President Donald Trump is weighing whether to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., as early as this week, Fox News has learned, in an effort to help deal with what he characterized as a surge in violent crime. 

The plans come just one day after Trump vowed on Truth Social to evict homeless persons from that nation’s capital. ‘The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,’ Trump said on social media. ‘We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong.’

Trump’s plans, which are expected to be detailed further at a 10 a.m. press conference Monday, would likely involve members of the D.C. National Guard, or the 2,700-member National Guard force that acts at the express authority of the commander in chief.

Unlike other branches, Trump would not have to get the sign off of local authorities to act — likely making their activation a tempting option.

When speaking to reporters in the Oval Office last week, Trump railed against what he described as a ‘ridiculous’ level of crime in the nation’s capital, buffeted most recently by the assault on a former DOGE staffer earlier this month.

‘We want to have a great, safe capital,’ Trump said last week. ‘And we’re going to have it.’

Trump also told reporters that his White House lawyers are looking into ending the Home Rule Act, a law passed by Congress in 1973 that gave Washington, D.C., residents the right to elect their own mayor and local representatives. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also told reporters last week that Trump had ordered law enforcement personnel to increase their presence in the capital, though the additional details on the scope and timeframe of that presence remain unclear. 

Trump is expected to address those plans in a press conference Monday morning. 

However, for Trump, delivering on this promise could be fraught with long-term legal complications — in part, because crime in the city is actually down to its lowest point in nearly 30 years.

Violent crime in the first seven months of 2025 has dropped by roughly 26% compared to 2024, according to data compiled by the D.C. Police Department and released earlier this month. Overall, crime in the nation’s capital has dropped by roughly 7%.

On Sunday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said in an interview with NewsNation that Washington, D.C., ‘is more violent than Baghdad.’ 

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, for her part, told MSNBC in an interview Sunday that ‘Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false.’

However, it’s not the first time Trump has sought to crack down on crime in the nation’s capital — an effort he has returned to frequently, including during his first term in office.

Trump in March signed an executive order, ‘Making DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force,’ designed to address issues with a city he has long derided as ‘filthy,’ ‘horribly run’ and ‘crime-ridden,’ among other things. ‘We want to have a great, safe capital,’ he told reporters. ‘And we’re going to have it. And that includes cleanliness and it includes other things.’

However, those powers aren’t indefinite, experts explained to Fox News Digital.

Trump does have the authority to activate the 2,700-member D.C. National Guard without the approval of local officials. Guard troops provide ‘mission-ready personnel and units for active duty in the armed services’ in Washington, D.C., according to their website.

Beyond that, Trump’s ability to exercise authority in the nation’s capital is bound by the Home Rule Act. 

In the more than 50 years since that law was passed, ‘there really hasn’t been a serious conversation about ending home rule governance,’ George Derek Musgrove, a history professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, told Fox News in an interview.

‘And the problem with our federal system is that there are places where Trump really doesn’t have any supporters, and therefore, with the limits of executive power, really doesn’t have that much sway,’ Musgrove said. ‘And he’s constantly probing for ways around that.’

Other options available to Trump aren’t without their own limits. In order to call up the local police force for any meaningful length of time, as Trump has suggested, a president must be able to assert ‘special conditions of an emergency nature,’ according to the 1970s law.

‘If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take federal control,’ Trump said last week. 

However, that’s easier said than done, individuals familiar with the law told Fox News Digital.

‘DC is just a tempting target because there’s not even a lot of legal gymnastics you have to do in order to exert tremendous power [in a city with ]a 90% Democratic jurisdiction. He has it already,’ Musgrove said.

‘But it is morally questionable, I think, and violates democratic principles,’ he added.

President Donald Trump has renewed his call for Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, to undergo a cognitive test. 

”Congresswoman’ Jasmine Crockett is a Low (Very!!!) I.Q. Individual, much in the mold of the AOC Plus Three Gang of Country Destroying Morons – Only slightly dumber,’ Trump wrote on TRUTH Social on Monday. 

