A political party that acts as if it is only one man will lose its ability to get anybody else elected.
A political party that acts as if it is only one man will lose its ability to get anybody else elected.
T here are a great many lessons to be drawn from the steep descent of Republicans from the heights of 2024 to the collapse of 2026. But surely a big one is this: The party in Congress paid the price for Donald Trump’s contempt for the party in Congress.
It wasn’t always this way. Look at Trump’s first term. Sure, he didn’t always take the advice he was given from the Hill. His effort to repeal Obamacare was a halfway compromise between what he wanted and what Republicans wanted, and it failed. But he was much more open then to treating Republicans in the House and Senate as partners. The 2017 tax bill had Trump input and features, but it was largely conventional Republican tax policy, mostly written by Paul Ryan from prior Republican proposals. On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell and committee chairs such as Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham had a lot of input on judicial nominations. Trump sent executive branch nominees to the Hill with an eye to who would get confirmed. He grumbled but accepted reality when McConnell and his caucus wouldn’t budge on abolishing the filibuster. For all of Trump’s instincts to demand personal loyalty, Republican senators kept a sufficiently distinct brand from his that a number of them survived tough races in 2020 when Trump was going down to defeat.
This time, things were different from the outset. Even with a Senate inclined to give Trump just about anything he wanted, he set the tone up front by threatening to demand that the Senate put itself in recess so he could appoint a cabinet without confirmation hearings. Even Trump couldn’t get Matt Gaetz confirmed, but Senate Republicans were browbeaten into accepting his other terrible nominees, including not only the execrable Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but also people such as Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who have since departed in predictable disgrace. Along the way, Trump forces drove Joni Ernst of Iowa into retirement in good part by hounding her over her skepticism of Pete Hegseth and made Bill Cassidy’s position untenable as well. Ernst’s Senate seat will now be held by a Democrat.
Few things are more traditionally the prerogatives of Congress than the setting of tax rates. That includes tariffs, which were once the main source of federal revenue and enacted in highly detailed schedules by Congress that reflected the conflicting interests of different constituencies and regions. But breaking with the targeted tariffs of his first term, Trump early on unveiled sweeping, global tariffs that proved immensely unpopular and sabotaged his entire brand as a champion of a lower cost of living. Crucially, Trump did not go to Congress with this plan, the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda. He gave no consideration to the export interests of farmers in states such as Iowa and Kansas (both swept by Democrats last night) or the deep economic ties of states in the Great Lakes region to Canada. He also didn’t bother to get fresh, clear legal authorization for his tariffs, which resulted in them being struck down by the Supreme Court after he tried to shoehorn them into language in a 1977 statute. True, had Trump gone to Congress, he might have been more constrained and a lot slower in putting tariffs in place. But he would have heard from the people’s representatives and engaged in the give-and-take that keeps political coalitions healthy — especially unwieldy ones like Trump’s 2024 coalition.
Trump practically rubbed salt in the wound of the irrelevance of Congress with the One Big Beautiful Bill, the very name of which announced to the public that Congress was only going to do one thing. Hard-nosed treatment of Republicans in that process drove another senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, to retire. His seat, too, will now be Democratic.
Then there was the Iran war. Trump didn’t ask Congress to approve bombing Iran in the summer of 2025 in Operation Midnight Hammer. He didn’t ask Congress to approve sending the military into Venezuela to remove its head of state. But at least those were short-term operations of the sort we have grown accustomed to presidents doing on their own.
The Iran war was different. From the start, it was more ambitious than Midnight Hammer. If it wasn’t originally obvious how long it would last, that was largely because it wasn’t clear what our war aims were. That’s because Trump neither explained them to the American people nor went to Congress. Again, things would have moved slower had Trump needed the approval of Congress, just as the invasion of Iraq moved slower because George W. Bush went to Congress in the fall of 2002. But then, Trump might have had both public input and an incentive to make a public case.
We remember that Iraq was a major contributor to wrecking Bush’s presidency and coalition in 2006. But that was the fourth year of the war. The war vote helped Bush build the GOP caucus in the 2002 midterms, and he was reelected with a popular majority and an expanded Senate caucus in 2004. Trump today can only wish that he got two good years after a far more modest war with no ground troops. But he had no public mandate because he didn’t get Congress involved.
When Trump decided to do something legislatively, he fixated on the SAVE America Act. He could have treated this as an election-year campaign issue, in which Democrats were forced repeatedly to vote against the bill in the House and cloture in the Senate, and rallied a unified party on that ground. Instead, he and his supporters treated the bill as a wedge against fellow Republicans. They demanded that the filibuster be repealed or altered to pass it, then blamed John Thune and Senate Republicans for not doing so, letting Democrats completely off the hook. The internecine warfare on this issue was a major wedge in Ken Paxton’s successful primary challenge to John Cornyn, who (like Cassidy after voting for RFK) got nothing out of abasing himself to endorse the end of the filibuster. Cornyn’s seat, too, will now be in Democratic hands.
The fact that they were formally consulted on neither of Trump’s two biggest decisions — tariffs and Iran — left Republicans straining to defend those decisions or find a reason why anybody should reelect them. And the list goes on. Trump didn’t ask for Congress to bless anything he was doing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He renamed the Department of Defense without asking Congress to change the law. His various vanity projects, or his domestic deployment of the National Guard, or the Department of Government Efficiency, or a dozen other things were done unilaterally.
Trump treated Republicans in Congress like they didn’t matter. Is it any wonder voters took the hint?