‘A Total Cluster F*ck!’ GOP Senator Was ‘Yelling’ at Trump During Closed-Door Lunch Over Iran Deal

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) reportedly yelled at President Donald Trump during a Senate GOP lunch on Wednesday as Trump attacked Cassidy and three other Republicans for voting in favor of a war powers resolution to limit the war in Iran.

MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell reported some of the details from inside the closed-door lunch, from a source inside.

Cassidy “confronted President Trump over the Iran memorandum of understanding, a source familiar with the lunch conversation,” reported Schnell, adding:

Cassidy was “yelling” at Trump, the source said. This source also tells me that Trump went after Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) for missing yesterday’s war powers vote, which was successful, 48-50. But worth noting: McCormick was with Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. And even if he were at the Capitol, the resolution still would’ve been successful because McConnell was absent.

PunchBowl’s Andrew Desiderio added, “Per multiple people in the room: Cassidy came in guns blazing, at one point stopped calling Trump ‘Mr. President’ and referred to him as ‘brother.’ Trump repeated what he’s said on social media about the housing bill, SAVE Act & the filibuster, but nobody pushed back.”

Cassidy later told reporters his version of events, “I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.”

Cassidy added that Trump “did not particularly care for my comments, raised his voice, I lost my temper…it’s the Irish in me.”

“But again I matched his tone and his volume, and it went back and forth… so I sat down and tried to de-escalate, I guess my point is, though, that the American people need to know more than we are being told. The Senate needs to know,” he concluded.

Semafor’s Burgess Everett added of the lunch, “The Senate GOP meeting with Trump is not going well. ‘A total cluster f#ck,’ one person said.”

Trump reportedly also slammed Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who joined Cassidy in voting to rebuke Trump on the Iran war. Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Dave McCormick (R-PA) were absent for the vote and also received jabs from Trump during lunch, despite McCormick missing the vote to campaign with Trump.

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur had senior Hill correspondent Ali Vitali on to discuss the meeting. “Do we have any insight about what is being talked about?”

“Sounds like not much good. Sounds like it was going to be pretty tense,” Vitali replied, adding:

And frankly, that was already going to be the mood before Trump added this whole new wrinkle to the mix: canceling a bipartisan housing bill that, frankly, both parties were eager to run on as an example of “hey, we’re trying to solve affordability.” How many times were you and I on the campaign trail hearing people say, “I cannot afford housing”? This wasn’t just something championed by an ally of the president — Tim Scott was a co-sponsor on the bill. He’s the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; his job is to keep and grow the Senate majority. This could have helped them do that.

And so all of this now culminates in that very tense walk down the hallway that Trump took with John Thune, whom he has continuously put in tough positions. Now, a source familiar with what’s going on in the room says Trump is being taken to task over things like the Iran Memorandum of Understanding — by people like Senator Bill Cassidy, who, of course, Trump endorsed against. The reason Cassidy didn’t win his primary, in large part, is because Trump worked against him.

And apparently — in the words of this source, telling my colleague Mychael Schnell on the Hill — Cassidy was yelling at the president over this deal, which, as we were discussing before we came on, effectively forces Republicans to do a 180 on ten years of talking points about how bad the Obama deal was — and now here they are, again, with Trump.

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

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