Donald Trump will return to the White House with a Senate Republican majority that is larger than the start of his first term and friendlier to him overall, a combination that gives him a powerful advantage to filling his Cabinet and other positions.
There’s a high likelihood that Republicans will have a 53-seat majority when they start the confirmation process for Trump appointees in the next Congress, which means at least four Republicans would have to join all Democrats and independents to stop a confirmation.
That’s an additional cushion from the 52-seat majority Trump had in 2017. And the Senate won’t include some of the more moderate GOP senators who pushed back on Trump’s nominees and legislative desires — Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Mitt Romney of Utah, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona.
The new generation of senators came to office since Trump’s first term, with fewer who are willing to show independence from their own party’s president, said Casey Burgat, director of the Legislative Affairs program at George Washington University.
“The Republicans who are left are more in the mold of a commitment to Donald Trump and what he wants to do as president,” Burgat said. “They’re going to be committed to that in a way that the older senators who were around before Trump are not.”
In the first Trump term, only two Cabinet-level nominees had any GOP “no” votes on the floor from senators still serving. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, opposed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and both Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, opposed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Several nominees at the Cabinet level and below dropped out after facing public opposition from Republicans, including one-time Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Puzder and EPA’s assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention nominee Michael Dourson.
Former Rep. Scott Garrett’s nomination to lead the Export-Import Bank was blocked at the committee level when Republican Sens. Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Tim Scott of South Carolina voted against him. Trump also withdrew a handful of judicial nominees in the face of GOP opposition.
Collins and Murkowski are on top of any list of Republican senators willing to buck Trump’s picks this time. But beyond them, it becomes more difficult to find likely candidates to be a third opposing senator, let alone a fourth, Burgat said.
In Trump’s first term, Flake and Corker repeatedly clashed with Trump before retiring ahead of the 2018 elections. Romney, one of seven Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021, retired ahead of the 2024 election.
McCain, in one of his final votes before his death, cast the decisive vote in 2017 against the Republicans’ final proposal to repeal the 2010 health care law.
As happened with those senators, Burgat said any criticism of Trump or his nominees could be met with a massive response from the White House, and there will likely be a bandwagon effect on even controversial nominees who end up sailing through.
“There is very rarely an instance where one senator is bucking their party to cause a defeat,” Burgat said. “There is certainty and safety in joining together. The only thing worse than losing is having the vote win and you be the lone dissenter.”
Upcoming picks
Picks such as former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., for attorney general, Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of Defense and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence are “emblematic” of Trump’s confidence that the new Republican majority will support his stated efforts to drastically change the government, Burgat said.
And ahead of Wednesday’s leadership elections, Trump and his allies pushed the candidates to potentially allow recess appointments to his Cabinet and other positions, which experts said would cause a major shift away from the Senate’s constitutional “advice and consent” role.
Burgat said the recess threats alone are “a signal in and of itself that this is not your old, even 2017 Republican conference. The Trump takeover of the Republican Party has reached the Senate too.”
David Froomkin, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, said that the fact that Senate Republicans voted for Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to be majority leader over close Trump ally Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., could be seen as a sign that Senate Republicans do not want to completely back Trump’s efforts.
However, he noted that voting for Thune on a secret ballot is very different from voting down one of Trump’s nominees on the Senate floor or opposing recess appointments.
“Just because Republicans are willing to defend norms on a secret ballot doesn’t mean they will be willing to defend it on the record,” Froomkin said.
Congressional experts and some senators said that how the Republican majority handles those first confirmations will be a sign of how the chamber will act as an independent branch of government in a second Trump term.
Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, said there’s a tendency among senators to allow incoming presidents to have their choice of Cabinet members.
At the same time Glassman said Trump’s approach has already clashed with typical Senate style by preferring to drag fights out into public that normally occur behind closed doors in the chamber. That will make Thune a “lightning rod” for criticism because of his role as agenda-setter for the chamber and determining which Trump priorities receive floor time and which wither.
At the same time, Trump is nominating “exactly the wrong kind of people” to have the Senate walk away from its advice and consent role, Glassman said, and approaching it in a way that will rub senators the wrong way.
Multiple Republicans said Wednesday that they found out from reporters that Gaetz had been nominated.
“The Gaetz nomination and RFK Jr. nomination hurt any chances of them going along with recess appointments. They have to be thinking ‘Jesus, what about the people he hasn’t nominated? Who is coming next?’” Glassman said.
Trump and Republicans will have a wide runway to confirm conservative federal judges and fill any openings on the Supreme Court in the new Congress.
Election matters
Multiple Republican senators this week pointed to the results of the 2024 election, where Trump’s victory in both the popular vote and Electoral College helped deliver a trifecta of Republican control of the federal government, as a sign Trump should get his choice of nominees.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pointed to those results when speaking to reporters Thursday. “So I think, given that, he is entitled to the presumption of my support as the leader of my party and somebody who just won the election pretty decisively,” Hawley said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he felt Gaetz was “qualified” for attorney general, and inclined to support him and other Trump choices for the Cabinet, even as he acknowledged Gaetz would face hard questions in the confirmation process.
“Elections have consequences. He chose Matt Gaetz. Matt will come before the committee, and he will be asked hard questions,” Graham said.
As Trump has laid out his Cabinet picks, most Republicans have praised them as qualified and couched any criticism in terms of “hard questions” for the nominees or that they may have nonspecific difficulties in getting confirmed.
So far, senior Republicans have expressed more concern over hypothetical stonewalling from Democrats than the quality of Trump’s nominees.
Thune has so far resisted Trump’s calls to use recess appointments to confirm his nominees, telling Fox News in an interview on Friday that he would only move to have the Senate recess if Democrats obstruct the process. He also pointed out that the Republicans who “might have a problem voting for somebody under regular order probably also have a problem voting to put the Senate into recess.”
The Constitution’s recess appointments power allows presidents to make temporary appointments to positions that normally require Senate confirmation during a formal recess of the Senate. Those recess appointments would last until the end of the next session of Congress, in this case 2026.
Collins and Murkowski have levied some criticism of Trump’s picks so far. Collins on Wednesday said she was “shocked” by the announcement of the Gaetz pick and Murkowski said she did not think Gaetz was a “serious nomination” to the post.
Other Republicans have raised concerns about Gaetz in the context of a House Ethics Committee investigation into the former congressman’s conduct, which several Republicans have said should be included in the vetting process. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said members “should have access to that report.”
Democrats who have criticized Gaetz and other Trump picks face an uphill battle to defeat their confirmations. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said he sees nominations like Gaetz’s as a test for the Senate and whether Republicans will “unilaterally” surrender the Senate’s confirmation power.
“If the president is going to push Senate Republicans to not have confirmation hearings so that someone can move forward who’s been the subject of credible allegations of sex trafficking, that would be a very difficult way to start his administration,” Coons said.
Some Democrats are not so confident, though. Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., said he has “not seen a lot of independence” from Senate Republicans so far, pointing to them backing away from a bipartisan agreement on an immigration bill after Trump opposed it during the campaign.
“I listened to a lot of these Senate Republicans crow about the institution and the importance of preserving, you know, checks on the executive branch. Well, we’ll see if they meant it,” Murphy said.
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