It does not sound as if tempers are cooling on Capitol Hill.
Several outlets reported that President Donald Trump had a tense and heated exchange with outgoing Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy during a closed-door GOP luncheon, with one senator describing Trump as “mad as a murder hornet” over a recent War Powers vote.
According to the New York Post, Trump and Cassidy were both attending the Republican lunch when the conversation turned sharp. The dispute reportedly centered on Cassidy’s decision to join three other Republicans in backing a measure aimed at limiting Trump’s wartime authority.
Trump was clearly unhappy with Cassidy. But there likely was not much goodwill flowing in the other direction, either.
Cassidy recently lost his primary race to Rep. Julia Letlow, who had Trump’s backing, according to Politico. That political backdrop only added to the tension surrounding the exchange.
Whatever the source of the bad blood, senators who were in or near the room suggested the confrontation was loud and direct.
Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who worked as an OB/GYN before entering politics, compared the scene to a tense hospital board meeting.
“Very much like a hospital board meeting when a bunch of doctors are yelling at each other, but at the end of the day, we’ll figure out a way to get along,” Marshall said. “Voices were raised… I think the vote yesterday on the War Powers Act, the president’s very disappointed.”
According to Semafor congressional bureau chief Burgess Everett, Marshall also offered a more plainspoken explanation.
“Sometimes two guys just have to get it off their chest,” he said.
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy put it in even more colorful terms.
“The president was mad as a murder hornet about the War Powers vote,” Kennedy said.
Cassidy later gave his own account of what happened, according to The Hill. He said the confrontation began when Trump asked the room why anyone would vote for the War Powers resolution.
Cassidy said he stood up and asked, “Is that a rhetorical question or would you like to really know?”
When Trump asked for an answer, Cassidy said he gave him one.
“You have not told the American people what’s going on,” Cassidy said he told the president. “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.”
Cassidy acknowledged that the exchange escalated from there.
“He did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice. I lost my temper, that’s not appropriate — it’s the Irish in me,” Cassidy said. “I matched his tone and his volume and it went back and forth.”
Cassidy also said Trump took a personal shot at him by bringing up his election loss.
“What does President Trump say? ‘Oh, you lost the election,’ that sort of thing, whatever comes to mind to demean another person,” Cassidy said.
Trump, for his part, played down the incident when asked about it afterward. He did not mention Cassidy by name, but he suggested the meeting was mostly positive.
“We had a really great meeting, and we’re very proud of the party. We like our leader. We like everybody. Really, in the room, we don’t like a few people, but that’s okay,” Trump said.
He added, “For the most part, we had a really well unified party.”
That may be the message Trump wants coming out of the meeting, but the details tell a less tidy story. The Republican Party may still be largely lined up behind him, but the War Powers vote exposed real frustration inside the conference. Cassidy, already on his way out after losing to a Trump-backed challenger, had little reason to soften his criticism.
The result was a private meeting that quickly became public, complete with raised voices, personal insults and senators trying to explain it all afterward as the kind of fight that happens in a family. Whether that explanation holds is another question. For now, the episode shows that even in a party Trump largely controls, some disagreements are still loud enough to spill into the hallway.
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