2026-06-24T22:15:10.815Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/24/politics/trump-cassidy-senate-republicans
就在唐纳德·特朗普总统彻底终结参议员比尔·卡西迪的国会生涯一个月后，这位路易斯安那州参议员已成为美国国会大厦内对总统最尖锐的批评者之一。
但当两人周三在国会山的一场会面中面对面站定时，这两名共和党人在数十名参议院共和党同僚面前爆发了互相指责的激烈争吵。
据卡西迪回忆，这场火药味十足的交锋始于特朗普质问为何包括卡西迪在内的本党议员前一天投票支持民主党，谴责总统在伊朗的军事行动权限。
“我起身说道：‘你没有告诉美国民众事情的真相，’”卡西迪在会后回忆起闭门会议上他对总统说的话，“（伊朗行动）本应持续四周，却已经持续了四个月。我们最初的目标并未达成，我想知道到底发生了什么。”
据在场多名消息人士透露，愤怒的特朗普随即对卡西迪发难，提高了嗓门。卡西迪回忆称，自己当时“失去了理智”，以与总统相同的“语气和音量”回呛。
另一名消息人士称，在午餐会期间，特朗普曾一度命令卡西迪坐下，但卡西迪拒绝了。特朗普随后称他为“疯子”。作为回应，卡西迪朝特朗普大喊，其中一次还称特朗普是他的“兄弟”。特朗普告诉他自己不是他的“兄弟”，最终卡西迪才坐了下来。
特朗普与共和党参议员之间这场紧张的会面持续了约70分钟，此时正值两党紧张关系升级之际——总统多次颠覆国会山的共和党核心议程。在第二任期的大部分时间里，特朗普为达成自己的目标绕过国会：从解雇联邦官员、破坏预算，甚至发动战争——其党内越来越多的派别直言他们已经受够了。
参众两院共和党领导人急于摆脱特朗普的一些个人优先事项——包括一项在参议院无法获得足够票数通过的选举改革法案——转而专注于生活成本问题，以便在国内造势。但他们正面临一个尤其难以捉摸的特朗普，这位总统似乎对共和党精心协调的中期选举战略毫不在意。据多名共和党消息人士透露，国会山内部的资深共和党人对总统过去几周的行为感到恼怒，一些人坚称他正从团队那里获得“糟糕的建议”。
“他们对这一切都非常恼火，”一名与多名面临连任压力的共和党议员交谈过的共和党人说道，他形容这些议员对特朗普不断下滑的支持率日益感到沮丧。“他们看到了其他人都能看到的民调数据，但他们也不想陷入与总统互相攻击的境地。”
卡西迪表示，周三午餐会上的冲突异常激烈，“到了某个时候，我身边的同事说‘好了，比尔，坐下吧’，于是我坐下来试图缓和局势。”但这并未立即缓解紧张气氛。一名白宫官员事后称卡西迪“彻底让自己颜面尽失”，将他描述为“精神失常”，称当时总统试图解释当前谈判的进展。
据沮丧的共和党参议员和助手透露，只有卡西迪公开反驳特朗普的原因之一是，总统掌控了发言主动权，没有留给参议员们发言或提问的时间。
这场闭门午餐会的前一天，特朗普公开表达了对包括卡西迪在内的四名共和党参议员的不满，这些参议员投票限制了他的伊朗战争权限。“四名共和党失败者投票支持民主党人，”特朗普周二晚间在Truth Social平台上写道，他称此次投票“时机不当且毫无意义”。
一名了解会面情况的人士表示，特朗普的怒火不仅针对卡西迪，更广泛地指向所有在伊朗问题上投票反对他的共和党人，以及那些缺席投票的人。一名参议员称，特朗普觉得此次象征性投票削弱了他的权威。
参议员约翰·肯尼迪在闭门午餐会后对记者表示：“总统昨天对战争权限投票的愤怒，过去是、现在也是像杀人蜂一样疯狂。”
特朗普后来暗示了他的不满，尽管他坚称会面“进行得非常顺利”。
“我不喜欢几个人，但没关系，”他说，“我想你们知道他们是谁。”
就在几个小时前，特朗普还取消了计划与顶级共和党人举行记者会，庆祝近日通过的一项法案——这是一代人以来规模最大的住房负担能力法案。他干脆决定不签署该法案——彻底打乱了旨在宣传解决生活成本问题举措的计划。
即便共和党面临可能重创的中期选举，特朗普仍拒绝承认他最主要的立法愿望清单项目——“拯救美国法案”——没有足够的支持票数。特朗普在对共和党参议员的讲话中大部分时间都在谈论这项选举法案，阿拉巴马州参议员汤米· Tuberville称其为“我见过他发表的最佳演讲”。
“他有时情绪激动，基本上是在说共产主义正在接管，这将是我们最后的机会，如果我们不打破阻挠议事规则，”Tuberville说道，他指的是前一天晚上的纽约初选，由民主社会主义者佐赫兰·曼达尼市长背书的一批候选人获胜。
这位知名的前奥本大学橄榄球教练将此次讲话比作教练的中场休息演讲：“你知道，‘我们剩下的时间不多了。’”
据参会的一名共和党参议员透露，特朗普特别指出，曼达尼背书的候选人在纽约选举中获胜表明，他们迫切需要通过《拯救美国法案》。
最终，还是特朗普的忠实盟友、参议员里克·斯科特试图向特朗普传达，国会中根本没有足够的共和党票数来通过他的选举法案。
“我说：‘这就是我们目前的处境，’”来自佛罗里达州的斯科特在回顾此次会面时说道，“我是个生意人。你必须面对现实。”
但目前尚不清楚特朗普是否领会了这一信息。斯科特表示，特朗普正专注于不惜一切代价通过该法案：“他真的相信这是今年秋季选举的关键。”
参议院多数党领袖约翰·图恩私下里对选举法案在参议院搁浅感到不满，他表示无法确定特朗普是否被参议员们提供的投票计数数据所说服。
“总统明确表达了他的观点，我们都知道他对此事的看法。我不确定他从中得到了什么启示，但我认为可以公平地说，我们已经多次阐明了这一点，”图恩说道，“这不是他希望我们得出的结论，但这是我必须说明的事实。”
参议员约翰·科宁——和卡西迪一样，是即将卸任的共和党参议员，在初选中输给了特朗普支持的挑战者——在离开会面时打趣称，特朗普发表了“相当不错的团结信息”。
“总统最后在宣讲团结，但他整个小时都在谈论一些完全谈不上团结的事情，”科宁补充道。
CNN的泰德·巴雷特、安妮·格雷尔、埃利斯·金、艾莉森·梅因和杜格尔德·麦康奈尔对此文亦有贡献。
Trump’s Capitol visit devolves into shouting match with GOP senator he helped oust in primary fight
2026-06-24T22:15:10.815Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/24/politics/trump-cassidy-senate-republicans
In the month since President Donald Trump put a decisive end to Sen. Bill Cassidy’s congressional career, the Louisiana senator has become one of the president’s sharpest critics in the halls of the US Capitol.
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.
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.”