‘Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (WR!),’ Trump said. ‘As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!

Trump previously said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., should take a cognitive test in June when the progressive ‘Squad’ leader demanded his impeachment over the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. 

Meanwhile, as the White House pushes Republican states to redistrict mid-cycle ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Crockett has accused Trump of pushing a ‘white supremacy agenda’ and ‘diluting the voices of people of color.’ The Trump administration asserts that Democratic states have engaged in ‘gerrymandering’ for years and encouraged illegal immigration to boost their congressional influence. 

In Texas, Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in an effort to stop the vote on a GOP redistricting plan that likely would have resulted in Republicans picking up five House seats. 

Crockett has accused Trump of hurling the low IQ insult as a racially-coded tactic to insult ‘people of color,’ including ‘The Breakfast Club’ host Charlamagne tha God. 

‘Newsflash, Wannabe Dictator: I don’t care how many times you shake the Etch A Sketch trying to redraw these lines,’ Crockett wrote on X last week. ‘I’m not disappearing. I’ll be back, still on your behind every step of the way. We’ve already been over this. I’ve got the degrees, the credentials, and the receipts. If you’re looking for ‘low IQ,’ try looking in the mirror – or at your own Cabinet.’ 

Despite the president describing her as having a low IQ, Crockett said Trump has the ‘most incompetent Cabinet in the history of this country,’ referring to the Signal-gate scandal earlier this year. 

Crockett has also dubbed Trump a ‘Temu dictator.’ At a progressive rally in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this month, the congresswoman said on stage, ‘Donald Trump is a piece of sh–.’ 

‘This is a person who has a problem with people of color. Period,’ she told CNN. ‘I don’t care how many Black MAGA [are] out there with [their] hats, I want to be clear, when we look at who it is that he’s kicking out of this country, it’s people of color.’ 

President Donald Trump took aim at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a press event on Monday over his frustration with the Ukrainian leader’s objection to ‘land swapping.’

‘I get along with Zelenskyy, but, you know, I disagree with what he’s done, very, very severely, disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,’ Trump said, reiterating his belief that the Ukrainian president is in part at fault for Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion.

‘I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval’,’ Trump said. ‘I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap, because there’ll be some land swapping going on.’

‘I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody,’ Trump added, noting it was ‘for the good of Ukraine.’

Zelenskyy – who did not declare war on Russia, as Moscow had already invaded, did declare Martial Law on Feb. 24, 2022 with the approval of Ukraine’s parliament, which gave him presidential powers to mobilize a military response — made clear over the weekend that he objected to Trump’s ‘land swapping’ proposal and has repeatedly said it would require a national referendum under the nation’s constitution, not a unilateral decision by him. 

Trump wouldn’t detail what exactly he hopes to get out of the meeting with Putin and described it as a ‘feel-out meeting,’ saying within ‘the first two minutes [he’ll] know exactly whether or not a deal can be made.’

‘I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, you got to end this war, you got to end it,’ Trump said, reiterating his belief that if he had won the 2020 election, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine, saying ‘he wasn’t going to mess with me.’

‘I go into that thing fully loaded right up there, and we’re going to see what happens,’ he continued. ‘It could be a good meeting, and we’ll go a step further. We’ll get it done. 

‘I’d like to see a ceasefire very, very quickly, very quick,’ he continued. ‘And, we’re going to be dealing with the European leaders and, we’re going to be dealing with President Zelensky and hopefully we’re going to have a great success.’

A Democratic whistleblower told the FBI that Adam Schiff approved leaking classified information in order to discredit President Donald Trump, according to newly-released documents.

The documents, which were obtained by Just The News, were recently handed over to Congress by FBI Director Kash Patel. 

The whistleblower reportedly worked for Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee for over ten years, and reported Schiff’s alleged behavior to the FBI in 2017.

According to the report, the intelligence staffer called the leaking ‘treasonous’ and ‘illegal,’ in addition to being unethical. He was most recently interviewed by the FBI in 2023.

