By Charles Hilu
Friday, December 26, 2025
Even for a president known for his disregard for norms
and scathing attacks on his enemies, it was a bridge too far.
After news broke last week that acclaimed film director
Rob Reiner and his wife had been stabbed to death in their home, President
Donald Trump reacted in a way that was unsurprising only in the degree of its
callousness. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said
the death of Reiner, a longtime Democratic activist and strong critic of the
president, was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive,
unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as
TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
That the president would denounce someone whose death police
say came at the hands of the couple’s son was one reason why several
congressional Republicans went out of their way to condemn the president’s
post. They included
Reps. Mike Lawler of New York, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, and Don Bacon of
Nebraska. Bacon, in particular, said the president’s issues with regard to
decency could be a breaking point for Republicans in the future. “Most people
know that was beneath the president,” he told The Dispatch.
There’s not much congressional Republicans can do about a
distasteful comment from the White House other than condemn it. But Trump’s
actions in his second term have repeatedly tested the limits of Republicans in
Congress, pushing the bounds of executive authority and contradicting the professed beliefs of large
swaths of the caucus. In response, Republicans have offered varying degrees of
pushback, sometimes putting up no resistance at all and at other times
expressing concern but not giving substantive opposition. Only on rare
occasions have Republicans in Congress told Trump “no” or moved to block his
actions.
This deference to Trump is unsurprising, given that the
president has not been afraid to threaten dissenting members of his party with
a primary challenge. In the 2022 cycle, Trump-backed challengers succeeded in ousting
multiple Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted to
impeach the president following the January 6 Capitol riot. After Sen. Thom
Tillis of North Carolina voted against advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill
Act, Trump publicly declared
that he would meet with primary candidates, and Tillis soon announced his
retirement. Most recently, Trump has announced
his intentions to back challengers to GOP members of the Indiana state Senate
who voted against the state’s push to give Republicans a more favorable
congressional map.
Despite that history, congressional Republicans in recent
months have shown more of a willingness to criticize Trump and buck his
wishes—a trend that has coincided with a decline
in his job approval ratings. Nevertheless, the country has yet to see the
congressional GOP take a stand against Trump on an issue that is especially
high-profile or of serious importance to his agenda as Republicans have worked
to leverage their governing trifecta.
‘Supporting the president.’
The Constitution gives Congress the power to levy
tariffs, but the legislature has deferred more and more to the president on
trade in the past few decades, with Republicans keeping in line with that trend
this year. Throughout his political career, the issue Trump has shown is the
most near and dear to his heart, apart from immigration, is trade. His most
expansive utilization of presidential authority on tariffs came on April 2,
when he levied tariffs of 10 percent or
higher on almost every country in the world. Such a liberal use of import
duties contradicts Republican orthodoxy, which for decades has favored free
trade.
The following day, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa
and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington introduced
a bill that would give Congress more authority over tariffs the president
proposes. But neither that
bill nor its companion legislation
in the House have advanced out of their committees.
Some senators have made use of privileges that the law
affords them to force votes on resolutions that would repeal some of Trump’s
tariffs. In October, the chamber passed
three such pieces of legislation, which would repeal the global duties, as well
as those on Canada and Brazil. On all three resolutions, Republican Sens. Lisa
Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul
of Kentucky voted with Democrats to kill the tariffs. Tillis joined them in
voting against the Brazil tariffs.
That legislation’s passage is not a sign of a widespread
GOP rebellion, though. As the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter noted, the
defectors consisted of a group of three senators who have consistently broken
with Trump since his first term—Murkowski, Collins, and Paul—and two senators,
McConnell and Tillis, set to retire next year. Senators who depend on Trump’s
support for reelection did not contradict him.
What’s more, the votes are merely symbolic. Even if such
legislation were to pass both Houses of Congress, Trump would likely veto it.
