Trump Might Already Be a Lame Duck
President Trump has never really cared about the Republican Party per se. He basks in its adulation, and it’s beneficial to him when the GOP controls Congress. But he’s never adhered to its orthodoxies or honored its heroes. Neither has he been willing to brook internal dissent in the name of the party’s big tent. He demands absolute fealty but displays little loyalty. He can’t help obsessing over his personal priorities—such as his proposed ballroom or his retribution campaign against perceived tormentors—to the detriment of his party’s political interests. On ballots, Donald Trump (MAGA) would be more accurate than Donald Trump (R).
With little more than five months until the midterms, that divergence between what Trump thinks is good for Trump and what is good for the Republican Party has never been wider. Trump’s priorities appear in many ways to be hurting the GOP’s chances in November, when it already faces stiff odds of keeping control of Congress. The war he started with Iran put Americans’ economic struggles front and center when the price of gasoline jumped. Any semblance of a national legislative agenda has evaporated as he pushes long-shot bills that his own party declines to take forward. And his obsession with construction in and around Washington, D.C., it is safe to say, doesn’t suggest a chief executive focused on the problems of everyday citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump has wielded his clout inside the party like a broadsword, endorsing primary opponents in races against incumbents who defy him. Trump has a perfect endorsement record this year: All 118 candidates—for House, Senate, and governors’ races—he has backed in primaries have won, according to a Fox News count (though many of these races were not really contested). Even though Trump’s power over his party appears at its pinnacle, many Republicans believe that the president has actually accelerated his own political decline. Many of those primary winners may struggle in November, darkening the GOP’s prospects for keeping control of Congress. And at least some of the defeated incumbents, who will serve on Capitol Hill until next January, now feel liberated to push back on what they dislike in Trump’s agenda. Others in the Senate who are not up for reelection are bitter about the president’s role in their colleagues’ defeat and have shown little interest in helping him pursue his personal-grievance campaign.
“The problem is he has nobody around him who is willing to tell him, ‘Sir, the stuff you are talking about is not possible, and you are shooting yourself in the foot every time,’” one Republican Senate adviser told us. “He essentially has lame-ducked himself in pursuit of retribution, and either the staff has failed to make a reasonable argument against these actions, or they have told him this and he is no longer listening.” Either way, the party loses.
Since Trump returned to the White House, very few Republicans have dared defy him. Most have set aside private reservations to embrace his push on tariffs and mass deportations while professing ignorance about Trump’s efforts to enrich himself and his family. (“I haven’t seen the story,” is a common refrain.) On those rare occasions when a lawmaker has resisted his will, Trump has paid attention and waited for his revenge. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, as measured by his voting record, was a reliable conservative. But he also was a prominent Republican voice calling for the release of the Epstein files. Trump opposed the release (unusually, he didn’t get his way), slammed the Kentucky congressman, and supported his primary opponent. Massie lost. Seven Indiana state lawmakers broke with Trump’s effort to redistrict their state in favor of the GOP. Trump backed their primary challengers. Five of the incumbents lost; one other faces a recount.
[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]
The biggest ructions have been in the Senate. No modern president has endorsed challengers to two sitting senators from his own party. But Trump successfully backed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against the four-term incumbent John Cornyn in Tuesday’s primary runoff, and also helped oust Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, meanwhile, got so fed up with Trump that he decided to retire. But scorned senators can be furious foes. The Republican majority of 53 already was a tad precarious because of occasional defections from two relative moderates, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Add in Tillis, Cornyn, Cassidy, and retiring former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Trump’s grip on the chamber starts to look shaky.
The president’s purge of candidates who have shown they can win a general election in favor of newcomers who are focused on pleasing him means the party will now have to do more to have a shot at victory in November. Some strategists think that the Texas race for U.S. Senate with Paxton on the ticket could require as much as $ 100 million in additional Republican funding from out of state, both because Paxton is a less effective fundraiser than Cornyn and because his turbulent history leaves him more vulnerable to Democratic attacks. Although Democrats have often hyped but seldom delivered in the Lone Star State, they see Paxton as the weaker opponent for state lawmaker James Talarico. A Talarico win in Texas could hand the Senate to the Democrats; even if he loses, the diversion of GOP resources to Paxton could put other states in play.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune made no secret of his support for Cornyn. When Trump and Thune spoke on May 18, the call was so tense that Thune told his advisers afterward that he thought Trump would back Paxton. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who runs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, followed up with his own pitch for Cornyn in a less contentious conversation with the president, people briefed on the exchanges told us. Trump endorsed Paxton the next day. (Internal polls were already showing Paxton ahead, but the president’s endorsement turned the contest into a rout.)