The staffer also said that he personally attended a meeting where Schiff greenlit the leak.

‘When working in this capacity, [redacted staffer’s name] was called to an all-staff meeting by SCHIFF,’ the documents state, per Just The News. 

‘In this meeting, SCHIFF stated the group would leak classified information which was derogatory to President of the United States DONALD J. TRUMP. SCHIFF stated the information would be used to indict President TRUMP.’

‘[The whistleblower] stated this would be illegal and, upon hearing his concerns, unnamed members of the meeting reassured that they would not be caught leaking classified information,’ the report added.

John Solomon, who co-authored the piece with Just The News’ Jerry Dunleavy, appeared on Fox News Channel’s ‘Hannity’ to discuss the report.

‘This is the first of several major leak investigations we’re going to see over the next several days,’ Solomon said. ‘You’re going to see other major people that were clearly identified by the FBI, having leaked classified secrets.’

‘Their own staff turned them in when interviewed by the FBI. Nothing, again, happened,’ he added. ‘It’s a common pattern. The question now is, in Donald Trump’s Justice Department, does that dynamic change?’

Soon after the report was published, Patel shared it on X, saying that the FBI ‘found it [and] declassified it.’

‘Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives – and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people,’ Patel’s post read.

Fox News Digital’s Brooke Curto contributed to this report.

In a lengthy and beautifully crafted address on Independence Day, July 4, 1821, then-President John Quincy Adams delivered an extraordinarily detailed and learned lesson on the founding of America. It’s one that still deserves repeated and close reading — though much of it will simply not be understood by most Americans today, for it is dense in references to history no longer taught widely in the United States. 

Adams’ most memorable sentences are often quoted:

‘[America] has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.’

The declamation that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’ is a favorite text of both the pre-World Wars One and Two isolationists in America, but of course both global conflicts reached out and drew the United States into them. 

Now, far, far more than in 1917 and 1941, the assumptions of our sixth president simply no longer apply. 

There is no longer any ‘abroad.’ 

The idea of an ‘abroad’ about which Americans could be either indifferent or at most the subject of a distant approval or remote scorn, is dead.

To repeat: There is no such thing as ‘abroad.’ 

Not even remotely. 

What remained of the concept after Pearl Harbor was shattered by Sputnik in 1957, and then by successive generations of missile technology.  With the rise of hypersonic missiles only fools would believe that there is an ‘abroad’ anywhere on the globe that the United States can disregard. 

Beijing’s hypersonic arsenal can reach Washington, D.C. in two hours or less, and that margin is going to shrink rapidly. Russia’s hypersonic missiles can reach the lower 48 even sooner and Alaska in a blink. 

Other nations will inevitably add to the number of potential adversaries that can change the world via hypersonic missilery and wreck enormous, perhaps Republic-ending damage on the country. 

Of course, America possesses a ‘second strike’ capability deep under the seas in our Ohio-class submarines, and even an enormous fusillade of thousands of hypersonic missiles would be unlikely to cripple all of our B-2s and B-21s or ever missile silo. The United States would take down with it all of the evil powers that combined to strike it first, just as it did from 1941 to 1945. 

But there would be no ‘Marshall Plan’ waiting for anyone or any country on the other side of such an unimaginable catastrophe. Thus it must be deterred. Deterrence is only accomplished by the reality of American military power and the military power of the allies on which it can rely.

To repeat a third time: There is no ‘abroad.’ 

This very dangerous word will only grow more so with the years. President Trump’s decision to destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons program alongside Israel’s blows against that fanatical theocracy’s ballistic missile capability shielded the entire world from the most unstable and terror-addicted regime in the world obtaining the ability to threaten all of the West and beyond with Armageddon. 

For a time, at least, the precise and purposeful application of American military force to the missile and nuclear arsenal of an enemy on the brink of ‘breakout’ kept the number of nuclear powers stable. 

Bravo, President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whatever criticisms come their way on whatever other subject, the most important mission of their careers is complete. (Though both men may be obliged by the fanatics in Tehran to do it again.)

