couldn’t afford to lose Tillis’ vote, and Trump and his political team knew it.

Walking into an Air Force One cabin filled with members of North Carolina’s GOP congressional delegation, Trump mused, “I hear your man Thom might not be with us,” according to a person who heard the remark. Trump then openly speculated, “Maybe someone will primary him. ... Do we have any takers?”

The threat wrapped in a joke was never deployed publicly. Instead, Trump took a different tack. Before the comment, his political team had set up meetings for Tillis with Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. The behind-the-scenes pressure campaign then culminated with a meeting between Trump and Tillis the day of Hegseth’s confirmation vote.

“We went into overdrive,” said a senior administration official who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Tillis just kept shrinking with each passing hour.”

Tillis ultimately fell in line and supported Hegseth, who squeaked through after Vance cast the tiebreaking vote to secure his confirmation. Notably, Trump never used what was his preferred tool of congressional diplomacy during his first term: a social media scolding.

Trump’s more measured management of his relationships with Republican lawmakers — in which blow-ups still occur, but over the phone or behind closed doors rather than on social media — has been a critical difference between his two terms so far, according to eight sources on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue familiar with the dynamic between Trump and members of Congress.

“He has stronger relationships on the Hill, so he doesn’t feel the need to be as — he’s a relationships guy,” a senior White House official said. “Now he has deeper, more personal relationships.”

'He's proven himself to me'

When Trump, a former Democrat, first arrived in Washington in 2017, few congressional Republicans knew him — or trusted him. And there were Republicans then who were unafraid to break with Trump’s actions or rhetoric, from Sens. John McCain and Bob Corker to Reps. Charlie Dent and Mark Sanford.

Eight years later, Trump is regarded as the most dominant GOP figure in generations, those vocal critics are out of office, and he is deploying a softer touch with the loyalists who remain. Unlike the start of his first term, he knows Republican lawmakers on a first-name basis, passes out his cellphone number to them and frequently hosts them and their spouses at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“He was my fifth choice for president, and I was wondering what we were getting into” in 2016, recalled Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., who endorsed Marco Rubio in that primary campaign. “And then I became a convert to support him because of the policies that he had. It’s not what he said; it’s what he did. He’s proven himself to me.”

Wilson then pulled out of his jacket pocket a photo of him with Trump at Mar-a-Lago from a visit in January.

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who publicly pushed back against Trump’s stolen election claims in 2020 and endorsed another candidate for president last year, said in an interview last Thursday that Trump “is prepared this time” around.

“He’s had four years to plan his first six months in office. And it has been a very successful first two months for sure,” he said.

Those relationships were tested last week when Trump used his pull with House Republicans to break an impasse over a budget resolution that’s critical to advancing his border security, energy and tax agenda through Congress.

Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., were getting squeezed on both sides — from GOP moderates fretting about potential Medicaid cuts that could harm their constituents and conservative fiscal hawks furious that the proposed spending cuts weren’t deep enough.

Trump and Johnson began assuaging concerns of the moderates. One, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., said he spoke to Trump twice last week, including just hours before the vote. Van Drew said that he called Trump and left a message for him last Tuesday and that Trump called him back soon after. Rather than insist that Van Drew vote for the budget blueprint, he recalled, Trump asked him whether he thought the votes were there to pass it. The two talked about protecting Medicaid for low-income Americans, many of whom voted for Trump.

“Waste, fraud and abuse. Yes, we all want to get rid of that. But the issue ... are people that are disabled, people that are in nursing homes, people that are working poor, a lot of all these people are wearing red hats,” Van Drew said. “They’re the new Republican Party, the populist conservative party. [Trump] understands that.”

But the quartet of conservatives dug in and refused to move off their opposition. During a dramatic standoff on the House floor, Trump began calling three of the remaining conservative holdouts: Reps. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, and Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. The House Republican leadership team is using its “phone a friend lifeline with caution,” said a source involved in discussions, who didn’t want Trump to waste political capital so early in a perilous process.

Trump spent 25 minutes on the phone with Spartz, who walked away from the conversation telling Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., she would still vote against the resolution, according to a person who witnessed the conversations. Trump and Spartz then had a second phone call.

“We had a productive conversation, and he reassured me that he will back me up when things are important for me and he agrees with me,” Spartz said, adding that Trump recognized strong-arming her would backfire. “President Trump is a smart man. He would know better than that, you know, that it would never work, right? ... President Trump was very nice. ... He cares a lot, and he always listens.”

Republicans said Trump’s defter behind-the-scenes approach most likely has to do with his paper-thin majority in the House. The budget resolution passed 217-215 — a single-vote margin — and he’ll need nearly every Republican on board again to pass the reconciliation package later this year. Publicly bashing and alienating opponents, lawmakers said, could risk blowing up his entire agenda.

That’s a marked difference from 2017, when House Republicans had a 241-194 majority. That year, 20 House Republicans bucked Trump and voted against a partial repeal of Obamacare. McCain would later kill the package in the Senate.

And that December, a dozen Republicans voted no on a sweeping tax bill that Trump later signed into law.

Trump’s “got to be real careful, which he is not. There will be problems on the hard right, with pragmatic members and others,” said Dent, the former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who voted against the Obamacare repeal bill in 2017 and resigned from the House a year later. “No margin for error.”

'It's like night and day'

Trump also genuinely likes the Republican leaders of both chambers, administration sources say, a dynamic that was absent during his first stint in the Oval Office with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the former Senate leader and House speaker, respectively.

After the bill to repeal Obamacare collapsed, Trump posted on social media that McConnell, R-Ky., “couldn’t get it done.” And when McConnell blamed Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump called him a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” As for Ryan, R-Wis., Trump has called him a “weak and ineffective leader” and a “curse to the Republican Party.”

Congressional Republicans acknowledge Trump is also generally more accessible to them in his second term, with many in possession of his personal cellphone number.

“It’s like night and day from what it was in the first term,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told NBC News.

Cornyn also credited Trump’s “sensible” chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who has long-standing relationships with many Republicans on Capitol Hill and can help lawmakers “navigate” disagreements with Trump.

“She hears the good, bad and the ugly,” Cornyn said.

Trump also has another tool at his disposal in managing Congress: billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who spent more than a quarter-billion dollars on the 2024 elections.

Musk’s embrace of Trump has been a net positive in his relationship with Congress, a senior administration official said, “and not just by the threat his very existence imposes” — referring to his ability to spend massive sums of money on an election.

Musk’s penchant for fiery posts on his X platform requires White House management. But he has proven to be a valuable ally for Trump, having recently spent 45 minutes on the phone lobbying a “difficult” senator on behalf of an administration priority, the senior official said.

“We just have to be cognizant that if he’s not on the same page, we could risk something being said at any time that sets us back,” the official said.

Still, there are limits to Musk’s influence. During the Republican Senate leadership race last year, in which all votes were private, Musk endorsed Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., against Thune and Cornyn. Shortly after Musk’s posts on X, Senate Republicans were flooded with voicemails, emails and even protesters at their hometown offices. Scott ended up losing the vote in the first round, anyway.

For now, Trump’s primary threats against fellow Republicans remain on ice or, at least, only implied. But he has a massive war chest and a long memory, and that won’t always be the case.

“At the end of year one there’s a scorecard,” the senior administration official said. “We’ve either achieved everything we need to and people have taken the right votes and are in good graces ... or at the end you’ve made yourself persona non grata.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com