Congressional Republicans who have been around since 2017 already know the routine: At any moment, the president could—at a public appearance, on social media, or elsewhere—say or do something rash, threatening, or otherwise controversial. When that happens, they can bet reporters on Capitol Hill will mob them to ask about it.
“I know that I’m going to, for four years, walk past y’all, and you’re all gonna ask me what I think of what Donald Trump said today,” Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told reporters the day after Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
Generally, Republicans try to take their disagreements to Trump privately, rather than criticize him publicly. In one example soon after the election, Republicans did not raise public alarm over Trump’s selection of then-Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, but behind-the-scenes aversion to the pick led Gaetz to remove his name from consideration.
Still, Republican lawmakers must keep up with the onslaught of news and choose how they would like to respond publicly when asked about Trump’s saying or doing something voters could find objectionable. While they don’t want to openly contradict a president who commands a loyal following among the party base, Trump sometimes goes against stances they themselves have taken in the past, so they can’t necessarily give him a pass on certain policy pronouncements. Since Trump has taken office, they have generally chosen not to denounce him openly. Republicans in Congress have shown little resistance through his first 100 days. While they have displayed some disagreements with the president, those have seldom translated to material opposition.
Usually, they will employ certain strategies to defend Trump. They might ignore the absurd nature of a statement from the president and say it is part of a broader aim, or they might point to a similar thing a Democratic president has done in the past. Or they might just joke about it and make fun of the press.
After the inauguration, GOP lawmakers’ first test was the blanket pardon of 1,500 people charged with crimes related to the January 6, 2021, riot in the Capitol, many of whom engaged in violent actions. Few Republicans had expected such a broad scope, and they faced plenty of questions afterward. Asked at a press conference days after the pardons, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson justified the pardons by arguing that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department overstepped its prosecutorial authority.
“There was a weaponization of the Justice Department. There was a weaponization of the events, the prosecutions that happened after January 6,” he said. “It was a terrible time and a terrible chapter in America’s history. The president’s made his decision. I don’t second guess those. … We move forward. There are better days ahead of us. That’s what we’re excited about. We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forwards.”
Cramer expressed disagreement with the sweeping nature of the pardons, but cited Biden’s preemptive pardons of his family and others whom Trump has disparaged as an example of a similarly controversial use of presidential pardon power.
“I would like to have seen a case-by-case process, but then I think when President Biden pardoned the January 6 Committee for whatever reason and his entire family for whatever reason, suddenly it looks like there’s a lot to be concerned about,” he told reporters. “It seemed much more appropriate for Donald Trump to join him in just sort of clearing the entire deck, and we can move forward now.”
After Trump suggested in February that the United States would “take over” the Gaza Strip and floated the possibility of using American troops to secure the area, Republicans found themselves scrambling to respond to the idea, which came not just out of left field, but out of a different ballpark. Even some of his most reliable defenders struggled to make sense of the proposal.
“All I can say is, I want to destroy Hamas, but I’ve been on the phone with Arabs all day. That approach, I think, will be very problematic,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters. “The idea of Americans going in on the ground in Gaza is a non-starter for every senator. So, I would suggest we go back to what we’ve been trying to do: Destroy Hamas, and find a way for the Arab world to take over Gaza and the West Bank in a fashion that would lead to a Palestinian state that Israel could live with.”
Still, other Republicans sought ways to agree with the president’s broader aims, skirting some of the more bothersome details.
“I think we do need to take strong action. I think that’s what President Trump is doing,” Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota said. “And if it would require an [authorization for use of military force], I would certainly be open to that. So, we have to see what role they play, make that decision. But, yes, I’m supportive of strong action for a long-term fix here.”
Johnson, likewise, gave initial praise for the idea.
“This is a bold, decisive move, and I think you have to do something to eradicate the threat to Israel,” he said. “Here’s the problem. If you leave Gaza in its current form, there’s always a risk of another October 7, there’s always a risk of proxies of Iran, all these terrorist organizations whose openly stated goal is to eliminate Israel as a state. So, it just makes sense to make the neighborhood there safer.”
After Judge James Boasberg’s attempt to block the Trump administration’s deportations of certain migrants under the Alien Enemies Act, the president in March called for Boasberg and other “crooked judges” to be impeached. Reporting from Politico indicated Republicans were privately unhappy with the idea. Rather than embrace the call, they responded by promoting the idea of eliminating the nationwide injunction—without openly telling Trump “no.”