The West still has enemies, of course, and the most formidable one is the Chinese Communist Party that dominates the People’s Republic of China, and its ruthless leader, Xi Jinping. Xi and the CCP are followed in second place by Xi’s equally ruthless if not quite as powerful ally in Putin’s Russia, not to mention the unstable nuclear powers of North Korea and Pakistan. 

The West’s nuclear arsenal —distributed among our allies Great Britain and France and especially alongside that of Israel and our sometimes friend India— combines with our own prodigious, yet in-need-of-modernization nuclear arsenal to hold the most dangerous enemies at bay. 

There are only four actual superpowers in the world —the quartet of nations that can project nuclear power far beyond their borders and which possess intelligence and espionage capabilities that are unmatched except by each other’s capabilities: The United States and Israel on the side of the West and the PRC and Russia on the side of despotism. All others in the ‘nuclear club’ have limitations imposed by their own chaotic domestic politics or lack of deliverable firepower and the will to use it. 

That’s national security realism in a nutshell. 

When two of the leaders of any of these four nations meet, it is a significant occasion. It is a very good thing that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have met three times in 2025 and have spoken far more frequently than that. 

Xi and Putin have only met in person twice in this year, but their ‘partnership’ is very close even though Xi is to Putin as Trump is to Netanyahu: the senior partners to their powerful but not nearly as powerful junior partners. 

This is the basic geopolitical structure of the world and only with that understanding of reality can analysts judge what President Trump gets out of his meeting with the Russian tyrant this week —if anything is even made public afterward. It will take months, if not years, to assess what happens this week. 

Putin has attempted to play every American president since Bill Clinton, sometimes successfully, sometimes fooling them only for a time. The temptation to ‘strike a deal’ with Putin is the same as the apple on the forbidden tree in Genesis. That way lies ruin. But sizing up the tree and the apple at close range can have benefits. 

President Trump has met with Putin six times prior to this week and has spoken with him often. The real estate developer-turned-television force-turned president has as much of the skills set anyone could have to deal with such a stone-cold killer as Putin. Trump survived not just two assassination attempts in 2024 but years of lawfare preceded by the plots of the permanent left embedded in our vast administrative state during his first term. 

Trump is as tough and as resilient as any president since Richard Nixon. There will be no hot mic whisperings of weakness, nor will there be blunt assessments spoken like that of former Vice President Dick Cheney: ‘[W]hat I see [in Putin is] a KGB colonel.’

Trump is a realist, just like his friend of old from New York in the 1980s and early 1990s, RN. Trump is as tough as W standing in the ruins of the Twin Towers, as tough as the genuine war hero H.W., as tough as Reagan, Ford and Ike. 

If Trump can bring an end to the savagery underway in Ukraine on terms acceptable to President Zelensky, it will be an achievement greater than his interventions to stop the hostilities between India and Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, Thailand and Cambodia and last week’s peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan.   

Trump’s destruction of the Iranian nuclear program is the biggest building block of his legacy, rivaled only by the Abraham Accords.  If he can bring a ceasefire to Central Europe that is acceptable to our allies and the Ukrainian people, it will be the third pillar of his legacy, with the fourth —the rebuilding of the American military into so potent a force that no one, not even China’s Xi, dares to risk a confrontation with us— as his fourth. On top of those four pillars can rest an era of prosperity and renewed American growth and innovation. 

If anyone is hoping for the president to fail in this endeavor as described, they are not patriots but partisans blind to the realities of the world. There are a lot of those sorts of partisans in the U.S., and increasingly our NATO allies are showing themselves to be unreliable. 

Like it or not, the near-term security prospects of the West rest on Trump, and serious people must prefer that to the infirmities of President Biden or the illusions of President Obama. 

Trump has confidence in his own abilities and serious analysts of realpolitik should too. At this point, after ‘Midnight Hammer’ and the other ceasefires, after all of the decade since he came down the escalator, there is very good reason to believe he can achieve as much as any other American at the table with Putin. Anyone hoping for his failure should assess their own mental health. It is in the interests of everyone on the planet that knows no ‘abroads’ that stability break out everywhere, beginning in Alaska this week. 

