How a narrowly divided nation could frustrate Trump’s vast ambitions
Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
(CNN) — Sen. John Kennedy’s folksy patter can be funny, often offensive and occasionally contrived. But the Louisiana Republican on Thursday put his finger on one of President-elect Donald Trump’s greatest challenges.
Kennedy was considering the task facing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in their project to cut the size of government and what many see as “waste” that pervades its spending.
“My experience has been trying to convince people to cut it, it’s kind of like going to heaven. Everybody’s ready to go to heaven, but nobody’s willing to take the trip,” Kennedy told CNN’s Lauren Fox.
While he was referring to the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a nebulous body Trump plans to set up to gut the Washington bureaucracy and regulations, Kennedy’s comment applies to a broader reality that will weigh on the president-elect when he takes office next year.
Even the 47th president won’t be able to do everything on his own.
Trump will be one of the most powerful presidents in modern history, with a monopoly on power in Congress and a sympathetic conservative Supreme Court majority. His dominance of the GOP and power to punish the few remaining party heretics who defy his will suggests he should be able to quickly push through his agenda.
The president-elect – who leads Vice President Kamala Harris by some 2.4 million votes – swept all seven swing states and became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote while pushing many Democratic districts to the right.
But lasting policy change cannot be affected without Congress, where the GOP will have an especially narrow margin the House.
Trump’s congressional conundrum
Trump is expected to push the limits of executive power with a flurry of actions after he’s sworn in on January 20 — so much so that his opponents fear he’ll be a dictator in all but name.
But the president can’t just decree tax cuts.
And for all his talk of his historic landslide, Trump’s electoral coattails were minuscule. He delivered the smallest House majority since the Great Depression. And the GOP capture of the Senate can be better explained by the inevitable demise of red-state Democrats in an increasingly polarized nation than some vast MAGA wave. Trump’s 49.9% of the November vote seems an accurate picture of a nation split right down the middle, where the difference of a few points in a handful of states can pick a president and produce massive swings in policy — at least for a term.
The idea that congressional Republicans will act as a conscious constraint on Trump is fatuous, given the party’s unwillingness to prevent the president-elect from repeatedly trampling legal and democratic guardrails during his first term, which featured two impeachments but saw Senate Republicans balk at convictions.
But Trump may still not have everything his way. The biggest impediment to a successful and sweeping second term may be Republican division and indiscipline and the reticence of some lawmakers to cede all their cherished power to the strongman in the Oval Office.
To adapt Kennedy’s metaphor, plenty of Republicans want to accompany Trump on a journey to the political paradise of an America made great again. But getting them all to march in that direction, at the same time, is going to prove a huge challenge.
Trump will need to manage Republican power more effectively in Washington than he did in his first term. His first year in office in 2017 was largely taken up with the chaotic failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Trump didn’t sign his signature domestic bill — a massive tax overhaul — until just before Christmas.
His window for success will be even narrower this time. The 2016 election gave Republicans a House majority of nearly 50 seats. Next year, with several lawmakers likely to leave to serve in the Cabinet, House Speaker Mike Johnson is looking at a possible party breakdown of 217 Republicans and 215 Democrats. Potential Republican replacements after special elections could give him slightly more breathing room, but a few illnesses or untimely deaths in the House could make his majority disappear altogether.
“Do the math, we have nothing to spare,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday.
Hegseth’s struggles show Trump may not get everything his way
This perilous situation explains why Trump’s team has been so aggressive in rolling out his Cabinet picks and planning for a fast start in January, amid expectations that if history holds true, the new president’s party could have a tough midterm election in 2026.
Passing a tax bill is a complex matter at any time — since there are multiple agendas in a governing party and many lawmakers have their favored item on which their vote might depend. Johnson will have to balance the demands of debt hawks, proponents of big defense spending hikes and the needs of more moderate lawmakers from states like New York who will be critical in 2026.
The same is true of historic attempts to trim the size of government by using the congressional power of the purse. Every program that is viewed as superfluous by one lawmaker may be existential to another. A military base, for instance, that officials want to close could be vital to the economy in a swing district.
In a House majority limited to a handful of seats, every lawmaker becomes a kingmaker.
Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett was asked on “CNN This Morning” this week whether he’d stand as a single Republican and hold up business on a point of principle. He told Kasie Hunt: “If it’s morally correct, if it’s something that I really believe in. … If we continue down this path of economic destruction, spending our great grandchildren’s money, yes, I will, and I have.”
Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the next majority leader, will have slightly more room than Johnson, and budgetary tricks like reconciliation to pass Trump’s priorities with a simple majority in the Senate that could overcome Democratic filibustering.
But the complications of a relatively narrow Senate majority were also on show all week as Trump’s provocative pick to serve as Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, tried to convince GOP senators – only three of whom he can afford to lose – to vote for his confirmation next year.
Musk goes to Washington
On Thursday, Musk stared Washington reality in the face.
“We need to make sure we’re spending public money well,” Musk said as he swept into a meeting with Thune. But the optics of his visit suggested a rare power imbalance that did not favor the Tesla and SpaceX supremo.
DOGE isn’t really a government department and may look more like the quasi-official commissions that have often been used to make recommendations for efficiencies and trimming the federal behemoth. But Trump can’t make cuts on his own — at least constitutionally. Congress still sets spending levels, and the annual White House budget document that is greeted with huge fanfare each year is really not much more than political messaging.
That means Musk and Ramaswamy will need to get buy in from senior Republicans — like Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who will have immense power as the incoming Senate Appropriations chair next year. There is already speculation that Collins, a relative GOP moderate who faces reelection in 2026, may balk at the size of cuts that Musk is proposing.
On the campaign trail, for instance, Musk suggested that he could cut $2 trillion out of a federal budget of about $6 trillion. That would mean cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Collins said after her meeting with Musk that they had an informal discussion about improving the efficiency and effectiveness of government. “We did not go through any kind of list of cuts or anything like that. We didn’t get into that.”
If Trump can’t get his planned cuts through Congress, many conservatives want him to use executive powers to simply slice his way through the bureaucracy, like the Schedule F plan that could allow civil servants to be fired like political appointees. The Trump team is considering using “impoundment” — a process in which he would refuse to spend money that Congress appropriates. This might work in the short-term but would potentially poison relationships with congressional Republicans and is certain to trigger legal challenges.
Then there are the political impediments Trump is yet to consider. Large-scale cuts to government spending would not just potentially hurt thousands of civil servants who could lose their jobs. Those cuts could rebound on the very voters who put Trump into office, many of whom said they wanted relief from the high costs of grocery prices and housing. This raises the question of whether the president-elect, who rarely gets ahead of his base, is really prepared to pay a political price for the kind of cuts Musk and Ramaswamy might propose.
One House member, for instance, this week suggested that Republicans needed to have the courage to make “hard decisions,” even on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved. We just have to have the stomach to take those challenges on,” Georgia Rep. Richard McCormick said on Fox Business.
But Rep. Stephanie Bice, an Oklahoma Republican, told CNN on Thursday that Social Security cuts should be off the table — in line with Trump’s campaign trail promises — but that there were efficiencies that could be found in government health programs. She added: “I think we can look at inefficiencies from the discretionary side.”
That sounds a lot like the language many Republicans and Democrats have used through Clinton, Obama and Trump administration government efficiency drives. And it will be familiar to Sen. Kennedy.
“I hope this time is different. But my experience has been that cutting the budget, cutting waste, everyone knows it’s there, but all of this waste has a constituency,” he told CNN’s Fox.
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