White House officials flashed a pivot toward domestic issues on the minds of many voters before the holidays, but President Donald Trump had other plans, returning from South Florida once again fully immersed in global affairs.
Trump did urge House Republicans at a policy retreat on Tuesday to focus on health care and energy prices ahead of November’s midterm elections. But the majority of his first week of the new year back in Washington was focused on decapitating Venezuela’s government — and threatening others across the Western Hemisphere.
One close Senate ally, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, defended the president Thursday, describing him as a master multitasker.
“You’ve got to do both. When you’re the commander in chief, you deal with the world,” Graham said. “He’s made a decision to destroy the drug caliphate. Good for him.”
Amid a stack of November and December polls that showed voters further souring on still-high prices and Trump’s economic stewardship, White House aides scheduled several on-the-road events for the boss and Vice President JD Vance. The goal: Cool voter heartburn by convincing them that 2026 would be better for their wallets and retirement accounts, driven by the kicking in of the massive Republican-led domestic tax and spending bill Trump signed into law last summer.
They even convinced the president — once a fierce campaigner — to hold a pre-Christmas rally in battleground North Carolina, a state he’s won three times. But that event was scheduled for 9 p.m. on Dec. 19, a Friday night, and Trump actually took the stage even later, minimizing its impact. Another clue into the president’s frame of mind came after he’d settled into his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for his winter break.
His working hours — in between rounds of golf and parties with members of the private club — were dominated by meetings and news conferences with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Late on the night of Jan. 2, Trump ordered U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel to charge into Caracas and arrest Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Notably, the Trump team this week ditched his usual communication strategy — taking questions from the day’s press pool. Instead, he sat for a lengthy interview with a group of New York Times reporters and then called into conservative host Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, before sitting down with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity. Those interviews were dominated by foreign affairs — another break from Trump’s 2024 “America First” campaign trail pledges.
Asked by Hewitt about his response should Iranian leaders begin harming people attending protests that have rocked the Islamic Republic in recent weeks, Trump said, “They know, and they’ve been told very strongly, even more strongly than I’m speaking to you right now, that if they do that, they’re going to have to pay hell.”
The same afternoon, five GOP senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Todd Young of Indiana, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — broke with Trump and voted to advance a war powers resolution pushed by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., which would bar further U.S. military action in Venezuela without congressional authorization. The president accused them of “stupidity” and said the five Republicans”should never be elected to office again.”
Around the same time Thursday, it fell on Vance — not Trump — to headline a White House news briefing about a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-involved shooting in Minneapolis.
But Graham, during a brief interview, contended that Trump remains very much engaged with Republican lawmakers on domestic issues.
“He’s trying to find a way to end the escalation of unlimited spending in Obamacare, trying to find a bipartisan product, if you can do that, find a way to lower everything, make America more affordable, but also protect us,” he said. “I talked to him for an hour about it yesterday, about health care. … He’s looking for ideas. He’s open-minded.”
Still, when Trump did address domestic matters this week, he did so with rare words of warning and qualifiers.
For instance, after saying for months that the United States had become “the hottest country” economically, he had a cooler assessment Thursday with Hewitt: “We have the greatest potential economy in history.”
When he addressed GOP lawmakers Tuesday, he said their party had to win the midterms or Democrats would “find a reason to impeach me.”
He urged Republicans to campaign on their tax and spending law dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
“All of these things, you have so much ammunition, all you have to do is sell it,” he said. “But the great Big, Beautiful Bill is just that. There are so many goodies in the bill, you have to get the word out.”
But retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis on Wednesday took to the Senate floor to argue that the president’s actions in Venezuela and talk of somehow acquiring Greenland was drowning out any attempt to, as Trump put it, “get the word out.”
“I’m sick of stupid,” the North Carolina Republican said of Trump’s advisers. “I want good advice for this president, because I want this president to have a good legacy. And this nonsense on what’s going on with Greenland is a distraction from the good work he’s doing, and the amateurs who said it was a good idea should lose their jobs.”
‘Master deal-maker’
Other Trump Capitol Hill allies this week sounded skeptical of his focus on matters beyond U.S. shores, including how much to spend on the very military prowess the commander in chief has bragged about since the Venezuela operation.
“That’s a lot of money,” Sen. Rick Scott, a self-described fiscal conservative, said Thursday, shaking his head when asked by reporters about Trump’s out-of-the-blue demand on social media to increase the military budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027.
One conservative source, granted anonymity to be candid, said a growing number of conservatives have become disenchanted with Trump’s antics, including over his recent social media remarks about the late Hollywood director and Trump critic Rob Reiner, whose son has been charged in the murder of his parents.
“It’s things like his comments on Rob Reiner. That absolutely shocked conservatives who believe in morals and setting a good example for young people. That stuff is eroding his support around the margins,” the source said. “And he’s losing independents too.”
“When you step back and look at all of this, all these things the administration is doing that just blow past all these norms and laws, you’ll conclude they are pseudo-revolutionaries. They’re not conservatives. This administration, despite the fig leaf over their true intentions, are very different from real conservatives,” the source said. “I don’t think populist comes close to really capturing it. To them, there’s a need to reimagine government, reimagine the entire economy and global order via shock treatment.”
But Trump aides and his closest congressional allies have offered much different assessments, describing him as ready to engage Congress while also being a decisive commander in chief.
A senior administration official, during a Dec. 22 interview to preview his boss’ 2026 legislative wish list, called Trump “ready to storm the Hill [to] get as much as you can.”
The president, he said, “is a master deal-maker, so I wouldn’t rule anything out.”
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday saluted his party’s leader for “the actions that he took this weekend to protect American lives.”
“For years, Maduro’s regime turned Venezuela into a pipeline for deadly drugs, fueling one of the leading causes of death in our country. I think we all know somebody who has died from a drug overdose,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters. “President Trump stepped in and decisively took action; he didn’t shy away from putting America first.”
“He didn’t shy away from taking action. And that’s the bold leadership. That’s exactly what we’re bringing back to this country,” Johnson added. “And it’s the same bold leadership that we’re bringing to the House this year.”
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