Leadership in the House has proven unwilling even to take up such legislation,
and in fact have taken away their members’ power to do so, at least for the
time being. In the spring, Speaker Mike Johnson began adding
language to procedural motions, which the House has to vote on to bring
legislation to the floor, that blocked consideration of resolutions regarding
tariffs. Republican members were disincentivized to vote against those motions
since they allowed for votes on pivotal bills—that were unrelated to
tariffs—such as a stopgap spending measure to prevent a government shutdown and
the framework for what would become the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Though
there was a small revolt in the fall when Johnson tried to put such language
into a procedural vote for a collection of less pivotal bills, resolutions to
repeal Trump’s tariffs are blacklisted until the end of January.
Johnson has said Trump needs “the space” to negotiate
trade agreements and that he thinks the president has the authority
to levy the tariffs that he has this year. Other Republican lawmakers have made
similar arguments, saying that Trump is leveraging the tariffs to get better
trade deals with other countries. “I think we need to give the president the
opportunity to be able to carry out his strategy to level the playing field on
tariffs,” Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska told The Dispatch earlier this
year after Trump temporarily suspended
many of his sweeping global tariffs. “... We’ve just got to keep supporting the
president.”
Expressing concerns.
As Trump has contradicted traditional Republican beliefs
on foreign policy and defense, congressional Republicans have occasionally made
their disagreements known or expressed concerns, but they haven’t taken much
action to oppose him.
While the most
recent case of this is the administration’s strikes on boats in the
Caribbean suspected of carrying drugs, Republicans throughout the year have
criticized the president for his actions in the war in Ukraine, without doing
much substantively to push him in the direction they want. Since Russia’s 2022
invasion, many, if not most, Republicans, especially in the Senate, have been
supportive of President Volodymyr Zelensky's country, both in rhetoric and in
giving military aid. In his efforts to end the war, Trump has given mixed
signals about whether he views Russia or Ukraine as at fault and which country
he sees as resisting a peace deal. He has both called
Zelensky a “Dictator without Elections” and told
Russian President Vladimir Putin to “STOP!” bombing civilian areas in Ukraine.
Following the “dictator” comment, Republicans made it clear they believed Putin
was the real
dictator.
In his dithering, Trump has not gone as far as many
congressional Republicans would like in pressuring Putin to end the war. The
Senate has waffled on a bill that would push Trump to put additional sanctions
on Russia. It has the support of 85 senators, including Majority Leader
John Thune, and House Speaker Johnson has told
The Dispatch there is “a big appetite” among Republicans in both
chambers for “tough sanctions on Russia.”
Despite that hunger, Republicans have not advanced the
bill from committee. The Senate’s willingness to consider it has often been
dependent on how Trump feels about the war at a particular time. In
mid-October, Trump suggested
he would give Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, which would allow it to strike
targets deep inside Russia. Days later, Thune said
it was time to move on the sanctions bill. But then Trump had
a call with Putin and a reportedly tense meeting with Zelensky, indicating the
president was seeing things Russia’s way. After that, Thune indicated the bill
was on hold; but then Trump seemed to sour on Putin, cancelling a planned
meeting with him. And that left the bill in limbo once again. In November,
Trump gave the bill his blessing, and the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Lindsey Graham
of South Carolina said
the Senate would move on it, but Congress left town for Christmas last week
without advancing it.
Telling Trump ‘no.’
There have been times when Senate Republicans have stood
in the way of Trump’s agenda, choosing to honor deeply held traditions in the
world’s greatest deliberative body over Trump’s wishes. Democrats have used the
Senate’s “Blue Slip” tradition—which effectively allows senators to veto
judicial nominees in their home states—to block certain U.S. attorney nominees,
such as Alina Habba, whom Trump nominated to a post in New Jersey after she
served as his personal lawyer.
The president has called
on Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, throughout the year to
scrap the practice, but the 92-year-old Iowa senator has not budged, getting
support from senators such as Tillis and Graham, the latter of whom is
typically deferential to the president.
Over a month into the longest government shutdown in
American history, which began this fall after Senate Democrats blocked a
stopgap spending measure, denying it the requisite 60 votes to reach final
passage, Trump called
on Republicans to scrap the filibuster. He argued that Democrats would do so
anyway the next time they gained power, so the GOP might as well kill it first
and put in place a host of policy priorities such as voter ID and a ban on
mail-in ballots.
