Republicans in Congress spent 2025 staunchly defending President Donald Trump’s most controversial decisions and pushing through his legislative priorities.
The first eight days of 2026 look nothing like that.
On Thursday alone, the Senate passed a Trump-opposed resolution to curb the administration’s military power in Venezuela as well as a measure to compel Republican leadership to install a plaque honoring law enforcement who defended the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. The House passed a bill to extend expiring Affordable Care Act tax subsidies against Trump’s wishes, and nearly three dozen GOP members voted to override Trump’s veto on Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Colorado water bill.
Republicans lawmakers told NOTUS that they see early signs of Trump’s GOP coalition in Congress threatening to unravel, especially as Republicans eye a punishing 2026 campaign cycle with their majorities on the line.
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“Fraying but not broken,” a senior GOP lawmaker said of the Hill’s relationship with Trump. “The fear factor in GOP primaries is still real.”
The fear of a Trump-backed primary challenger has not prevented a swell of dissent this week.
Just earlier this week, Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, pushed back on Trump’s claim that the GOP should soften on a law that bans federal funding for abortion. And several Republicans lawmakers blasted Trump’s aspirations to acquire Greenland.
Another House member told NOTUS that they don’t think the growing Republican blowback shows “any kind of a weakening in Republican support for the president.”
“I think it shows that the president is picking less prudent fights,” this lawmaker said. “I mean there has always been limits to the extent of which Republicans will back the president.”
“When he stays within generally mainstream conservative thought, he’s going to have overwhelming support,” they continued. “The further he gets outside of that, the more he’s going to see that base of support drop. That’s always been the case.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt dismissed the notion of a fracturing relationship between the White House and Congress in a statement to NOTUS.
“This is nonsense,” she said. “President Trump has a great relationship with the vast majority of Congress, as evidenced by his passage of the Working Families Tax Cut which codified his entire agenda into law in the first six months of his presidency. The President is in constant communication with members from both Chambers, as is the White House.”
Rep. Kevin Hern, a leadership ally, told NOTUS that he thinks that GOP lawmakers breaking with Trump “are looking out for the election.”
“At the end of the day, people are looking at their own elections. That’s what this place always comes down to: What’s it take to get reelected? And people are looking at that calculus,” Hern said of the GOP breaks with Trump.
Republican lawmakers now face a Goldilocks-like conundrum. If they stray too far from the president, they risk facing his public wrath — like senators who backed the War Powers Resolution incurred on Thursday — and a primary challenge. If they don’t break with Trump on unpopular issues, they risk becoming out of sync with their voters in a key election year.
“I don’t know if it’s fraying,” a second GOP lawmaker told NOTUS of Trump’s grip on congressional Republicans. “I would say it’s just members deciding where they draw the line on some issues.”
Trump has always had to contend with Republican grumblings, primarily from the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Their regular pushback and late-night request for policy assurances have annoyed the president that he vented about them Monday at a recent meeting with the conference. He blasted them as “3 o’clock in the morning” people, and said “I probably love them the best, the guys that I don’t have to call.”
Rep. Keith Self, a regular holdout who participated in several last-minute phone calls from Trump, offered one template for how to break with the president going forward: arguing that breaking with Trump is actually about advancing Trump’s wishes.
“Everything that comes out of the Republican Conference is not always clearly aligned with the president’s agenda,” Self told NOTUS. “So what we try to do is make it more aligned with the president’s agenda.”
For the most part, those calls work, and Trump is usually able to persuade the Freedom Caucus members to vote with him.
The White House spent Thursday projecting confidence that they can plug the drip-drip-drip of Republican dissent.
“I’m not concerned at all,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters when asked if the Trump administration is losing control of Congress.
Marc Short, the president’s first term legislative affairs director and former Mike Pence aide, echoed Vance’s confidence.
“I still think he has a pretty strong grip on Congress,” he told NOTUS in an interview. “I would anticipate, you know, a little more separation. But I think there’s a lot of members who feel, even if they don’t agree with the president, they will get primaried.”
Short said that over the course of the last 10 years, the president has leaned into his ability to primary members of his own party and used it to fuel his agenda, even if it seems antithetical to traditional conservative values.
If the trend continues, it won’t take many Republican rebels to stymie Trump’s 2026 agenda. Due to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation and Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s sudden death, Johnson can only afford to lose two votes in the House and just one if you discount perennial no-vote Rep. Thomas Massie.
Some moderate Republicans have been hankering for Congress to assert itself against the White House, and multiple told NOTUS in December that they anticipate more pushback on Trump in 2026.
“We need some independence,” Rep. Don Bacon told NOTUS. “It’s better for America.”
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