The president’s stated opposition to cutting the program has put Republicans laboring to enact his domestic agenda in a bind.
Representative Jeff Van Drew, a Republican who has resisted his party’s efforts to cut Medicaid to pay for President Trump’s domestic agenda, says he has a powerful ally on his side: Mr. Trump himself.
“He does not want to hurt Medicaid,” said Mr. Van Drew, a congressman from New Jersey. “He hasn’t said it once, twice, three times — it’s been about half a dozen times. And I’ve had those conversations with him one on one.”
Mr. Trump has traditionally acted as House Republicans’ most effective whip when they are facing tough votes, leaning on holdouts in person and on social media and threatening to run an opponent against them if they fail to fall in line with the party. But when it comes to unifying G.O.P. lawmakers around the most politically perilous piece of their budget plan — cutting Medicaid to pay for the tax cuts they want to enact — the president has made clear that he is not going to do any arm-twisting.
“We’re not cutting Medicaid, we’re not cutting Medicare, and we’re not cutting Social Security,” Mr. Trump repeated in an interview with NBC last weekend. He said he would veto the megabill carrying his agenda through Congress “if they were cutting” Medicaid. “But they’re not cutting it,” he added. “They’re looking at fraud, waste and abuse. And nobody minds that.”
His unequivocal stance on the matter — he has said he does not want to “touch” Medicaid in any way — is one reason that Republicans have failed so far to coalesce around a cost-cutting plan for the program. That, in turn, has left them toiling to produce key details of the “one big, beautiful bill” they are trying to push through Congress over the solid opposition of Democrats.