Trump ramps up pressure on House Republicans to pass major tax cut and spending bill
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is ramping up pressure on Republicans to get his tax and spending bill across the finish line.
Several House Republicans arrived White House on Wednesday morning for meetings as the president presses his party to pass the sweeping legislation — a centerpiece of Trump’s second term agenda.
Vice President JD Vance, who cast the tie-breaking vote to get the bill passed in the Senate, was spotted at the White House as well.
An administration official said the White House is hosting multiple meetings on Wednesday with Republicans on the White House complex. The president is expected to engage directly with members throughout the day.
Some of the lawmakers seen entering were GOP eps. Jeff Van Drew, Rob Bresnahan, Dusty Johnson, Dan Newhouse, Mike Lawler and Andrew Garbarino.
Those lawmakers are part of the Main Street Caucus, a group of lawmakers who bill themselves as “pragmatic” conservatives focused on getting things done.
President Trump notably has no public events on his schedule Wednesday.
Trump previously told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce he believed things would be “easier” in the House than the Senate with regards to the megabill, but several changes made by the Senate have angered some Republican hardliners in the House.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, talking to reporters on Capitol Hill, questioned whether the House would be able to pass the megabill on Wednesday — but said Trump was helping on that front.
Asked by ABC News whether he feels like Republicans are short of the votes needed for passage, Scalise acknowledged the bumpy road both in the past and ahead.
“We’ve still had a lot of members that had questions about the changes that the Senate made. That’s to be expected,” Scalise said.
The majority leader added, “When you talk to members, there’s some that still are holding out for something different, but at the end of the day, they know this is probably as good as we’re going to get.”
Scalise said that Republican leadership is meeting with small groups of members who haven’t locked in their support, and the president is also helping on that today as their “best closer.”
“He’s talking to individual members,” Scalise said of President Trump. “Even when the bill was in the Senate, you had some individual members that wanted some changes in the Senate calling the president to help his support for those changes, and some of those changes were implemented. So you know, the President, from day one, has been our best closer, and he’s going to continue to be through today.”
Trump also continued an online pressure campaign, posting to his conservative social media site multiple times on Wednesday.
“Republicans, don’t let the Radical Left Democrats push you around,” Trump wrote this morning. “We’ve got all the cards, and we are going to use them. Last year America was a ‘DEAD’ Nation, with no hope for the future, and now it’s the ‘HOTTEST NATION IN THE WORLD!’ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
(NEW YORK) — “We are especially mindful that we are in the middle of a war right now,” former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — the front-runner in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary — told a crowd at a Juneteenth lunch event in the Bronx on Thursday.
Some people in the crowd started muttering — the war in the Middle East?
“We’re in the middle of a war — you don’t see it? Day in and day out, when you turn on the TV news and you see a president named Mr. Trump. Have you seen President Trump on TV?”
As some in the crowd booed, Cuomo added, “President Trump has declared war on Democratic states, Democratic cities. He’s declared war on working families, he’s declared war on immigrants, he’s declared war on minorities, and he’s declared war on New York City and New York State.” He later told reporters, “Good news is — we beat [the administration] once before, and we’re going to beat them again.”
In the final days of campaigning for Tuesday’s New York City ranked choice Democratic mayoral primary, which has 11 candidates on the ballot, Cuomo and others fanned out across the city to make their closing arguments, with one shared focus being how they’re framing themselves as the best choice to stand up to the White House.
Curtis Sliwa, who lost to Mayor Eric Adams in 2021, is the only Republican running for mayor.
Voters, meanwhile, told ABC News they’re looking at both national and local issues — particularly affordability — as they decide who to cast votes for.
And scorching high temperatures in New York City could impact turnout on Election Day, as voters brave the heat to trudge to their polling places on Tuesday, with the city’s election board preparing for dehydration, and even potential heat-related power outages.
The New York City Board of Elections said last week in a news release that it is making sure polling sites that don’t have air conditioning will have fans, a “steady supply of water.” The board said it is working with emergency management and utility providers to make sure polling places don’t lose power, too.
A spokesperson for the board told City & State NY that potential heat-induced blackouts might impact vote counting, since then ballots would need to be counted similarly to absentee or affidavit ballots that get scanned later.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, signed legislation over the weekend allowing voters to receive refreshments while in line to vote.
