At the beginning of the 119th Congress, the House of Representatives looked like it would repeat the debacle of the 15 rounds of voting it took to make Kevin McCarthy speaker of the House before he would be torpedoed 10 months later for Mike Johnson.
A handful of the loudest rabble rousers in the conservative House Freedom Caucus had abstained in the first roll call for votes. But in the end, after some regrouping and whipping, Mike Johnson would get enough votes to become speaker of the House once again.
Only one Republican voted against making Johnson speaker: Rep. Thomas Massie, the idiosyncratic libertarian from Kentucky who would go on to be a thorn in Trump’s side.
This would begin a similar pattern throughout President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House: a handful of Republicans in Congress would voice their criticisms of any initiative Trump wanted, they’d hem and haw to the press, Johnson would call the president to lobby and eventually, almost all Republicans but Massie and maybe one other would get on board.
It represented a fundamental shift within the GOP: When Trump first became president in 2017, many of its elder statesmen remained uneasy about him.
His predecessor for the Republican nomination for president, Mitt Romney, would become his loudest critic in the Senate. Romney’s 2012 running mate Paul Ryan, who preceded Johnson as speaker of the House, tried to ignore Trump despite their significant differences on everything from trade to immigration. The 2008 Republican nominee for president, John McCain, teamed up with Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to kill his attempt to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
But now, McCain is dead, Romney and Ryan left Congress and many of the other statesmen in the GOP no longer occupy the halls of power. After initially, showing some nerve breaking with Trump on the nomination of Pete Hegseth to become secretary of Defense, Murkowski and Collins would greenlight most of his other nominees.
This means that open dissent within the GOP does not exist as much anymore. Stories that would have felled cabinet secretaries of yore become two-day stories at best. And few Republicans dare to criticize Trump lest they get an angry post on Truth Social.
That makes the ones left stand in starker contrast. While many of them still vote with Trump, others have decided to ultimately call it a day. Here’s a list of the unlikely rebels in the first year of Trump’s presidency.
Rep. Thomas Massie
No Republican has broken with Trump more than Massie. Not only would he oppose Johnson becoming speaker, he also opposed the passage of the One, Big Beautiful Bill on the grounds that it blows up the deficit.
Massie regularly wears a pin that shows the U.S. debt ticking up gradually. And when the Justice Department and the FBI released a two-page memo saying the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not keep a client list, he and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) gathered enough signatures for the discharge petition to force a release of the files. Since then, he’s hounded the Justice Department for not releasing the files.
This has led to Trump supporting a primary challenge to Massie.
“Do my constituents want another rubber stamp up here, or do they want somebody who forms their opinions?” Massie said. But Massie said he thinks Republicans will soon start to find their nerve.
“And so I think once we get past these primaries, a lot of my Republican colleagues will find their voice, but they're afraid of getting primary by somebody supported by the President.”
Sen. Rand Paul
Like Massie, Paul, another libertarian has specifically criticized Trump running roughshod over executive authority and running up the budget deficit. While he’s supported even Trump’s most controversial nominees, he opposed the One Big, Beautiful Bill.
He’s joined with Democrats to oppose Trump’s tariffs and last week, he held the line and did not flip his vote on a War Powers Act resolution to prevent Trump from taking further military action in Venezuela. Paul specifically called out the hypocrisy of his Republican colleagues afterward.
“I think the biggest contrast was, you know, that when Republicans, a little over a year brought up that Biden putting troops in to build that pier just of Gaza, that was a war powers resolution, Democrats brought up a point of order saying it wasn't a war because there were no troops, every Republican, including me, voted that it was war powers,” he said.
“So every Republican voted that Gaza was a war,” he said. “But now every Republicans on record voted that invading, bombing capital of Venezuela, taking the president and blockading an entire country is not a war.”
Paul has been a gadfly for both parties on everything from executive power to spending to military action, and Trump has antagonized him as well ever since they ran against each other for president. These two competing versions of conservatism will likely not find a way to reconcile.
Brian Fitzpatrick
The Pennsylvania Republican has perhaps the perfect rebuttal to conservatives who derisively label him a RINO (Republican in Name Only): he wins his district that encompasses the suburbs of Philadelphia that voted for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Fitzpatrick joined Massie in his opposition to the One Big, Beautiful Bill. He’s also a major supporter of Ukraine. He attempted to broker a bipartisan deal to temporarily extend the expanded tax credits for the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace.
But when Johnson put the kibosh on allowing an amendment to the larger Republican health care bill, Fitzpatrick and a few other Republicans joined House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ discharge petition to force a vote on the legislation.
In addition, Fitzpatrick voted to override Trump’s veto of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s legislation on water rights when many of his colleagues refused to do so. He’s also led the charge to ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning stocks, teaming up with conservatives like Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
No defection shocked Washington more than Trump’s breakup with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Georgia Republican had come to Congress as one of the main proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory and wore a Covid mask saying “Trump won,” repeating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
She regularly antagonized her Democratic colleagues and even some Republicans. She began to break with Trump after the initial House passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s provision banning states from regulating AI. She spoke out after Trump conducted strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
But the big break would come when she would join a discharge petition with Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Around this same time, she criticized Republican leadership for not coming up with a solution for the Affordable Care Act’s expanded tax credits.
Trump would un-endorse her. Greene would continue her push, ultimately leading to the passage of the legislation, but only a few days later, she would announce her resignation from Congress. But while it might have been seen as a surrender by some, Greene threw one more wrench in Johnson’s plans by depriving him of one additional vote in his slim majority. She also said she would offer to help Massie.
Thom Tillis
Trump’s clash with Greene only causes temporary pain since her district is will replace her with a Trump loyalist.
But Trump’s decision to criticize Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, became a self-inflicted wound. Initially, it looked like Tillis would go along with Trump. He voted to confirm Hegseth and shepherded Kash Patel’s nomination to become FBI director through the Senate Judiciary Committee. But his break came when he opposed the One Big, Beautiful Bill. After Trump criticized Tillis on social media, he finally had enough and said he would not seek re-election in the Tar Heel state.
That gives Democrats an opportunity to flip a seat in a battleground state. Since then, Tillis has placed a hold on Homeland Security nominees through the Judiciary Committee.
He delivered a blistering speech against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for talking about military action in Greenland, saying “I’m sick of stupid.” And after Jerome Powell said that the Justice Department was planning to file criminal charges, he said he would oppose nominees through the Senate Banking Committee.
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