Donald Trump upended his schedule to make sure he was still in Washington to savor his biggest legislative win yet as president, watching from the White House dining room as all the cable networks carried Thursday’s health care vote live.

The House passage of a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare marked more than a step toward fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise to unravel his predecessor’s signature legislative achievement. It let him be the President Trump that Candidate Trump had promised — a dealmaker who could corral a rambunctious Congress for his agenda.


“How am I doing? Am I doing OK? I'm president. Hey, I’m president,” Trump said in a Rose Garden victory lap that was unusually elaborate for a bill still so far from becoming law. “Can you believe it?”

For three months, he has endured setbacks on Capitol Hill and in the courts, and overseen a White House gripped by internal drama. The man who said Americans would win so much under his leadership that they’d get tired of it seemed not to be able to win at all — until, suddenly, he did.

The bill’s passage through the House touched off a boisterous celebration among Republicans on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, even though it faces a tough path forward in the Senate. At their final pre-vote meeting, GOP leaders cued up the theme from the movie "Rocky" to get lawmakers in a victorious mood. Cases of Bud Light were rolled into the Capitol. The former House whip, Tom DeLay, was spotted smoking a cigar just off the floor.

But in a sign of Trump’s maturation, he was also deferential to the lawmakers whose support he now understands he needs. In private, he celebrated in muted fashion, with applause and handshakes, calling a handful of lawmakers and members of the GOP leadership to thank them, according to two White House officials. And in the Rose Garden, Trump ceded the microphone and stood smiling as a parade of eight House members spoke — an unusual moment of sharing the spotlight for the president.

“I have never ever seen any kind of engagement like this,” Speaker Paul Ryan praised the president.

“This has really brought the Republican Party together,” Trump declared.

Much of the heavy lifting to get the bill passed through the House was done on Capitol Hill with Trump and the White House absent — they say strategically — letting the moderate and conservative wings of the fractious House GOP, led by Reps. Mark Meadows and Tom MacArthur, strike a deal among themselves.

“Folks that made this happen are Meadows and MacArthur,” said a senior administration official.

But in the final 48 hours, Trump himself was deeply involved, cajoling wavering lawmakers over a series of phone calls and personal visits to the White House, according to members of Congress and White House aides.

“He’s been all over this like a dog on a bone,” said Republican Rep. Bill Flores of Texas.

“I give him an A+ for the administration’s engagement,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, leader of the House Freedom Caucus, who helped negotiate the final package.

While Trump initially blustered through his early interactions with the Hill — wondering aloud to friends and advisers why members of Congress were so unyielding — lawmakers and White House aides alike say Trump has picked up the tricks of the trade fairly quickly, calling out individual legislators by name to thank them at campaign rallies or White House events.

“This is a guy in the hospitality industry,” said Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota. “He’s a relationship person.”

In March, Trump brought large groups of GOP lawmakers to the White House, resisting the heavier lifts of one-on-one lobbying, and too often let them escape without cornering them for a firm yes on his bill, according to White House officials.

This week, he reached out to lawmakers individually and would not let them off the hook without saying how they planned to vote. “There’s very few people who can be in the room with Donald Trump and not buy what he’s selling,” said one senior administration official.

Trump, of course, has added his own Trumpian touches. He likes to send letters to lawmakers, for instance, scrawling personalized notes of encouragement, typically in Sharpie, that serve as mementos and the kind of items that land on congressional glory walls. He calls lawmakers immediately after he sees them on cable, complimenting them on their compliments of him, sometimes inviting them for one-on-one meetings.

“Bringing people down to the White House, inviting them down for bowling, you’ve seen some of that, bringing people into the Oval Office,” said Rep. Tom Reed, a New York Republican. “He’s developing relationships and he is earning political capital by doing it the old-fashioned way.”

“You have to learn that this is a very human process. It’s not necessarily like some business deals where if the numbers work it goes,” said GOP Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona. “Here you have to deal with that intense humanity of having 435 people and that’s a learning process.”

It’s a shift from the hardball tactics Trump tried to deploy two months ago, when he dispatched his budget director to threaten one of his outspoken GOP critics, Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, urging him to vote against the health bill in March so Trump could push to defeat him in the 2018 primaries.

“Things seem to be beginning to stabilize within the White House,” Sanford said this week.

In addition to Trump, soft-spoken Vice President Mike Pence has played a key role rounding up support among his former House colleagues. “The cynic would say good cop, bad cop,” Sanford said of the Pence-Trump dynamic. Sanford voted for the bill on Thursday.

“You can’t take a blunt instrument to whipping,” said one senior House GOP aide. “You have to approach Congress with a scalpel.”

Trump still has his weaknesses. He doesn’t do policy details.

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But if Trump is relatively unversed in the intricacies of high-risk pools, the insurance market and pre-existing conditions, he has deferred to administration officials who are.

“For him to have to know every period and every dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’ — I don’t expect that of the president,” Flores said. “But I know that Mike Pence is fully engage and he’s got his arms around this, and I know that [Health and Human Services] Secretary [Tom] Price does as well.”

In the end, House members came around to Trump’s way of thinking: They wanted a political win.

They voted Thursday on a package that will dramatically remake one-fifth of America’s economy without Congress’ own budget adviser telling them how many people it would insure or how much it would cost.

And to get collectively to yes, they often choose to tune out Trump’s offhand remarks and tweets, from his suggestion this week that he’d be open to the gas tax to his comments wondering why the Civil War was necessary.

Instead, they’ve focused on the fact that he’ll be the one signing their agenda into law.

“A lot of us weren’t for Trump in the beginning. I wasn’t. But the guy has made a believer of me,” said Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona. “Because maybe he doesn’t say things all in the perfect diction or ideal diplomacy, but what he does is grounded in principle and takes America in a better direction.”

