Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) fist-bumps a Senate staffer in the Senate Reception Room, November 19, 2024, at the Capitol in Washington.
The forced withdrawal of Matt Gaetz’s nomination to be attorney general was not a one-off. Trump’s treatment of the government as unreality TV has activated the constitutional instincts of Republican senators who were prepared to roll over for a less in-your-face version of Trump. But those instincts, once activated, are likely to stick.
My reporting suggests that there are at least a dozen Republican senators who will refuse to go along with Trump’s request for recess appointments. That means full hearings for nominees, displaying sordid details, with the likelihood that the Senate will reject several, most notably Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, RFK Jr. as HHS secretary, Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, and possibly others such as Mehmet Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid. Trump may well take a head count as he did with Gaetz, and there could be other withdrawals (“I’m becoming a distraction”) prior to hearings.
Another significant indicator: Though it hasn’t gotten much attention, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the incoming majority leader, has said he opposes repeal of the filibuster. If Thune wanted to have the Senate be a rubber stamp for Trump, he would have his caucus kill the filibuster. That way, Trump could accomplish much of his agenda just by repealing statutes, from the Civil Service Act of 1883 to the Wagner Act, to any number of environmental and consumer laws. But with the filibuster intact, it takes 60 votes to pass ordinary laws; and Democrats, with 47 votes in their caucus, can block.
Thune has handed Democrats a stunning weapon. Why would Thune oppose filibuster repeal (a rule change that takes only a simple majority)? The explanation is one part institutional. It’s a long-standing Senate tradition, and Thune knows that another day Republicans will be in the minority. But it’s one big part resistance to the idea that the Republican caucus should just do whatever Trump wants.
Trump and his henchmen have threatened to primary senators who don’t bend to his will—he once urged Gov. Kristi Noem to primary Thune, whom he disparaged as a RINO. But this is also backfiring. Trump is a lame duck. He will be gone by 2028, and Republicans will have plenty of problems in 2026 without the added complication of divisive primaries.
And there’s a lot more. In the campaign, Trump could paper over schisms in the Republican coalition. But they turn out to be massive once Trump attempts to govern.
Exhibit A is trade. The nomination for Treasury secretary has stalled because Wall Street has applied massive pressure to have Trump name a globalist—who would oppose Trump’s entire view of economic nationalism, including tariffs. There has been a fierce campaign to keep Trump trade adviser Robert Lighthizer out of government entirely. (Trump should repurpose the National Economic Council as the National Economic and Trade Council and name Lighthizer to head it.)
In the campaign, Trump could paper over schisms in the Republican coalition. But they turn out to be massive once Trump attempts to govern.
Exhibit B is the budget. If Trump insists on all of his tax cuts and doesn’t have massive new revenue from tariffs (which would be a disastrous policy in its own right), there are not enough politically palatable programs to cut, the boasts of Musk and Ramaswamy notwithstanding, to make up the revenue gap. That means a bigger deficit, which in turn will cause the Fed to raise interest rates and set off the crash of a badly overvalued stock market. Warren Buffett, who is pretty good at investing, is keeping an astounding $325 billion in cash, in anticipation of a huge market “correction.”
On the spending side, Trump’s people say he won’t cut Social Security and Medicare, but will slash Medicaid, which provides health coverage for about 19 percent of Americans, mostly low-income. But think again. A lot of those people are constituents of Trump’s allies. Louisiana, home of House Speaker Mike Johnson, was the rare Southern state to opt for Medicaid expansion, with fully 44 percent on Medicaid. They are not all Democrats.
Republicans have also talked about subjecting Medicaid recipients to work requirements. But the vast majority of poor people are working, some in two jobs, juggling work and family. Nearly a third of all Medicaid spending goes to people in nursing homes. Imagine work requirements for a 90-year-old in a walker, let alone in a memory care unit. And with cuts in the Medicaid budget for care workers, who designs and supervises work requirements?
Trump also wants to use budget cuts to punish higher education, especially elite universities as nests of liberals. Slashing National Science Foundation research grants would be one easy way to do it. Yet nearly every economist agrees that much of America’s competitive advantage is rooted in great research universities. And Republican entrepreneurs depend on them.
And mass deportations may be popular in some circles, until the cost of food and a variety of services like home care go up because a lot of the low-wage workforce has been exiled. It’s another Trump policy that splits nativist constituents from corporate ones.
None of this means that Trump won’t inflict substantial damage. But it does mean that some parts of his program will meet massive resistance from powerful parts of his coalition, and that other aspects of his program that do get enacted will be fat targets for Democrats.
In the 2026 midterm election, Trump will not be on the ballot. Republicans, with wall-to-wall control of government, will be the resented incumbent party, and the entire mess will be theirs.