Since the ratification of the Constitution, the Senate’s
tradition of unlimited, or at least prolonged, debate—currently enforced by the
60-vote threshold—has prevented Congress from enacting rapid policy changes
based on the whims of fickle majorities. In the 21st century, the filibuster
has withstood efforts from both parties to kill it.
Though some Senate Republicans said they were open to at
least changing filibuster rules, most decided
that the positives of keeping it in place outweighed the temporary legislative
benefits they would get from killing it.
Substantive opposition.
But there is a difference between standing behind
traditions that have been in place for more than a hundred years and
proactively stopping presidential action. The few times since Trump was elected
to a second term in which congressional Republicans have actively opposed the
president haven’t been when particularly essential parts of Trump’s agenda have
been at stake.
Prior to Trump taking office, enough Senate Republicans
worked behind the scenes to stonewall his nomination of former Florida Rep.
Matt Gaetz as attorney general. But the energy from that 2024 act of defiance
has not carried over to 2025. Republicans approved Trump’s other controversial
Cabinet-level nominees, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi
Gabbard.
They have, however, blocked some controversial nominees
to lower-level positions. Trump tapped longtime
ally Ed Martin to be the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. His track
record, which included a defense of January 6 rioters, put off GOP senators,
most importantly Tillis. His opposition denied
Martin a majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, stopping his nomination
from advancing to the floor. “They have to follow their heart and they have to
follow their mind,” Trump said
after he pulled Martin’s nomination. Likewise, Republican senators also blocked
Trump’s nomination of Paul Ingrassia to lead the U.S. Office of Special
Counsel. After Politico published a report
that surfaced racist texts from Ingrassia, which included him saying he had a
“Nazi streak,” several Republican senators, including hardline conservative
Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida, signaled
that they opposed him. Ingrassia later withdrew his name.
Early in Trump’s term, the Elon Musk-led Department of
Government Efficiency (DOGE) ran roughshod through executive agencies,
attempting to downsize employment rolls and cut spending. As the effort went
on, a handful of Republican lawmakers tried to protect their affected
constituents.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia secured two
victories on that front. In April, the Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) laid
off 200 employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health, which helps oversee the safety of local coal miners, in Morgantown,
West Virginia. Capito, who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that
oversees funding for HHS, lobbied for the administration to reverse course, getting some
of them reinstated. Months later, the administration withheld
billions of dollars of funding for education programs that Congress had already
appropriated. Capito led 10 GOP senators in a successful
effort to get the money released. “We had 10 people—10 Republicans—on our
letter,” she told The Dispatch at the time. “That was my letter. I think
that was a lot of pressure.”
Over the summer, the administration tried to codify many
of its DOGE cuts through a package of rescissions, allowing Congress to
circumvent the filibuster to rescind money it had already appropriated. The
measure originally contained
$9.4 billion of cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, including $900
million to global health programs that likely would have affected the
President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Members of both parties
have praised the program for its success in fighting HIV and AIDS abroad. Sen.
Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, was the lead
opponent of those cuts, and enough GOP senators objected
to them for the White House to promise that PEPFAR would not be affected in
order to pass the rescissions package. In the end, the removal
of the PEPFAR cuts trimmed the rescissions package total to $9 billion and
allowed it to pass through Congress.
As the year went on, Republicans’ willingness to break
with Trump grew. And the president’s popularity fell. He started his term with
a positive job approval, according to the RealClearPolitics polling
average, but in March it officially became negative, and the current gap
between Americans who approve and disapprove of his performance sits at around
10 points.
2026 will see an election in which, if historical midterm
trends continue, the GOP will not do well. Republicans’ slim three-seat
majority in the House is at risk in a midterm cycle during the term of an
unpopular president. Although the Senate map makes it unlikely that
Democrats will win the chamber, they could very well eat into Republicans’
majority. Vulnerable Republicans walking the fine line between avoiding
primary challenges and winning the November general election will especially be
tested on how willing they are to break with the president, lest they lose
their seats to Democrats who will have no hesitation in contradicting Trump’s
wishes.
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