'Are you ruining my life?': Republican senators in disbelief over Trump shutdown threat

"Did he just say that?" she asked as she left a Republican lunch. "Ugh, are you ruining my life?"

Collins was already headed to the airport to return home to Maine and wait for the drama to play out, when word came, via House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had met with Trump, that a government shutdown now seemed more likely.

"Boy, we can't have government shut down. It's never good," she said. "How many times do we have to learn that?"

2 days until a partial government shutdown

Collins and other GOP senators were told they would be given 24 hours' notice before a vote was called so they could fly back to DC.

The White House had signaled earlier this week that Trump would sign the bill.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, was leaving the Capitol to join Trump at the White House for the signing of the farm bill that Roberts had ushered through the Congress.

"We're down to almost single digits here," Roberts said about the large number of senators from both parties who left town after the Senate passed the stopgap bill late Wednesday night. "This is not a good situation."

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, said he and other senators at the sparsely attended GOP lunch found out Trump wouldn't sign the bill when someone read aloud a tweet with the news. He said that after the tweet, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went to speak to Ryan about it.

Johnson plans to fly home later Thursday.

He said so many senators had departed the Capitol looked like a "ghost town." In addition, he said there are concerns that so many of the retiring and defeated Republican House members had not returned to DC, for these final votes of the session, that there were doubts about House leaders could pass anything that didn't have Democratic support. Roughly 40 members of Congress from both chambers and parties have missed votes in this latest series of votes, adding another complication to the last-ditch scramble.

"I'm not sure what leverage the President thinks he has at this moment. The way you create leverage is keep this issue alive and keep arguing why we need to secure the border," Johnson said before noting that Trump might just change his mind again. "This could all change in 30 minutes, too."

Several GOP senators said that even if the House passed additional funding for border security, it could not pass the Senate, where votes are needed from Democrats to advance it.

"No, he won't have 60 votes over here," said Sen. Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican who's the chairman of the Budget Committee.

CNN's Manu Raju contributed to this report.

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