In an email sent to supporters on Tuesday to supporters, Cuomo asked voters to “vote as early as you can to avoid the hottest parts of the day.”
For Cuomo, the election could mark his political comeback. His governorship was derailed after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct. He resigned as governor in 2021 but has consistently denied the allegations. One voter in downtown Manhattan told ABC News that she is voting for Cuomo despite misgivings over the allegations, mentioning that he had issued an apology in 2021.
Carmen S., a medical assistant who lives in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, told ABC News in an interview that immigration policy is one of the important issues in the race, becoming emotional speaking about the White House’s immigration policies. She declined to provide her full last name.
“I’m a child of immigrants,” she said. “Not every immigrant is a criminal.”
While she didn’t share who she ranked on her ballot, she praised Cuomo for his record and how he handled his job as governor.
Cuomo’s main opponent in the primary is state assembly member Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist whose progressive economic plans have galvanized many voters.
Mamdani, in an interview with ABC News on Thursday in Astoria, Queens, just hours after he voted early at a polling site in the Museum of the Moving Image, said his closing argument is that he is the one who can take on the “twin crises” facing the city: “Authoritarianism from the outside and an affordability crisis from the inside.”
“And what we need is a mayor who’s able to stand up to both of those and deliver a city that every New Yorker can afford and that every New Yorker understands that they belong to,” Mamdani told ABC News.
And as to why should people around the country care about this race, he said, “This is a referendum on where our party goes; it is a referendum on whether billionaires and corporations can buy yet another election, or if we opt for a new generation of leadership, one that isn’t funded by Trump donors, one that is actually able to stand up and fight for working class New Yorkers.”
That outlook has impressed some voters. Angela Pham, a 38-year-old content designer who lives in Greenwich Village, told ABC News in an interview after voting early that Mamdani “needs to win.”
“We’re supposed to be the most progressive city in America,” she said. “I feel like he’s the only candidate that makes sense for the things that we need to happen.”
Asked how she felt about Cuomo, Pham said, “He needs to get out of politics and retire to a farm.”
Mamdani has faced some pushback over his criticism of Israel, given New York’s large Jewish population. In response, he has emphasized policies to combat antisemitism and said that he wants to focus on city issues.
Cuomo has criticized Mamdani’s comments about Israel and made combatting antisemitism a key campaign focus. One voter in Greenwich Village told ABC News that concerns about antisemitism were a main driver for his decision to vote for Cuomo.
Fellow candidate New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who has “cross-endorsed” Mamdani, has received less momentum in polling but has gotten heightened attention since he was briefly detained last week by federal agents while escorting a defendant out of immigration court.
Lander, speaking with ABC News on Thursday on the Upper East Side near an early voting site at a school, said that the mayoral election in the city has national implications, because the administration has said it hopes to ““liberate” Democratic cities from their elected officials. That’s [a] code word for a federal government takeover, an erosion of democracy, a denial of due process,” Lander said.
“Democracy is on the line right now,” he added.
Officials from the White House and administration have said their actions towards cities such as Los Angeles are meant to restore order amidst protests and unrest.
Juan Peralta, a 31-year-old from Harlem who works in events, told ABC News that the only two candidates on the ballot he’s excited about are Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, pointing to Mamdani’s proposal for free child care.
“Growing up in New York, I did feel like this was a place for families,” Peralta told ABC News. “Now I feel like it’s a place for families of a certain income.”
(LONDON) — President Donald Trump held a high-stakes phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, as the White House continues its push for an end to Moscow’s 3-year-old invasion of Ukraine after last week’s peace talks in Istanbul, Turkey.
Trump over the weekend said the focus of Monday’s conversation would be on stopping the “bloodbath” on both sides. He said he would also be speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and various members of NATO.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at Monday morning’s briefing the public can expect to hear from President Trump or the White House following the calls.
Putin, speaking to journalists in Sochi, said the “conversation took place and lasted for more than two hours.”
The Russian leader claimed that he is willing to work on a “memorandum on a possible future peace agreement” with Ukraine, but did not elaborate on what that would look like.