Cassidy said the friction during Wednesday’s lunch was so intense that, “at some point my guys next to me said, ‘ok, Bill, sit down,’ and so I sat down and tried to de-escalate.” But that did little to immediately ease tensions. One White House official afterward said Cassidy had “totally embarrassed himself,” characterizing him as “unhinged” as the president tried to explain the status of ongoing talks.
One reason only Cassidy pushed back on Trump is because the president dominated the podium and didn’t leave time for senators to speak or question him, according to frustrated Republican senators and aides.
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.”
One person briefed on the meeting said that Trump’s ire was not just directed at Cassidy, but more broadly at all of the Republicans who voted against him on Iran, and those who had missed the vote. One senator said Trump felt undermined by that symbolic vote.
Sen. John Kennedy told reporters after the closed-door lunch that, “the president was and is mad as a murder hornet about the war powers vote yesterday.”
Trump later hinted at his frustrations, even as he insisted that the meeting had gone “really great.”
“I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay,” he said. “I think you know who they are.”
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, which Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama described as “the best speech I’ve seen him give.”
“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,” Tuberville said, referring to the New York primary elections the night before, where a slate of candidates endorsed by democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani won.
Tuberville, the celebrated former Auburn football coach, compared it to a coach’s halftime speech: “You know, ‘we don’t have much time left.’”
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.
“I said, ‘This is where we are today,’” Scott of Florida said, recounting the meeting. “I’m a business guy. You have to live in reality.”
But it wasn’t clear if that message sunk in for Trump. Scott said Trump is focused on passing the bill through whatever means necessary: “He really believes it’s a key to this fall.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who Trump has grown frustrated with behind the scenes as the elections bill has stalled in the Senate, said he couldn’t tell if Trump was swayed by the senators’ own math on the vote count.
“The president made his views very clear, which we know how he feels on it. I’m not sure what the takeaway was for him regarding that, but I think it’s fair to say that we’ve made the point a number of times,” Thune said. “That is not a conclusion he would like us to draw but it’s what I have to say.”
Sen. John Cornyn — who, like Cassidy, is an outgoing Senate Republican who lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger — quipped upon leaving the meeting that Trump offered “quite the unity message.”
“The president closed by preaching unity, but he spent the entire hour talking about things which were not exactly unified,” Cornyn added.
CNN’s Ted Barrett, Annie Grayer, Ellis Kim, Alison Main and Dugald McConnell contributed.
