Exclusive | Inside House Speaker Mike Johnsons tooth and nail fight to pass Trumps big beautiful bill

WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had to bring in the big gun last week — President Trump — to pressure House Republican holdouts last week into passing one of the largest tax cuts in US history.“There were many points in the final couple of weeks where the entire thing appeared that it would fall apart,” Johnson told The Post in a phone interview Friday, before touting Trump’s influence.“He’s the ultimate dealmaker.He literally wrote the book on it.

So when he speaks, people listen, and that’s been a great benefit to us.”The nearly $4 trillion budget reconciliation package — which will avoid a massive tax hike next January and make Trump’s 2017 individual rate cuts permanent if passed in the Senate — was the culmination of a year’s work with 11 committee chairs but wrapped up in the last 48 hours before a vote following high-stakes, round-the-clock negotiations with the Republican conference’s so-called “Five Families.”“I think it was Vince Lombardi that said, ‘Victory loves preparation,’ right?” Johnson paraphrased.“It required a long thoughtful plan, and that’s what we did.”Deals struck with blue-state Republicans for a $40,000 state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, a White House showdown with fiscal hardliners in the Freedom Caucus and a final agreement implementing rescissions of green-energy tax credits and other cuts to Medicaid helped the speaker send the legislation to the Senate.Sources with direct knowledge of the White House and 11th-hour speaker’s office meetings before the changes said Trump’s “colorful” rhetoric was key, with one noting how holdouts recognized “the gravity of that moment when the most powerful man on the planet knows you’re the problem.”“Don’t blow this opportunity,” the president fumed in the meeting held in the cabinet room of the executive mansion.

“Get it done.”Johnson and he deployed something of a good cop-bad cop dynamic initially, though the ...