Senate Democrats have undergone a steady tonal shift on Israel, with a recent vote to block arms sales to the Jewish State giving a glimpse at the evolution on the Hill.

More Democrats in the upper chamber than ever before voted alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to halt the $675 million sale of thousands of bombs and guidance kits for the bombs and to block the sale of automatic rifles to Israel.

Sanders’ push ultimately failed late last month, but over half of all Senate Democrats voted alongside him, with many voting with him for the first time. Meanwhile, all Senate Republicans voted against them.

‘The tide is turning,’ Sanders, who routinely caucuses with Democrats, said in a statement. ‘The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza. The Democrats are moving forward on this issue, and I look forward to Republican support in the near future.’

Getting Republicans on board for future attempts, as Sanders hoped would happen, is a stretch at best.

‘Republicans stand with Israel,’ Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho, told Fox News Digital in a statement.

‘Senator Sanders’ resolution to block arms sales would have reinstated the failed policies of the Biden administration and would abandon America’s closest ally in the Middle East,’ he continued. ‘We can’t afford to go back there.’

But the change within the Democratic caucus was likely spurred by the release of photos of starving children in the Gaza Strip, which earned shocked reactions from both lawmakers and President Donald Trump.

Many Democrats have pinned the blame on Israel and argued that the Jewish state has put a chokehold on aid that is meant for civilians in Gaza, while Republicans contend that the terrorist organization Hamas is stealing the food.

‘What’s going on is unacceptable, and Israel has the power to fix it,’ Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told Fox News Digital.

Like Sanders, King typically caucuses with Senate Democrats. But unlike his fellow Independent colleague, he has routinely stood firm in his support of Israel. But the photos and reports of widespread malnutrition prompted him to vote to block arms sales.

‘Israel’s the one that’s not letting the aid get in,’ he said. ‘The humanitarian response is entirely within Israel’s hands, and they’ve been blocking, slowing, starting and stopping, to the point where I just could no longer stand silent.’

And like King, Sen. Jean Shaheen, the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, changed course and voted in favor of blocking arms sales out of concern that food aid was not making its way to Palestinians.

‘I think it’s important to send the message to Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his government that things need to change,’ the New Hampshire Democrat said in an interview with PBS Newshour.

But Republicans charged that it was not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault that food aid was not making its way into Gaza, and instead believed that it was Hamas stealing the food.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said that Israel wants to make sure that the food aid actually makes it to civilians in Hamas.

‘Israel and the US have cut out, cut off most of Hamas’ cash flow,’ Kennedy said. ‘And a lot of their cash flows depends on stealing the food and selling it, sometimes to their own people, absorbing the prices.’

And not every Senate Democrat is on the same page when it comes to their position on the Jewish State.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has routinely slammed Democrats for criticizing Israel, and believed that his party was moving further away from his position.

‘What I really fundamentally believe, there’s been a wholesale shift, even within my party, to blame Israel for the situations and the circumstances overall,’ Fetterman told Fox News Digital. ‘And I don’t really understand. It’s like we’ve seen the same pictures and, of course, what’s happened in Gaza is devastating.’

‘But so, for me, I blame Hamas and Iran,’ he continued. ‘And I don’t know why there’s not like a collective global outrage.’

Senate Republicans left Washington this week to sell President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ but the road to creating and passing the legislation began just over a year and a half ago. 

Trump’s $3.3 trillion megabill, crammed with his legislative priorities on border security, defense and energy, was a product months in the making. And it was the marquee policy in the bill, which was to extend or make permanent many of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that was the driving force behind Republicans’ desire to pass it.

But Senate Republicans have had little time to rest on their laurels and celebrate the bill’s passage, spending the month since Trump signed it advancing a $9 billion clawback package and trying to ram through Senate Democrats’ blockade of the president’s nominees.