“I know he’s upset with these judges. I am too. I don’t like the rulings, and he’s perfectly entitled to criticize them. That’s fine,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told The Dispatch. “President Obama criticized Supreme Court justices to their face. I still remember it—his State of the Union, like, wagging his finger to their face on national television.”
But criticism is one thing. Isn’t calling for impeachment another?
“We have the power to impeach. I mean, it’s not as if that’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, you can’t do that.’ We certainly can,” Hawley said. However, having proposed a bill to limit the nationwide injunction after Trump made his overture, Hawley made a pragmatic argument against impeachment. “I would just say to my Republican colleagues: I’m really concerned about what’s going on,” he told reporters. “I don’t know that switching out the judges is going to ultimately do a whole lot, unless we address the systemic issue here, which is the use of this so-called [injunction] power.”
Less than a week later, Trump offered what seemed like an unthinkable notion counter to constitutional norms: running for a third term as president. A number of Republicans responded by laughing it off.
“The Constitution clearly indicates that the president has a two-term limit, but it is interesting to see how it has caught the attention of the American press,” Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota told reporters. He added that “you got to admire a guy that can just absolutely get the press to focus on whatever he’d like to have their focus on.”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma also said Trump was manipulating the media. “It’s all tongue and cheek. … You guys are blowing it way out of proportion. Last time I checked, the 22nd amendment still applies. You guys make such a big deal about everything, I think the president’s having fun with you,” he told USA Today.
Despite congressional Republicans’ general pliancy, there are some signs of wedges forming. “Liberation Day” rolled around on April 2, and Trump contravened decades of Republican orthodoxy on trade policy with his nearly global tariff regime. In response, some Republicans signed onto a bill from GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell that would rein in the president’s tariff power. Despite burgeoning Republican support for the bill, neither Johnson nor Senate Majority Leader John Thune has indicated he will put it on the floor.
There were also senators who were fine with giving Trump leeway on tariffs, such as Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. “I think we need to give the president the opportunity to be able to carry out his strategy to level the playing field on tariffs,” he told The Dispatch, referencing Trump’s eventual April 9 suspension of much of his sweeping tariffs. “The announcement today is just another step in that. We’ve just got to keep supporting the president.”
On issues of foreign policy and national security, indicators of a divide between congressional Republicans and Trump have also begun to emerge. Although GOP senators confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth along with the president’s other Cabinet nominees, they have publicly contradicted Trump on other actions he and his administration have taken on the global stage.
As The Dispatch has previously reported at the time, multiple Republican lawmakers have long expressed their support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump has stated falsely that Ukraine started the war and called its leader “a dictator without elections.” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said there was “no moral equivalency between Vladimir Putin and President Zelensky,” while Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana noted he disagreed with Trump’s claim that the Ukrainian president started the conflict. To that point, it was the most open pushback by Republican senators—the majority of whom have a substantive history of supporting Ukraine.
More disagreement surfaced on Ukraine policy in March when the Trump administration temporarily cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine, a move Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and other senators criticized. “I think we still need to work with all of our partners and the Ukrainians and share intelligence,” she said. “Hopefully that will resume quickly.” Intelligence sharing did eventually resume.
Later, Republicans showed their first sign of material opposition to Trump in the entire first 100 days. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had sent plans to attack the Houthis in a group chat convened by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, accidentally including a journalist. Not only did they buck the administration’s assertion that none of the information shared was classified, they also demanded answers. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi along with Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s ranking member, sent a letter asking the Defense Department’s acting inspector general to investigate the breach.
Even then, however, the Trump administration had its defenders. “I don’t think the American people care,” Kennedy told The Dispatch. “I think when moms and dads in this country lie down to sleep at night—and can’t—they’re not worried about what messaging platform was used. I think what they care about is whether the mission was successful. It was.”
His response followed another typical congressional strategy of responding to Trump’s envelope-pushing actions: blaming the media.
“I think the rest of it, they see as being driven by Democratic opposition to Republicans and driven by a legacy media that has its bowels in an uproar and is all hot and bothered because they think they have a way to undermine Trump,” he said.