President Donald Trump has long had an iron grip over the Republican Party, with congressional GOP lawmakers in safe districts held rigidly in line by the fear of angering MAGA voters. But barely a month into the Trump presidency, he has already overreached so dramatically that many of them are starting to show some small degree of pushback, Steve Benen noted for MSNBC on Friday.
"Though it didn’t generate a lot of headlines, Republican Rep. Gary Palmer [(R-AL)] made some provocative comments early last week, saying lawmakers 'need to remind' Trump that 'Congress has a role' in governing the country," and that "he has to work with Congress,” Benen wrote.
Similarly, Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH), "spoke at an event in his local district this week and described the president’s flurry of executive orders as 'getting out of control.' The GOP congressman added, 'Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away. Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides.'"
Meanwhile, Benen wrote, Sen. Lisa Murkowski told constituents “We have to stand up” to the mass firing of federal workers and that it likely was illegal. "Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has said the White House has gone too far in giving Musk governing authority. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has said Trump improperly fired inspectors general. A handful of GOP lawmakers in both chambers were willing to publicly disagree, on the record, with Trump’s latest efforts to align himself with Russia’s Vladimir Putin."
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So far, he said, this is mostly just talk, and only from a small minority of Republicans — but all the same, it speaks volumes: "one month into the president’s second term, Trump is demanding unflinching loyalty from his partisan brethren, and he’s confronting the kind of partisan skepticism he might have hoped to avoid."
All of this is happening despite some of Trump's key allies, like Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, directly threatening that anyone disloyal to the president will face a primary challenge with his blessing.
"Whatever the explanation, there are visible cracks in the Republican Party’s wall," Benen concluded. "The next step, however, is the one that matters most. One month into Trump’s second term, some — not a lot, but some — GOP lawmakers are finally willing to inch away from their party’s scandal-plagued and increasingly unpopular president. Will this rhetoric be followed by meaningful actions? Watch this space."
