In 2022, Trump did all he could to defeat Lisa Murkowski’s bid for a 4th term. Calling her a “disloyal and weak Republican,” he encouraged Kelly Tshibaka to run, endorsed her and actively campaigned for her, holding rallies and fundraisers to support her candidacy. Trump encouraged his followers to back Tshibaka but even right-wing senators like Rick Scott (FL), John Cornyn (TX) and John Thune (SD) supported Murkowski. So did conservative Democraps Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin (before they left the Democratic Party) as well as shameless corporate whores Jeanne Shaheen (NH) and Mark Warner (VA). The only MAGAt freaks Trump was able to round up for Tshibaka were his son, Don, Jr, Charlie Kirk, Sarah Palin and Kristi Noem.
The election was very close but Murkowski narrowly beat Trump’s candidate in the first round of Alaska’s ranked choice voting system:
Murkowski- 113,495 (43.4%)
Tshibaka- 111,480 (42.6%)
Pat Chesbro (D)- 27,145 (10.4%)
In the final round, most of the Chesbro votes flowed to Murkowski and she beat Tshibaka (and Trump) comfortably enough— 136,330 (53.7%) to 117,534 (46.3%).
Trump’s rage at Chip Roy (R-TX) in the last few days may presage a Trump-supported primary. Trump very publicly said it would, referring to him as “the very unpopular ‘Congressman’ from Texas,” claimed he was “getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory— All for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself. Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.” Later he was even more ominous and more explicit: “Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy, with no talent. By the way, how's Bob Good doing? I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary. He won't have a chance!”
TX-21 is a Texas Hill country district carefully gerrymandered to elect Republicans, so Trump was clearly referring to primary challengers. Roy had 3 Republican challengers in 2022 and won with 83.2% of the vote. This year the primary was uncontested.
Trump has never been a Roy fan and has tried to get someone to run against him before. Failing there, Trump quashed a bid by Roy to rise in the House GOP ranks by supporting Elise Stefanik against him: “Can’t imagine Republican House Members would go with Chip Roy— he has not done a great job, and will probably be successfully primaried in his own district. I support Elise, by far, over Chip!”
For his part, Roy had supported his former boss, Ted Cruz, and was executive director of a Cruz SuperPAC, in the 2016 presidential primary saying the Trump was unprincipled and not sufficiently conservative and accusing him of supporting Planned Parenthood.
This speech helped rally opposition to the Musk-Trump strategy round the fight over the CR last week, sending Trump into a rage. Roy understands better than many of his colleagues do that loyalty to Trump is pointless anyway— a one-way street, as Eugene Robinson explained to his readers Thursday: “Titans of industry and commerce, beware. When you bend the knee to the Mad King, when you shower him with money and bathe him in flattery, he will receive your gifts with apparent gratitude. But he will want more. He will always want more… I’m reminded of the day in January 2021, just weeks after the Capitol insurrection, when then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago— and, with that gesture, welcomed him back into the Republican fold. You might think Trump would have been grateful enough to use his influence and save McCarthy’s job when MAGA rebels in the House GOP caucus moved to oust him. But you would be wrong. In Trump’s worldview, loyalty flows in one direction: toward him. Don’t take my word; ask Mike Pence.”
[I]f history is any guide, reasonable people who try to work with Trump eventually reach a point where they feel they have to part ways with him. And when those reasonable people tell the world why, Trump lashes out at them. He tries to hurt them. He does not forgive— unless the “traitor” offers a humiliating public display of submission, as did Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and so many other Republican politicians. But even then, Trump never, ever forgets.
… What’s the definition of hubris? Telling oneself, “I’m going to be the one who finally talks some sense into Donald Trump. Surely, he’ll listen to me.”
Roy and the other members of Congress who voted in opposition to Musk's and Trump’s wishes last week, have shown the limitations of their anyway illegitimate claims to some kind of mandate, after beating Kamala Harris by just 1.5%— 49.9% to 48.4%, the narrowest popular vote margin since Al Gore bested George W Bush by a fraction of a point in 2000– 48.4% to 47.9%. In terms of candidates who were actually elected president the last one who got into office with a smaller popular vote than Trump was Richard Nixon in 1968, when he beat Humphrey by 0.7%.
