When President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office again on Jan. 20, it will complete a Republican takeover of Washington. The House and the Senate will have been sworn in two weeks earlier, offering the party a do-over for the trifecta it held in 2017 at the beginning of Trump’s first term. But while back then it was typically the White House acting as the biggest stumbling block to the Republican agenda, it seems likely that baton has been handed off to the incoming 119th Congress.

It’s easy to feel a sense of growing dread at what it means to have Republicans in full control again. I was filled with a similar sense ahead of the 2022 midterms — but one should never underestimate Republicans’ willingness to punch one another in the face out of spite. In many ways, a large number of the policies laid out in Project 2025 may not even need an organized resistance: At least in Congress, all Democrats need to do to notch a win is sit back and let the GOP tear itself apart, especially on the looming fight over taxes.

At least in Congress, all Democrats need to do to notch a win is sit back and let the GOP tear itself apart

You see, there’s a beautiful irony at work when it comes to the House Republican caucus. The last two election cycles have seen them capture, then retain, a majority of seats and the speaker’s gavel. When the last Congress was gaveled in, Republicans held 222 seats to the 213 that Democrats had won. The GOP then needed 13 rounds of voting to elect a speaker, only to narrowly avoid defaulting on America’s credit, before dumping said speaker nine months later. Add multiple occasions when a federal shutdown was averted thanks only to Democrats’ swooping in to save the GOP from itself, and it makes for a historically shoddy track record.

Most of that infighting centered on far-right members of the Freedom Caucus who pushed dead-end legislation to slash spending on the social safety net or otherwise to own the libs, be it by attacking transgender health care or yelling about gas stoves. With President Joe Biden in the White House and with Democrats running the Senate, it was an impractical strategy that undercut any leverage Republicans might have used to extract smaller concessions in the face of Democrats’ united opposition. The far right lashed out in anger at any yielding to political reality, even stymieing Republican messaging bills from reaching the House floor in protest as Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., attempted to keep the train on the rails.

This time around, Republicans are on track to hold as few as 220 seatsthe smallest starting majority in more than a century. If all members are present on both sides of the aisle (and assuming the Democrats can maintain party discipline), the GOP can afford to lose only three votes on any given bill before it fails. That margin could shrink even further in the weeks to come as the seats several of Trump’s Cabinet picks will vacate remain pending special elections. Even if the far right is completely placated in every bill Johnson puts forward, swing-seat Republicans still exist. Many of those front-line members barely staved off their opponents in the last election. Two years of backing Trump’s most divisive policies might be too much for their constituents to bear.

For a sense of how much this micro-majority might struggleremember that the only major legislation to emerge from Trump’s first term was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Most of the tax cuts and other major provisions in that law expire after 2025, making their potential reauthorization one of the biggest fights ahead in this incoming session. When the bill first passed through Congress, it did so with 12 GOP defections in the House. That’s four times as many votes as the GOP can lose before a bill is tanked — with Democrats perfectly happy to let taxes on the middle class spike on Trump’s watch.

Democrats will be well within their rights to point out that the people holding the matches are also the ones stepping on the firehose.

Most of those GOP “no” votes in 2017 came from Republicans from more populous states, like New York and California, who were upset that the legislation capped the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction people could claim on their taxes. Trump has suggested he would lift that cap this time around, but without even bigger cuts to spending, doing so would blow an equally big hole in the deficit. While it seems likely the White House could unilaterally attempt to eliminate that spendingthe amount of borrowing required may be enough for the GOP’s remaining fiscal hawks to pause before promising their votes.

Fiscal hawks, SALT advocates, the Freedom Caucus — already that’s multiple competing factions, each attempting to get its way, that need to be appeased to get all the Republicans on the same page. Satisfying all of them may prove impossible when you consider that the Senate also must get on board with Republican senators having their own set of priorities. The lack of leverage that House leadership will have to force loyalty will only be compounded if it leaves in place the rule that allows a single member to call a vote on whether to topple the speaker, as we saw in 2023.

And that’s not considering the other basic housekeeping hurdles lined up down the track. The annual spending bills for the current fiscal year still need to be passed, and the debt ceiling will be un-paused in January, setting the stage for a potential crisis later in the year.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board correctly clocked that Republicans have roughly a year to get anything done legislatively before fretting about the midterm elections takes over. “Perhaps Donald Trump can keep them in line behind Speaker Mike Johnson,” their essay warned, while “factionalism will mean the end of a functioning majority and guaranteed defeat in 2026.” And with the whole of Washington in Republican hands, Democrats will be well within their rights to point out that the people holding the matches are also the ones stepping on the firehose.

Hayes Brown

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.

This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 26 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Even allies of President-elect Donald Trump are admitting that his plan for tariffs will drive up the cost of pretty much everything for consumers. So why do it?

