Trump Follows Dinner Prayer With Story About How Congressman ‘Broke My Ass’

 

President Donald Trump hosted a dinner for lawmakers on Friday night and explained how one Republican congressman “broke my ass.”

The president showed off the newly renovated Rose Garden to guests, which included Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), and other Republican lawmakers. Before the dinner, Trump asked Lankford to say grace. The senator obliged and thanked God for “the food and the privilege to be able to be here together with each other. in the name of Jesus, I ask tonight, amen.”

Trump followed the prayer by telling an anecdote about wrangling votes for his “big beautiful bill“:

Beautiful. Appreciate it. That was very nice.

So, getting back to why you got invited. So, I get a call from the speaker and he’d say, “Sir, we have 16 hard no’s. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and we have one of many bills, because this happened many times. And it tended to be the same 16, 18, 19 people all the time. Four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning. I call him. I said, “Jim, how you doing, Jim? Everything ok?”

“Yes, Sir. It’s five o’clock in the morning.”

“How you voting for us?

“Well, what do you think? Tell me, what should I do, Sir?”

And he broke my ass and they had about 16 others. That doesn’t mean we don’t like them. But we had about 16, 17, or 18 others, and they made life very difficult. But we got them there because we had a period where we had a majority of one. Is that right, Mike? One. We were one heart attack away from losing the House. Think of that.

The president did not specify which “Jim” in the House of Representatives broke his ass.

Trump went on to praise Johnson, stating that the speaker would go down as one of the greatest in history.

Watch above via C-SPAN.

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Mike is a Mediaite senior editor who covers the news in primetime. Follow him on Bluesky.