On Friday, Marianne LeVine, Hannah Knowles and Liz Goodwin predicted that the chaos of last week’s just the beginning of what we can expect once the Musk-Trump administration is actually ensconced in the White House. Their role “in sinking a bipartisan deal to fund the government— and his public insistence that any spending bill lift the debt ceiling— led to a failed vote on the House floor Thursday evening. More than three-dozen members of his own party voted against the deal he’d endorsed hours earlier.” This could also indicate a problem for MAGA Mike in the Jan. 3 speaker’s election as the typical chaos and dysfunction Trump is known for highlighted the limits he “faces in bending his entire party to his will,” especially in a 217-215 split in the House (at least into the spring).
“It’s the most incongruous messaging to say: ‘Don’t vote for this bill, it’s bloated spending. By the way, get rid of the debt ceiling so I can spend more,’” said Marc Short, who was director of legislative affairs in Trump’s White House. Short warned that the “last 24 hours does not portend well” for Republicans’ plans to tackle border and tax policies in 2025. “Once is going to be hard enough, as you can see from this exercise.”
…With little room for error, congressional Republicans have begun to flesh out an agenda to push through tax cuts, border funding and other priorities they are still debating through reconciliation-— a process that circumvents the 60-vote threshold in the Senate. Senate Republicans favor moving on border funding first, given their slim House majority will be even more depleted in the first months of the year before special elections replace members who have been poached to join the Trump administration.
…Border funding is seen as easier to pass than the tax legislation.
Since winning the election, Trump’s efforts to publicly pressure congressional Republicans have mostly been limited to a push for recess appointments that was met with resistance in the Senate.
But that changed Wednesday, when he insisted that any legislation to keep the government funded would need to address the debt limit, going so far as to suggest that Republicans who didn’t agree with him would face primary challenges.
The following day, he wrote on social media that Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the House Freedom Caucus who opposed a clean debt ceiling increase, was “another ambitious guy, with no talent … I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary.”
After House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal to suspend the nation’s borrowing limit failed, Trump wrote Friday morning: “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’ This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”
While Trump has far more unified control over the GOP than he did in 2016, his demands via Truth Social amount to an early test of his influence over Congress, especially as his allies say raising the debt ceiling is his top priority.
“I know his number one goal is we get this taken care of before Jan. 20… He just wants this taken care of before he gets into office,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it “definitely would” help if Trump clearly articulated his demands to Congress with more than a day or two of notice. “I assume that is what will happen once he’s inaugurated— there’s a Cabinet, a legislative office and obviously he’s not in office yet.”
Peter King, a former Republican congressman who served during Trump’s first term, said the GOP caucus has also grown more unruly— even as Republicans back Trump more staunchly than they did in 2016.
“I think Trump’s job is easy compared to Mike Johnson’s,” King said of the House speaker. While past opposition to Trump often came from moderate lawmakers, King said, the group that defied the president-elect Thursday included staunch conservatives opposed to raising the debt ceiling.
In the first Trump administration, Republicans passed sweeping tax cuts in 2017, despite relatively narrow majorities in the House and Senate. Yet Trump also faced limitations, and he struggled to enact some key priorities even as Republicans controlled Congress his first two years in office. During that time, Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Lawmakers declined to appropriate the money Trump wanted to build a wall at the southern border— leading to 35-day government shutdown that ended with Trump declaring a national emergency to fund the project unilaterally.
At the end of his term, in 2020, Republicans rebuffed Trump’s push for bigger stimulus checks to citizens during the pandemic. Trump threatened to veto a roughly $900 billion spending package and urged lawmakers to increase its “ridiculously low” relief checks to $2,000— something Democrats supported. GOP lawmakers ultimately struck down the proposal.
This week, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) said congressional Republicans have yet to see Trump lobby them aggressively to suspend the debt limit.
“If he himself had picked up the phone and made a bunch of calls the result would have been different,” she said. “If it had been a hill he wanted to die on he would have. When he’s ready to die on a hill for an issue, he’ll do it.”
That hill sure wasn’t Matt Gaetz. And I’ll be very surprised if it turns out to be nominees Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard, whose confirmations more than a few Republican senators are very uncomfortable with. How about tax cuts for billionaires? Oh, yes, that's always been the hill. Absolutely.
It might be useful to realize that this kerfluff betw trump and roy are only on when to burn it down and how big the fire should be.
Eugene Robinson only stated the obvious. But since he's usually a fairly reasonable pundit, left of nazis, nobody that needs to understand will ever listen.