“The question is, of course, that the Russian and Ukrainian sides show their maximum desire for peace and find the compromises that would suit all parties,” Putin added.
ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott pressed Leavitt if Trump would set a new deadline for peace talks during his conversation with Putin, but Leavitt said she wouldn’t get ahead of Trump on any specific timeline.
“His goal is to see a ceasefire and to see this conflict come to an end, and he’s grown weary and frustrated with both sides of the conflict,” she said.
Leavitt also said she believed Trump “would certainly be open” to meeting with Putin but “let’s see how this call goes today.”
Renewed direct contact with Putin — the last publicly known direct phone call between the two presidents took place in February — comes after Trump’s hopes for peace talks progress in Istanbul were scuppered, Putin having declined to attend despite Zelenskyy’s invitation to do so.
The Istanbul talks were the first known meeting between representatives of Moscow and Kyiv since spring 2022, when the Turkish city hosted the final round of unsuccessful peace negotiations to end Russia’s unfolding invasion.
Once it became clear Putin would not attend, Trump told reporters of the peace effort, “Nothing’s going to happen until Putin and I get together, okay?”
“And obviously he wasn’t going to go,” Trump added. “He was going to go, but he thought I was going to go. He wasn’t going if I wasn’t there. And I don’t believe anything’s going to happen, whether you like it or not, until he and I get together, but we’re going to have to get it solved, because too many people are dying.”
On Monday, Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. is “more than open to walking away” from negotiations.
“We realize there’s a bit of an impasse here,” Vance told reporters, “and I think the president’s going to say to President Putin, ‘Look, are you serious? Are you real about this? Because the proposal from the United States has always been, look, there are a lot of economic benefits to thawing relations between Russia and the rest of the world, but you’re not going to get those benefits you keep on killing a lot of it is lot of innocent people.’”
Trump’s repeated threats of further sanctions on Russia have so far failed to precipitate any notable shift in Moscow’s war goals — which, according to public statements by officials, still include Ukraine’s ceding of four regions — which Russian forces do not fully control — plus Crimea, as well as a permanent block on Kyiv’s accession to NATO.
Putin said Sunday that any peace deal with Ukraine should “eliminate the causes that triggered this crisis” and “guarantee Russia’s security.”
Kyiv and its European backers are still pushing for a full 30-day ceasefire, during which time they say peace negotiations can take place. Moscow has thus far refused to support the proposal, suggesting that all Western military aid to Ukraine would have to stop as part of any ceasefire.
Contacts between U.S., Russian and Ukrainian officials continued after the end of the talks in Istanbul. On Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said Rubio welcomed a prisoner exchange agreement reached during the Istanbul meeting and emphasized Trump’s call for an immediate ceasefire.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Monday wrote on X that the Istanbul meeting highlighted a “stark difference” between Moscow and Kyiv. “Ukraine is forward-looking, focused on the full and immediate ceasefire to kickstart the real peace process.”
“To the contrary, Russia is completely focused on the past, rejecting the ceasefire and instead talking constantly about the 2022 Istanbul meetings, attempting to make the same absurd demands as three years ago,” the foreign minister said.
“This is yet another reason why pressure on Russia must be increased,” Sybiha added. “Moscow must now understand the consequences of impeding the peace process.”
Meanwhile, long-range strikes by both sides continued. On Sunday night into Monday morning, Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 112 drones into the country, 76 of which were shot down or jammed. Damage was reported in five regions of Ukraine, the air force said in a post to Telegram.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Monday morning that its forces had downed 35 Ukrainian drones overnight.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie, William Gretsky and Tanya Stukalova contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans who were protected from deportation and allowed to work in the United States.
The court approved the administration’s request to lift a lower court’s order that barred it from ending the protections.
In their application to the high court, lawyers representing the government had said the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California undermined “the Executive Branch’s inherent powers as to immigration and foreign affairs,” when it halted the administration from ending protections and work permits in April 2025 as opposed to the original date in October 2026.
Ahilan Arulanantham, who is representing TPS holders in the case, said he believes this to be “the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history.”
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history. That the Supreme Court authorized this action in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking,” Arulanantham said. “The humanitarian and economic impact of the Court’s decision will be felt immediately, and will reverberate for generations.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
