WASHINGTON — USPresident Donald Trump clashed with Sen. Bill Cassidy during an intense meeting behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday after the Republican senator accused the president of not being forthright with the American people about the Iran war.
The argument got so loud and intense between Trump and Cassidy that a senator next to the Louisiana senator had to pull him back down into his seat.
The fireworks started when Trump expressed his frustration over the Senate approving a war powers resolution on Tuesday directing him to withdraw US troops from hostilities against Iran, sending a powerful rebuke to the president.
Multiple sources described the clash between Trump and Cassidy as a shouting match. Senate Majority Leader John Thune tried to intervene to de-escalate the situation and other senators tried to jump in to ease tensions over the resolution, which aims to limit Trump’s ability to wage war in Iran but does not have the force of law.
Cassidy was one of four GOP senators who voted with Democrats in favor of the resolution that the House had passed earlier this month. Those votes along with two Republican absences allowed the resolution to pass by a 50-48 vote.
Since Trump put a decisive end to Cassidy’s congressional career, the Louisiana senator has become one of the president’s sharpest critics.
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.
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.”
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.
“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,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said, referring to the New York primary elections the night before, where a slate of candidates endorsed by democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won.
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.
Source: Saudi Gazette