When Donald Trump first came to the White House, he did so under rocky circumstances. Yes, he had beaten Democrats in the Blue Wall of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But he also lost the popular vote — and Democrats had picked up Senate seats in Illinois and New Hampshire, as well as flipping a few seats in the House.
Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House at the time, would regularly say, “I haven’t seen the tweet,” when asked about Trump’s worst Twitter rants. Mitch McConnell would blow off anything Trump said as he turned the Senate into a judicial confirmation factory. John McCain famously voted down Trump’s planned repeal of Obamacare. Senate Republicans balked at his desire to get rid of the filibuster. After the January 6 riot, ten House Republicans voted to impeach Trump and seven Republican senators voted to convict him.
That won’t be the case this time. This time, Trump comes to Washington with an overwhelming mandate, having swept all seven battleground states. McCain is dead. Mitt Romney will leave the Senate at the end of this year. Ryan is out of politics and Liz Cheney is deemed a heretic. McConnell will leave his post as Republican leader at the end of this year, too.
In turn, many of the new Republicans will be distinctly of the Trump flavor. Jim Banks, the next senator from Indiana, voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz both easily won their re-election. Whoever succeeds McConnell as Republican leader — be it Senate Minority Whip John Thune or John Cornyn of Texas — they will be obligated to follow him closely. Speaker Mike Johnson led the legal efforts on overturning the election results and is a much more hardline ideologue than his predecessors.
In short, this will be a much more pliable Republican Congress.
As of right now, it’s unclear whether Democrats will flip the House of Representatives or Republicans will hold it. But it will likely come down to a narrow margin, as was the case in the last two Congresses.
Either outcome will give Trump an advantage. The 117th Congress — the Democratic trifecta during Joe Biden’s first two years in office — showed that when Democrats have a narrow majority, the voices of moderates like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema become stronger. If he becomes speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries knows that occasionally, some of his more endangered members will need to break from Democrats and vote with Trump to hold their seats.
But during the 118th Congress, which featured a slim Republican majority in the House, the voices of the most extreme voices in the GOP become much stronger. Look no further than Matt Gaetz filing his motion to vacate against McCarthy, the three-week search for a speaker, and the constant teetering on the brink of a government shutdown.
Which is to say, if Republicans hold the House, Trump wins. If Democrats flip the House, he still wins — because he can pick off a few frontliners to vote for popular parts of his agenda.
Trump will have much more free rein to pass his legislative agenda and confirm judicial appointments. In 2017, he needed to dispatch Mike Pence to break a tie to confirm Betsy DeVos as education secretary. The existence of more mainstream Republicans meant that he could not pick his initial choice for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder.
Republicans who won in states that Trump won but underperformed him — like Tim Sheehy in Montana, Bernie Moreno in Ohio and even Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, who largely ran on track with Trump — will feel compelled to vote closer with the 47th president to retain his voters, lest they risk a primary challenge.
And Trump has every reason to make the case that people have to fall in line. He will likely target Democrats who won in districts who voted for him to go along with him. Republican elders in the Senate can no longer brush off his commands during press conferences now that they realize the party is not on loan to him; instead, they work for a party he decisvely owns.
The one comfort for Democrats will be that they only have to defend two seats in states that Trump won: Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff will face re-election and Gary Peters in Michigan. Meanwhile, Republicans like Thom Tillis in North Carolina, who always had a rocky relationship with Trump, will likely have difficult re-election cycles.
Similarly, Trump will likely face significant headwinds if he wants to restrict legal immigration or overhaul asylum laws, given that Republicans will not have enough votes to break a Democratic filibuster. Ironically, had Republicans taken up the border bill earlier this year, Trump would be able to implement some of his goals.