Well, one of the ostensible reasons Trump had for launching this potential trade war was to end the scourge of fentanyla real and enormous problem facing the United States. Fentanyl is a powerful opioid that contributes to about 100,000 U.S. overdose deaths a year. For the past decade, it has been laced into lots of other drugs and caused users of those drugs to overdose unwittingly.

Fentanyl is a powerful opioid that helps contribute to about 100,000 U.S. overdose deaths a year.

The problem is massive. Back in 2021, U.S. life expectancy dropped to its lowest level in two decades. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that after Covid, drug overdoses, largely from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, were the primary drivers of shorter American lifespans. That’s a real problem and a problem that big doesn’t have a fast or easy fix.

But something seems to be changing recently. As The New York Times reports, “After years of relentless rises in overdose deaths, the United States has seen a remarkable reversal. For seven straight months, according to federal data, drug fatalities have been declining.”

The difference is dramatic. There are a lot of reasons at play for that decrease, like more funding for better treatment, education and prevention measures. Back in September, when people first started asking about the drop and its causes, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra joined “All In” to talk about these harm reduction measures taking hold across the country — like making test strips and Narcan, a drug that reverses an opioid overdose, more readily available.

All of those efforts helped steadily change the curve. But drug policy experts tell the Times they believe “there is another, surprising reason: changes in the drug supply itself, which are, in turn, influencing how people are using drugs.”

For the first time since 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, says the potency of street fentanyl in America has gone down. Pure fentanyl is becoming scarcer and more expensive. In part because of law enforcement efforts, the White House says.

But there is another factor and this brings us back to Trump and tariffs and what he is trying to do now. Last year, President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi in California. The big takeaway from that meeting was that both sides signed an agreement on stopping the flow of the chemical precursors that are used to make fentanyl from China to Mexico and the United States.

It was a rare area of open cooperation between U.S. and Chinese officials, helping reduce the supply chain of fentanyl in this country. And again, it’s all these factors working together. There’s no simple silver bullet here, but all of these policies combined are having an effect.

That’s a story almost no one knows in America. It wasn’t part of the Democratic campaign. But it’s a good reminder of a hard truth: Building and fixing things is a lot more difficult than breaking them. Solving difficult problems like an overdose epidemic requires a bunch of people coordinating their efforts.

It also shows that doing the work of governing is much harder than populist posturing about the problems, which is what Trump and his team are skilled at.

There’s no simple silver bullet here, but all of these policies combined are having an effect.

“When you lose a son or a daughter to fentanyl, or a wife, or anybody else … your life is destroyed, their life is destroyed,” Trump told NBC News in 2023. “They’ve destroyed so many families. It comes from Mexico. Something’s got to be done.”

That something, for Trump, is to “get tough” and “crack down” to stop these other countries from humiliating us. But there is a record to look at here. Trump campaigned on stopping the fentanyl crisis when he won in 2016. He even created a task force to address the issue.

However, despite his hard-line politics and his tough talk and his best efforts, overdose deaths just kept going up on his watch. They plateaued a bit in 2018, then skyrocketed. Almost as if promises are easier than results.

This is the fundamental issue we face. Trump is not a person interested in all the difficult, serious things you have to do to fix stuff, but he is adept at channeling people’s frustration about these big, complex problems, at making them feel seen, and agreeing with them that this system sucks. However, that does not actually fix their problems. That is not what Trump is in this for.

The good news is it is possible to make improvements in people’s lives. We know how; it takes hard work by a lot of people over a long time. The bad news is it has become even harder for the Democratic Party, and Biden in particular, to communicate that and sell it to Americans.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes”at 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday on BLN. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is”A Colony in a Nation” (W. W. Norton).

President Joe Biden on Sunday issued a “full and unconditional” pardon for his son Hunter Bidenwho has been dogged by Republican attacks for years. The president’s son is scheduled to be sentenced this month on federal gun charges and federal tax evasion charges following a conviction and a guilty plea, respectively.

The president’s decision marks a clear reversal after he repeatedly vowed not to use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence. In a White House statement Sunday, Biden said he issued the pardon because he believes the charges were politically motivated.

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” the president said.

He added:

The pardon comes just weeks before Biden’s term ends and President-elect Donald Trump, whose attacks on Hunter Biden helped focus congressional and federal scrutiny on the president’s son, returns to the White House. Hunter Biden is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 12 for his June conviction on federal gun charges. He is also set to be sentenced on Dec. 16 in a separate federal tax evasion case after pleading guilty in September. He faced up to 42 years in prison, though it was expected he would receive a much lighter sentence given he was a first-time offender, among other factors.

The pardon is expected to cover both his gun charges and his tax charges, reported NBC Newsthe first outlet to report on the decision. It covers any offenses the 54-year-old “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

A representative for special counsel David Weiss, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed in 2023 to investigate Hunter Biden, did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment. Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell also declined to comment.

Hayley Miller

Hayley Miller is the senior blog editor for BLN. Previously, she was a senior reporter on HuffPost’s breaking news team. Before she was a reporter, she was a senior editor on HuffPost’s blog team.