House GOP infighting turns ugly over Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’

President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is running into a wall in the sharply divided House Republican conference, with tensions spiking over Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the party’s biggest sticking point: overhauling Medicaid.

President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is running into a wall in the sharply divided House Republican conference, with tensions spiking over Speaker Mike Johnson’s handling of the party’s biggest sticking point: overhauling Medicaid. As Johnson presses for a House vote before Memorial Day, the battlelines are becoming more pronounced, with Republicans in swing districts saying the sweeping bill can’t slash social safety net benefits while GOP hardliners are demanding trillions more in spending cuts – far beyond what many centrist members are willing to swallow. Those frustrations emerged in a two-hour meeting in Johnson’s leadership suite on Tuesday night, in which the speaker huddled with roughly a dozen GOP centrists who have refused to back any Medicaid changes that could hurt eligible Americans who rely on the program. Inside the room, Johnson made one more attempt to sell those members on a contentious plan — backed by the hard-right House Freedom Caucus and others — to sharply reduce Medicaid payments to states that expanded the program under Obamacare, according to two people in the room. His push drew a rebuke from multiple centrists in the room, who believed that idea was already off the table, the people said. “We laid down the law,” one Republican member who had attended the meeting said of the firm position many members took. Johnson and his leadership team insist that, in the end, GOP members will not be willing to stand in the way of Trump, who has said the actions taken in the next phase of his presidency will be charted through Capitol Hill. But the intraparty sparring between the two vastly disparate factions of Johnson’s conference raises the question of whether he can meet his own deadline to pass the package out of the House this month — with perhaps his own political survival on the line.