To hear the Founding Fathers tell it, the Senate is supposed to be a deliberative check on the president. But to hear Republican senators tell it on Thursday, they won’t be restraining Donald Trump much at all.
When NOTUS asked Sen. Josh Hawley if new GOP Leader John Thune would provide any check on the incoming president, Hawley was definitive: “No.”
“Check means blocking pieces of his agenda or slowing it down,” Hawley said. “And [Thune] just said in his leadership meeting he would absolutely not do that, that he would be pedal to the metal, that he would push through nominees, that he would push through legislation.”
“I’m just taking his word,” Hawley said.
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Thune — considered the majority leader candidate with the frostiest relationship with Trump — apparently sold his fellow GOP senators on letting him take the reins by telling them he was all in on Trump.
It turns out Thune may have won not because he was the most Trump-skeptical, but because he convinced the majority of GOP senators that he’s actually not as aligned with former longtime GOP Leader Mitch McConnell as many thought. Even though Sen. Rick Scott’s MAGA-approved bid for leader fizzled, his hard-line conservatism still forced Thune to issue a full-throated endorsement of the Trump agenda.
Thune pitched senators on fealty, not independence.
Asked how Thune should handle ruling over the Senate GOP, close Trump confidant Lindsey Graham offered a comparison.
“I think it should be what Schumer did with Biden,” Graham told NOTUS.
Ostensibly, that would mean very little disagreement between Thune and Trump. During the Biden administration, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate confirmed over 200 judges, 22 of 23 cabinet officials and passed dozens of laws Biden sought.
Sen. John Cornyn — who lost his own majority leader bid to Thune — said he expected “very little” daylight between the incoming president and the incoming majority leader.
When NOTUS pressed Cornyn about potential areas of friction on Wednesday, he said he couldn’t think of anything at the moment
“It’s a good fit,” Cornyn said, graciously.
That comment came minutes before Trump announced Rep. Matt Gaetz as his attorney general, perhaps the most controversial choice among his top allies. The Gaetz nomination is the first test of the Senate’s loyalty to Trump, given that Gaetz was the subject of a Justice Department investigation for allegedly having sex with a minor.
And yet, only two GOP senators have outwardly criticized Trump’s selection. In private, more senators are reportedly skeptical, but few are willing to say anything negative about perhaps the most hated Republican in Congress — a man whose qualifications to serve as the top law enforcement official in the country are that he has a law degree, served two years in private practice and was the subject of a DOJ investigation less than two years ago.
But with a 53-vote majority, the senators most likely to buck their party — Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — are less relevant. Thune can largely wave off their concerns and still muscle through nominations in the upper chamber.
Still, Sen. Mike Braun told NOTUS that Thune can’t ignore reservations entirely.
“He’ll listen to the senators,” Braun said. “He’s got 52 others to herd together, and that’s a margin, but that’s not a huge margin, so he’ll have to play all of that with maybe a heavy voice from the White House.”
Herding a Republican-controlled Senate to align with Trump hasn’t always been an easy feat. As Sen. Kevin Cramer put it, the Senate is a “special place,” explaining that there are “99 people who think they should be president — and me.”
“We protect both our constitutional obligations and powers and our individual votes,” Cramer said. “We all got here the same way he got to where he is as individuals that then collectively become a team. So we’re going to guard that pretty preciously and not give it away to somebody else.”
With Sen. Mitt Romney’s upcoming retirement, senators like Bill Cassidy and Thom Tillis — who sit somewhere between the moderate and MAGA wings of the GOP — are poised to be the next political tipping points.
While many Capitol Hill watchers agree that the Gaetz nomination is, as Murkowski put it, “unserious,” even Cassidy wouldn’t explicitly agree.
When asked about Gaetz, he deflected.
“Life’s a little hectic right now,” Cassidy told Politico.
Tillis demurred when NOTUS asked if he would ultimately support Gaetz, just saying, “We need to see when the nomination comes forward — if it ultimately comes forward.”
If the Senate were to break from Trump, Tillis said it wouldn’t be over a “struggle of personalities” but rather a “setting off of ambitions between two different branches of government.”
“It’s natural stuff,” he said.
For the most part, senators said the White House’s ambitions and those of the Senate aren’t so different. On Tuesday, when Trump nominated “Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary, hardly any senators rebuked him.
On Wednesday, when he tapped former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence, most senators moved on quickly. And on Thursday, when he announced that vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would run the Department of Health and Human Services, even Cassidy, a doctor, welcomed the decision.
For their part, outraged Democratic senators see the nominees as an explicit litmus test of loyalty.
“I mean, President Trump, with some of these appointments, he is testing to see whether Republican senators have a gag reflex or not,” Sen. Tim Kaine told NOTUS.
But if that’s true, it appears that most senators can swallow almost anything Trump puts in front of them.
“Sen. Thune is focused on advancing President Trump’s agenda,” occasional Trump critic Sen. Todd Young told NOTUS, “moving his nominees wherever possible. That’s what I think the entire Republican conference is focused on.”
For now, most senators told NOTUS that they are prepared to jump through whatever hoops they need to jump through for Trump, and they expect Thune will do the same.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville said it shouldn’t even be hard for the new majority leader to do so.
The job, he said, is “pretty much more of a PR position than anything.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. John T. Seward and Mark Alfred, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.
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