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Republicans hold all the keys as second Trump term begins

The public policy onus is on an ideologically pure GOP

President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd alongside Vice President JD Vance (Left), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), his wife Kelly Johnson, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) in the VIP overflow viewing area in Emancipation Hall after his inauguration at the Capitol on Monday.
President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd alongside Vice President JD Vance (Left), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), his wife Kelly Johnson, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) in the VIP overflow viewing area in Emancipation Hall after his inauguration at the Capitol on Monday. (Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images)

I arrived in Washington in late June 1980 to write about campaigns and elections. A bit more than four months later, the Republican Party won an overwhelming electoral victory when Ronald Reagan won the White House and his party gained a dozen Senate seats, giving the GOP control of that chamber.

Reagan won 489 electoral votes and carried the popular vote over President Jimmy Carter by almost 10 percentage points. In contrast, Donald Trump won 312 electoral votes in 2024, and he carried the popular vote by about 1.5 points over Kamala Harris. 

Trump’s victory was clear and decisive — he swept all the crucial swing states — but it was hardly the landslide he and others have claimed. That is not unusual, of course, since politicians always claim a larger mandate than they deserve.

Democrats had warned about a Reagan presidency, portraying the former conservative California governor as extreme and dangerous. But compared to Trump, Reagan was an affable member of the political establishment. 

Trump continues to be a disruptor who likes to create chaos. While some reports suggest that he is now more interested in bringing people together, he has spent months talking about how he will pay back his critics and adversaries. 

Some of Trump’s key Cabinet choices — particularly for Defense secretary (Pete Hegseth), Health and Human Services secretary (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), director of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard), and, initially, attorney general (Matt Gaetz) — lack experience and show contempt for government. (His subsequent selection of Pam Bondi as AG was not as unreasonable as his selection of Gaetz.)

Plenty of conservatives were elected to the Senate in 1980, the same year Reagan was first elected commander in chief. The list includes Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, Steve Symms of Idaho, John East of North Carolina and Bob Kasten of Wisconsin.

And of course, the Senate already included other conservatives, such as Bill Armstrong of Colorado, Roger Jepsen of Iowa and Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

But while Congress included many conservatives in the 1980s, the GOP was a broad-based party that included social conservatives, fiscal moderates, deficit hawks and pragmatists. Compromise was expected, and respect for institutions was taken for granted.

The Senate majority leader in 1981 was Howard Baker, who would be drummed out of the Tennessee Republican Party if he were in the Senate today. Baker was a pragmatic conservative and an institutionalist who often disagreed with the most conservative and uncompromising wing of his party.

Joining Baker in the Senate at that time were moderate and liberal Republicans like Charles Mathias of Maryland, Charles Percy of Illinois, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, Richard Lugar of Indiana, John Heinz of Pennsylvania and John Chafee of Rhode Island.

Many of these moderates disagreed with Reagan on major issues like the environment, social welfare policy, health care and budget cuts. Hatfield was strongly opposed to Reagan’s defense spending and foreign policy.

Over the past few decades both parties have become more ideologically uniform and less willing to compromise. The moderate wing of the GOP has shrunk down to a few members of the House and Senate. The same goes for the Democrats.

The Democrats are the more reasonable party now, but they might not behave any differently than the Republicans if the shoe were on the other foot. After all, they defended President Bill Clinton during his Monica Lewinsky scandal. 

Clearly, there have been other changes.

Members of Congress once guarded their political power tenaciously, even when the president was of the same party. That’s no longer the case, obviously. Republican members of Congress are more concerned with staying in Trump’s good graces than with defending their authority.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s recent decision to remove Ohio Rep. Michael R. Turner as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — most likely because Turner had the political spine to challenge Trump — demonstrates the price Republican members of the House and Senate must pay if they stand up to Trump.

Republicans now control the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. That means the party is entirely responsible for the shape and direction of the country. Trump and his allies surely will blame Democrats for anything unpopular that surfaces between now and the midterm elections.

Democrats need to figure out what they stand for and how they will appeal to voters who find Trump’s agenda or style unappealing. They will need to do that soon, since the 2026 midterm elections are approaching more quickly than you think.

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