“They do need to give us space. We need to digest the House bill,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told the Washington Examiner. “We need to find places where we can tweak this bill to produce more savings, and it would sure be nice if we had the time to do that without feeling like everything we say is a final statement about our position. This is a negotiation.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said Trump’s “input is welcome, but the Senate will have its way in terms of trying to do what we think is best.”

Fiscal hawks such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI), who opposed the House legislation over its $4 trillion debt ceiling hike and adding to the national deficit, found themselves the subject of Trump’s Truth Social wrath or criticism delivered from the White House press briefing room.

Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social that Paul “has very little understanding” of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and “votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas.”

“His ideas are actually crazy (losers!),” Trump continued. “The people of Kentucky can’t stand him. This is a BIG GROWTH BILL!”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Paul and Johnson, as well as nonpartisan scorekeepers such as the Congressional Budget Office, were “blatantly wrong” for saying the bill would add to the deficit by extending Trump’s first-term expiring tax cuts.

“It’s not news that they disagree with this president on policy,” Leavitt said. “The president has vocally called them out for it and for not having their facts together.”

Paul and Johnson, both of whom have recently spoken with Trump, offered cordial reactions to the criticisms.

Paul said it was “not conservative, not fiscally sound, to raise the debt $5 trillion,” a nod to the Senate budget blueprint, which calls for an even higher debt limit than the House’s $4 trillion.

“I like the president as much as anybody,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I’m a big fan of the tax cuts. I told him I’ll vote for the tax cuts. I’ll vote for spending cuts, even if they aren’t everything I want. But I’m not voting to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.”

Johnson said his conversations with Trump have “always been very cordial, very respectful.” His red line remains hundreds of billions in additional offsets to the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts that the House Freedom Caucus secured over the next decade.

“I’d love to see him really lead on his commitment to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending,” Johnson said.

Meanwhile, other holdouts have been able to largely avoid being singled out by Trump or the White House, at least for now.

For example, Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) said he holds “deep concerns” about the deficit and is closely evaluating proposed clean energy tax credit rollbacks from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.

“I want Republicans to be thoughtful but not reactive,” Curtis said. “Just because it was in the IRA doesn’t make it bad.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), another fiscal hawk who often aligns with Paul, told the Washington Examiner Tuesday he was set to have his latest conversation with Trump later that day.

There also remains a bloc of Senate Republicans still concerned about cuts and changes to Medicaid, including Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Susan Collins (R-ME).

To make matters more dramatic, Elon Musk turned Congress upside down after torching the bill as a “disgusting abomination” for adding to the deficit. However, despite the scathing review and his influence with Trump, GOP senators said the billionaire tech mogul would unlikely jeopardize their fate or the changes senators are making.

The Senate is only in the first days of considering the measure following a weeklong recess after the bill was passed by the House last month. Still, GOP senators will have to make changes, win over enough consensus, and take procedural steps all in the span of the coming weeks for congressional Republicans to get it to Trump’s desk by July 4.

SENATE PROMISES TO UPEND TRUMP’S ‘BIG, BEAUTIFUL’ HOUSE COMPROMISE

That means Trump will face weeks of high-stakes moments where he’ll need to walk a fine line with narrow majorities in Congress.

“I would suggest patience,” Lummis said. “One of my favorite sayings around legislating comes from Bart Simpson, where he says, ‘Don’t have a cow. Okay?’ I think this is the right time. Don’t have a cow, you know?”