Speaker Mike Johnson’s success at squeezing a Republican budget resolution through the House this week, after his brush with defeat just minutes beforehand, underscored his shaky hold on his unruly majority — and how heavily reliant he is on President Trump to keep his members in line.
He had no Plan B if the budget plan were to fail, he told reporters on Tuesday night as he entered the chamber for a vote that he had a very solid chance of losing. And in the end, Plan A relied on a big handhold from the president, who made calls that ultimately flipped the few Republicans who were standing in the way of advancing his domestic agenda through what he has called “one big beautiful bill.”
The president was “a big help,” Mr. Johnson said after the vote. That may have been an understatement. The moment reflected how Mr. Johnson, who has already made himself subservient to Mr. Trump, has become dependent on the president to manage the punishing math of his tiny majority and the erratic personalities and uncompromising viewpoints of his rank and file.
It was Mr. Trump who talked to Representative Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican who was one of the final members threatening to vote against the bill, for 15 minutes before he finally voted “yes.” Another of the last holdouts, Representative Victoria Spartz, Republican of Indiana, was spotted by her colleagues crying as she spoke on the phone with Mr. Trump in the cloakroom just off the House floor.
“He’s on board to get some great things done on health care,” she told reporters later. “I trust his word.”
The vote to adopt the budget on Tuesday night followed a similar pattern as the one that elected Mr. Johnson speaker in January. He had been on the verge of defeat on the first ballot, but was pulled over the finish line after Mr. Trump interrupted his golf game to lobby holdouts by phone.
It is not a phenomenon that began with Mr. Johnson, or even with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. Mr. Johnson’s predecessor as speaker, Kevin McCarthy, thanked Mr. Trump first in his Oscar-style acceptance speech after winning the gavel in 2023 following a drawn-out floor fight. And that was when Mr. Trump was somewhat marginalized and out of power at Mar-a-Lago.
“I do want to especially thank President Trump,” Mr. McCarthy said back then. “I don’t think anyone should doubt his influence.”
Mr. Johnson received some credit of his own on Wednesday for muscling through the resolution when he could afford to lose just one vote.
“He took a bit of a risk in running to the floor without having the votes,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a top adviser to former Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. “That takes some gumption — being able to stare down a lot of these members and having them fold.”
On social media, Mr. Trump sounded pleased, noting in a Truth Social post that the vote was a “Big First Step Win for Speaker Mike Johnson, and AMERICA.”
Hours before the vote on Tuesday morning, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, acknowledged how heavily the party was depending on Mr. Trump’s help when he referred to the G.O.P. hold on the House, the Senate and the White House not as the Republican Party’s governing trifecta, but as the “Trump trifecta.”
At the same news conference, as he made the case for the G.O.P. budget, Mr. Johnson offered what sounded like a veiled warning to any Republican who dared to get crosswise with Mr. Trump.
“Everybody wants to be on this train,” Mr. Johnson said of the fiscal plan, “and not in front of it.”
Some vulnerable House Republicans who represent swing districts spent Wednesday trying to justify their votes for the budget resolution, which could pave the way for cuts in Medicaid, by using Mr. Trump — who has vowed not to touch the program — as political cover.
“Last night’s vote was just a procedural step to start federal budget negotiations and does NOT change any current laws,” Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr., a first-term Republican from a competitive district in Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “I will fight to protect working-class families in Northeastern Pennsylvania and stand with President Trump in opposing gutting Medicaid.”
Democrats have said that hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts that the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, is being asked to identify are only achievable if the government undertakes what would amount to the largest Medicaid cut in history.
“We’re going to celebrate tonight,” Mr. Johnson said after the vote, even while conceding that adopting the budget plan was the easy part of the complicated and politically fraught process of moving Mr. Trump’s agenda through Congress.
Mr. Johnson will have to return to the same wavering members after the Senate has its say on the budget plan, and will inevitably have to backtrack on some of the policy that already did not go far enough for them.
“The resolution that they passed seemed incompatible with what can get through the Senate,” Mr. Buck said. “Now it gets much harder.”
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