Donald Trump in 2024 dominated the popular vote and the Electoral College, massively outperforming even the pundits’ most bullish predictions.
He delivered the Senate and the House.
He stitched together a brand-new GOP coalition that might, if the base isn’t betrayed as it usually is by both parties, deliver victories for years to come.
He is the undisputed leader of the party.
He has a mandate, which is to actually #DraintheSwamp this time around, to clear out the special interests that rob and manipulate and persecute the American public, and to restore law and order to all sectors of society — including to the most prolifically criminal class of them all: the ones at the top.
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Many Senate Republican dinosaurs — careerists who were there long before Trump and hope to remain after he’s gone, up until they’re being wheeled around by a staffer like Diane Feinstein’s corpse was before it finally gave up the ghost — don’t like or respect American voters to exemplify any due deference to the executive branch.
(By the way, as bad as Trump’s approval numbers got at points, he never came close to Congress’ record-breaking 12%. No one, save for a tiny sliver of the population that benefits from its largesse in the greater D.C. metro area, appreciates Congress because it is crawling with filthy prostitutes who sell out themselves, and America in the process, out to the highest bidder.)
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While corrupt and immoral, these people are not stupid; they can sense their institutional power threatened by a strong, populist executive like Trump, so their instinct is to play passive-aggressive defense. They know they can’t come out and denounce Trump fully because it would cost them dearly — look what happened to Liz Cheney in her own state — so they settle for shivving him in the back at every turn.
And corporate media is giddy to help them out under the auspices of checks and balances.
Via Politico (emphasis added):
While much of the GOP has become a Trump subsidiary, there are still some Senate Republicans who consider themselves members of a co-equal branch of government and take their Advise and Consent duty seriously…
The challenge will not just be how willing they are to thwart Trump, but whether they will be willing to do so with more than one nominee. It’s one thing to rise up with safety in numbers and block, say, Matt Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general should it reach the floor. It’s quite another to torpedo Gaetz and then take down another, let alone two or three, more Trump appointees.
It’s worth watching, though, because this same bloc of Republican lawmakers would also be the most likely to reemerge later in Trump’s term to selectively challenge him on issues (tariffs or foreign policy come to mind) or an inevitable power grab.
Things don’t need to turn out like they did last time when Trump got henpecked into making decisions anathema to his own campaign pledges and the desires of his base that put him in office.
If these politicians get the fear of God put into them politically — if they believe they’ll get run out of town next primary season by a Trump-backed populist — they’ll act right.