The journey to pass the bill began well before Republicans had a trifecta in Washington in early 2024, when then-Senate Republican Conference Chair John Barrasso, R-Wyo., hosted a policy retreat with Senate Republicans to hash out what the GOP’s agenda could look like should the win out in November.

And months later, Trump visited with Senate Republicans to discuss the strategy they had been working on behind-the-scenes.

‘With President Trump in the White House, we discussed how Republicans will get America back on track,’ Barrasso said at the time. ‘That starts with helping families escape the pain of Democrat high prices, unleashing American energy, stopping Democrat tax increases, and securing the Southern Border. Republicans are united.’

The real, nitty-gritty work began in January where concepts were taken and fleshed out into legislation.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., opted to leapfrog the House and move forward with the Senate’s own budget framework, which initially divided the ‘big, beautiful bill’ into two chunks. That added pressure on Republicans in the lower chamber to coalesce behind a plan of their own.

For much of the earlier part of this year, however, the Senate was waiting on the House to fine-tune and pass their own version of the bill. Still, Thune and his leadership team, including Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., worked to get a product from one side of the building to the other that the Senate GOP could work with.

And when the bill made its way to the upper chamber in early June, the pressure was on to deliver a finished product to Trump by July 4, an artificial deadline used to help corral lawmakers into finishing work on the bill.

One of the major disagreements in the upper chamber before the bill ever hit the floor was over the nature of cuts to Medicaid, particularly aimed at the provider tax rate. The issue was eventually smoothed over through the creation of a $50 billion rural hospital fund, but lawmakers who sounded the alarm against it vowed to ensure that the changes to the provider would never take effect.

‘I think it was a huge mistake,’ Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said at the time. ‘I think this has been an unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid.’ 

‘And I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching,’ he continued. ‘If you want to be a working class party, you’ve got to get delivered for working class people. You cannot take away health care from working people.’

And when the bill did finally hit the floor for what would evolve into a multi-day affair of passing through procedural hurdles, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., forcing the reading of the entire bill and a marathon vote-a-rama, Senate Republicans were still not entirely on board.

At first, a cohort of fiscal hawks led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., appeared to not support the package — they wanted even deeper cuts to Medicaid by tweaking the percentage that the federal government pays for healthcare in states that opted into Obamacare, which they argued would have saved billions extra.

They were offered an amendment that eventually never came to the floor, but was enough for them to back down from tanking the bill. And their resistance began in the first of a handful of huddles inside Thune’s office outside the Senate floor.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., joined them for the closed-door conversations, and told Fox News Digital that while her vote was not contingent on getting the change added, she wanted to make the case for why it should be.

‘It saved a lot of money,’ she said. ‘It saved a lot of money, and so I was anxious to see us use the opportunity, since we were able to open up mandatory spending, use the opportunity to really save some money.’

And later on, in the wee hours of the night, Republicans were bouncing from Thune’s office to the Senate floor, hashing out deals as they went to get Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to support the bill, knowing that Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., could vote against it.

‘Sometimes it’s got to be put on a clock, because at some point the argument has to come to an end,’ Mullin told Fox News Digital. ‘And that’s why we had to do some of it on the floor. We had to, we had to force the hand.’

And in the end, only three Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Collins and Tillis voted against the bill. From there it went to the House, where Republicans in the lower chamber had their own dramatic rally to pass the legislative behemoth.

And now, as Republicans scatter to their home states to sell the bill to their constituents, Tillis said that the ‘foundational’ piece of information that lawmakers can share is that they averted a nationwide tax hike.

‘The shame of the Medicaid provision is that the vast majority of the bill is supported,’ he told Fox News Digital. ‘I think we have to remind them the problem with the tax bill is they’re not going to see a cut, but if we hadn’t done it, they would have seen a historic increase.’

‘So we need to remind them of what we’re doing is continuing what we started, and the economy that we created, it was able to withstand COVID,’ he continued. ‘And I firmly believe if we hadn’t passed it. We’d have been in a different posture.’