Trump meets with Republican leaders at White House as president plans to visit North Carolina to defend executive order
Congressional Republican leaders met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, and the president gave a number of public remarks following a White House summit.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana are expected to address the media about discussions at their first meeting with the new president since he began his second term.
Trump clashed with some congressional Republicans late last year as the federal government faced a possible shutdown but narrowly averted one.
Other Republican leaders attending Tuesday’s meeting included House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota and House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain of Michigan.
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Congressional Republican leaders met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, January 21, 2025. (Fox News Digital/Trump-Vance Transition Team)
On the Senate side, Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming, Arkansas Conference Chairman Tom Cotton and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia also weighed in.
While Trump signed a series of executive orders on his first day in office, he also expressed eagerness to work with congressional Republicans to pass key parts of his agenda through the Legislature.
At a news conference after meeting with Republicans, Trump mentioned the gathering as well as his new executive order to rename Denali Mountain and the Gulf of Mexico.
He said President William McKinley deserves to have his name back on top of North America, sarcastically calling his fellow Republican the “Tariff King” and leading one of the most powerful economies in U.S. history. .
Trump claimed that the United States was the “richest country” in the world from 1870 to 1913.
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Asked about pardoning the Jan. 6 criminals, Trump acknowledged that attacks on police officers were wrong, but said the media and the left were not paying attention to those involved in decades-long deaths in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis. People who were fired during the week expressed the same concerns as George Floyd.
Trump also talked about stripping his former adviser John Bolton of Secret Service protection, calling the Baltimore native a “war monger” and a “very stupid person.”
Later, Trump announced at a press conference that he would visit North Carolina and California in the coming days.
Trump made a veiled reference to the Great Smoky Mountains region devastated by Hurricane Helene, claiming that Democrats were “uncomfortable” in the wake of the historic storm that affected large swaths of the country, particularly from Damascus, Virginia, to Augusta, Georgia. Tahir State has been abandoned.
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Trump also seemed to suggest that the Democratic Party and the failure of Democratic policies on the eve of the Los Angeles wildfires led to the party’s “political death” in California.
“Everything they did was destroyed [Los Angeles]”, he said of sprinklers without water and fire hydrants without proper water or pressure.
He says California leaders either “want to die” [or] They’re stupid, or there’s something else going on.
When he travels to California, he may particularly encounter one of his longtime political rivals, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is now the state’s junior senator.