Thune in particular has at times thrown up his hands in the face of the president’s obduracy. Trump, in turn, has been venting to other GOP senators that the upper chamber is ineffective and insufficiently loyal. “There are definitely frustrations there that are not going away,” one person familiar with the exchanges told us, “and there is no appetite from Thune to resolve it.”
Trump grew so frustrated over the Senate’s inability to pass the SAVE America Act—legislation designed to crack down on issues as disparate as immigrant voting rights and transgender surgeries—that he embraced the idea of a “talking filibuster,” based on the recommendation of Utah’s Mike Lee. (The talking filibuster is a rarely used tactic during which senators delay voting on a bill by refusing to yield the floor, thereby forcing very lengthy debate.)
Thune had the thankless task of explaining to Trump that such an approach would also empower Democrats to offer their own amendments. That could have forced floor votes on issues such as tariffs, the Iran war, and abortion rights, where Republicans would have to choose between defying the president and giving Democrats ammunition for the fall. The legislation remains stalled.
[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill]
Senate Republicans have shown other flashes of independence. Tillis held up Trump’s nominee for chair of the Federal Reserve until the Justice Department stopped pursuing Jerome Powell. Rand Paul, Murkowski, Collins, and Cassidy voted to advance a resolution that would require Trump to get congressional authorization to continue the war in Iran. (House Republicans canceled a vote on the measure out of fear that it might pass.) And early hopes that Congress might authorize $ 1 billion in security funding for the White House ballroom were dashed after pushback from some GOP lawmakers and a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian. Trump ordered Thune to fire the parliamentarian; the majority leader refused.
Last week, still smarting from the Paxton endorsement, the Senate went into recess rather than consider Trump’s plan to create a nearly $ 1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of government “weaponization.” The plan was widely and immediately panned on two grounds: the prospect of recompense for the rioters who attacked Congress on January 6, 2021, and protections that would forever shield Trump, his family, and businesses from IRS scrutiny. “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” McConnell said in a statement. The fund’s fate is now unclear.
Over the weekend, Iran hawks in the Senate who are usually joined at the hip to Trump—Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker—fumed at the reported terms of an Iran peace deal that the president was touting as imminent. The White House tried to silence the objections, but the timetable for a deal notably decelerated, and nothing has been signed.
In the House, where the Republican majority is even more tenuous than in the Senate, Trump has also faced defiance. Massie, Kevin Kiley of California, and Don Bacon of Nebraska broke ranks to give Democrats a chance to oppose Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Bacon is retiring after criticizing Trump’s foreign policy. Kiley, meanwhile, found his congressional district eliminated as California leaders retaliated for GOP redistricting in Texas. Kiley declared that he would run for reelection in a new district—as an independent.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, downplayed the internal GOP strife. “President Trump is the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party,” he told us in a statement. “Look no further than his perfect and sterling record in the past year—a 100% success rate for his preferred candidates, proving his endorsement is the most powerful endorsement in history.”
For months now, Republicans have fervently hoped that Trump’s focus would shift to issues that could help the party in November. Instead, he has been consumed with an Iran peace agreement and with his projects: new paint for the Reflecting Pool, a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, the conversion of a Washington, D.C., public golf course into championship links, and, of course, the ballroom. The economy? Not so much.
A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 45 percent of voters said that affording gas is now somewhat or very difficult, up from 29 percent in December. The same poll found that 55 percent of voters, including 16 percent of Republicans, blamed Trump “a lot” for the rise in costs, and 56 percent of voters opposed the U.S. military action against Iran.
[Read: Trump voters are over it ]
Despite White House promises that the president would hold events across the country to promote economic fixes, Trump has largely stayed in Washington (or at Mar-a-Lago) and declared that the affordability crisis is a Democratic “hoax.” He seems uninterested in fulfilling his campaign promises to get prices down. Earlier this month, the president effectively gifted the Democrats a campaign ad by saying, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” when he was asked about the impact of the Iran war. On Wednesday, while insisting that domestic political considerations would not factor into his negotiations with Tehran, Trump declared, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Many Republicans likely nodded in resigned agreement.