Eventually, Senate Republicans were going to prioritize their own political survival over President Donald Trump’s wants and needs.
They have. But it just might be too late.
Despite the headwinds they knew they’d face in a midterm year, Republicans were confident their Senate majority wasn’t in real trouble. The 2026 Senate map is favorable to the GOP, and they’re starting with 53 seats. Losing the majority was once inconceivable.
Yet less than six months from Election Day, Trump’s approval numbers are historically bad. Many Republicans fear Trump is determined to bring them down with him — along with their shared legislative agenda.
Senate Republican leaders are now coming to grips with the reality that advancing Trump’s priorities may be in conflict with their efforts to retain the majority. Plus, Trump’s recent successes in ousting GOP incumbents have made it even harder for Republicans to steer him away from ideas they see as so obviously harmful to their chances.
A Republican senator delivered this grim assessment on Thursday: “Our majority is melting down before our eyes.”
It’s difficult to overstate the erosion of goodwill between Trump and Senate Republicans. This has been building steadily for months over campaign strategy disputes, uneven White House messaging and Trump’s attempts to get rid of the filibuster. But it became supercharged this week as GOP leaders made deliberate decisions to distance themselves from Trump, believing that’s now a political necessity as Election Day gets closer.
“It’s hard to divorce anything that happens here from what’s happening in the political atmosphere around us,” a despondent Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged Thursday. “You can’t disconnect those things.”
Thune was speaking shortly after he abruptly punted consideration of a party-line ICE and Border Patrol reconciliation bill. The legislation is bogged down amid an impasse with the White House over the creation of a new $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that Hill Republicans see as politically toxic.
“The White House dropped a bomb in the middle of a pretty well-planned-out reconciliation [bill] to help deliver on one of President Trump’s priorities,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) complained.
The immigration bill was on a glide path earlier this week, even as Republicans were preparing to buck Trump’s demand to include $1 billion in security funding for his East Wing ballroom project.
But Thune lamented that the effort, which is almost entirely focused on immigration enforcement funding, “got a little bit more complicated this week” because of the announcement of the “anti-weaponization” fund.
Just consider how bad this week was for the Senate GOP Conference:
— Republican Senators returned on Monday, stung from Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-La.) loss to a Trump-backed primary challenger. Trump was creating more “free agents” who can vote against his priorities.
— Just as Senate Republicans were about to meet on Tuesday, Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) — without so much as a heads-up to Thune. Trump also held a news conference at the White House ballroom construction site as Republicans were about to strip the $1 billion in security funding from the reconciliation bill.
— On Wednesday, GOP leaders decided they had no choice but to use the reconciliation bill to restrict the “anti-weaponization” fund for the same reason they dropped the ballroom funding — the poor political optics. GOP congressional leaders also believed they’d lose a Democratic-forced vote on it, so they wanted to preempt that.
— Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spent nearly two hours getting grilled in private by Senate Republicans about the weaponization fund. GOP senators — around 25 of them, an exceptionally high number for these closed-door meetings — took turns blasting the proposal and lamenting that they were being put in this situation.
“We can’t help the president with a budget reconciliation package with this hanging over us,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said, summing up the message in the room. “From a legal standpoint, they may be right. [Politically,] it’s unexplainable. That’s the problem.”
Multiple GOP senators complained during the meeting that the administration’s recent actions show that they don’t care about the plight of the GOP majorities on Capitol Hill — something we chronicled earlier this week.
Put simply, the White House isn’t making life easier for Hill Republicans in any way.
In the House this week, Trump administration officials pushed a rail-safety bill that had long been an anathema to members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The move stunned much of the House Republican leadership, which is also opposed to the provision.
Picking up the pieces. The Senate is in recess next week, but GOP leaders need to figure out how to secure 50 votes when they return on June 1 to at least begin voting on the reconciliation bill. Thune’s message to the Trump administration was simple: You got us into this mess, so you need to help get us out of it.
“The timing is obviously something we had no control over,” Thune said. “They need to help with this issue, because we have a lot of members who are concerned, obviously about the timing but also about the substance.”
It’s unclear what the “sweet spot” would be for GOP consensus over the weaponization fund. Republicans pitched Blanche on several different ideas on Thursday, including blocking payouts to people convicted of assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officers on Jan. 6 and imposing guidelines for how the fund’s commissioners can be appointed.
The delay in the reconciliation bill will have ripple effects that could imperil other must-pass bills, including FISA Section 702 reauthorization. The program expires June 12. Democrats are less likely to help Republicans pass FISA than they were before.
“We’ve got other stuff to do,” Thune said. “So it’s going to be important to execute on actually getting this thing done, across the finish line.”
