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{"id":5243,"date":"2025-01-22T09:50:43","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T09:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/the-reluctant-steamroller-in-the-white-house\/"},"modified":"2025-01-22T09:50:43","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T09:50:43","slug":"the-reluctant-steamroller-in-the-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/the-reluctant-steamroller-in-the-white-house\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reluctant Steamroller in the White House"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Just hours into his second presidency, Donald Trump was already bulldozing congressional Republicans.<\/p>\n<p>He granted clemency to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2025\/01\/20\/donald-trump-jan6-pardons-00199532\" target=\"_blank\">some 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders<\/a>, some of them convicted of violent assaults. He flouted a bipartisan TikTok ban, ordering it to remain unenforced. And he moved to cancel some of his predecessor\u2019s energy programs over the pleadings of some in the GOP who wanted him to wait \u2014 to name just a few of the ways he undercut members of his own party.<\/p>\n<p>A day later, it was as if a switch had been flipped.<\/p>\n<p>In a meeting Tuesday with top GOP leaders, he didn\u2019t move to settle key strategic disputes over raising the debt limit and passing the party\u2019s big domestic policy package. Top leaders from the House and Senate left the White House and gave reporters completely contradictory accounts of how his agenda would be passed.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, Trump is already showing his split-screen approach to congressional relations \u2014 one that, so far, is more concerned with using his political muscle to perform acts of dominance than to settle the intramural disputes that are holding up his agenda.<\/p>\n<p>The past two days underscore how Trump and his team view Capitol Hill, informed by his previous four years in office, and the four subsequent years he spent climbing back: Republicans will eventually fall in line with whatever he wants, they believe, so why hold back?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe sooner these guys recognize that it&#8217;s the president that kept their House majority and their Senate majority, and the sooner they realize it&#8217;s the president that has the will of the people \u2014 not them \u2014 the sooner they will be able to live a productive life,\u201d one Trump insider granted anonymity to discuss relations with Congress told me recently.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt the end of the day, he\u2019s the one with the mandate, and they know it,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n<p>There was immediate evidence that such a read is absolutely correct.<\/p>\n<p>Faced with questions about Trump\u2019s Jan. 6 pardons, most GOP lawmakers opted for a delicate tap dance. Many deflected attention to predecessor Joe Biden\u2019s pardons of family members. Others quickly dusted off the old first-term playbook: I didn\u2019t see the tweet\/comment\/executive order.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI haven&#8217;t seen the list,\u201c Speaker Mike Johnson <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/live-updates\/2025\/01\/21\/congress\/johnson-pardons-00199701\" target=\"_blank\">told my colleague Meredith Lee Hill<\/a>. \u201cI haven&#8217;t had a chance to evaluate it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And when Trump essentially flipped them the bird on TikTok \u2014 putting off dealing with something they\u2019ve described for years as a major national security issue \u2014 nary a squawk was heard. Johnson and Senate Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) spoke out Sunday to reiterate their support for the nine-month-old ban, only to be neutered a day later.<\/p>\n<p>Same goes for Trump\u2019s first-day decision to gut Biden\u2019s electric vehicle mandates. Hill leaders wanted to repeal it themselves so they could book the savings and use them to offset the cost of tax cuts. Trump bullied forward anyway.<\/p>\n<p>He even burned political capital on a molehill of a mountain: re-renaming Denali to Mount McKinley over the objections of Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/trump-96824.jpg\" alt=\"The past two days underscore how Trump and his team view Capitol Hill: Republicans will eventually fall in line with whatever he wants, they believe, so why hold back?\" data-portal-copyright=\"Julia Demaree Nikhinson\/AP\" data-has-syndication-rights=\"0\" data-license-id=\"\" data-licensor-name=\"AP\" data-title=\"The past two days underscore how Trump and his team view Capitol Hill: Republicans will eventually fall in line with whatever he wants, they believe, so why hold back?\"><\/p>\n<p>A more traditional politician might consider it risky to wildly alienate members of your own party (especially a known swing vote like Murkowski) when much of your agenda requires congressional approval \u2014 doubly so when you have a House majority even narrower than in the Senate.<\/p>\n<p>Not so for Trump, obviously. Yet the alpha-male power plays suddenly evaporate when it comes to settling disputes among Republicans about his own agenda.<\/p>\n<p>The chambers remain on diverging paths when it comes to passing border, energy and tax measures, with the House pushing one vote on one massive bill while the Senate wants to split it in two. Same for the debt limit: Include it in a party-line budget reconciliation bill? Or cut a deal with Democrats?<\/p>\n<p>Some Republicans were hoping Trump would use his audience with Hill leaders at the White House on Tuesday to crack the whip on those questions and others. That doesn\u2019t seem to have happened: One senior Republican aide we spoke to afterward couldn\u2019t hide his disappointment; Trump continued to waffle rather than provide clarity.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s despite complaining in the meeting, as he often does, about how Democrats always stick together and Republicans instead bicker and fracture. He insisted on unity but didn\u2019t do much to facilitate it.<\/p>\n<p>Which is partly why Trump\u2019s whatever-I-want posture early on is raising so many eyebrows among some Republicans. The president, they believe, will have to spend some of the political capital he seems intent on burning now to get his agenda passed later.<\/p>\n<p>A key test is at hand, with some of Trump\u2019s most controversial nominees headed toward confirmation votes that will force some Senate Republicans to eat a \u201cshit sandwich,\u201d as one Republican aide told me on Inauguration Day.<\/p>\n<p>Pete Hegseth, his pick for Pentagon chief, is teed up for a vote within days despite a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/national-security\/senators-received-affidavit-containing-new-allegations-pete-hegseth-de-rcna188342\" target=\"_blank\">late-breaking report<\/a> that he\u2019d made an ex-wife \u201cfear for her safety.\u201d (The woman denied she\u2019d been physically abused.) And many senators remain uncomfortable with his choice of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, with her isolationist views and policy flipflops.<\/p>\n<p>They haven\u2019t even gotten yet to his plans for tariffs \u2014 not only on China but allies like Mexico and Canada \u2014 potential levies that have given traditional pro-business Republicans heartburn for months.<\/p>\n<p>If Republicans fall in line behind Hegseth, Gabbard and tariffs \u2014 as most now expect \u2014 it will be proof positive that Trump\u2019s steamroller approach is working.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom his end, he\u2019s doing what he said he would do, so this notion that we\u2019re going to have any ability to stop him from doing what he feels is right is laughable,\u201d said one senior GOP aide. \u201cIt\u2019s just not happening.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So who cares if he isn\u2019t sweating the small stuff?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just hours into his second presidency, Donald Trump was already bulldozing congressional Republicans. He granted clemency to some 1,500 Jan. 6 offenders, some of them convicted of violent assaults. He flouted a bipartisan TikTok ban, ordering it to remain unenforced. And he moved to cancel some of his predecessor\u2019s energy programs over the pleadings of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}