On January 8th, in an ornate hall of the United States Capitol, five Republican senators stood behind President-elect Donald Trump as he talked to the Capitol Hill press. Four listened impassively, but John Thune could hardly stand still. As Trump began describing a “lovefest” in Greenland over his plans to annex it, Thune turned away, as though distracted by oncoming footsteps. He crossed his arms, stared at his feet, rocked from side to side, moved his hands in and out of his pockets, and fidgeted with his suit jacket as Trump spewed falsehoods: that the diversion of water for “a tiny little fish” had kept Los Angeles from putting out fires; that illegal immigrants were mainly murderers or mental patients; that China was “running the Panama Canal.”
After Trump left, Thune, who was about to take over as the leader of the Senate’s new majority, gamely echoed the President’s insistence that Republicans stood “united on his agenda.” Yet Thune, as he often does, subjected that agenda to notable edits, making Trump’s platform sound like that of a Reagan-era Republican: bolstering the military, bringing down taxes, “securing the border,” producing more energy. He said nothing about Trump’s signature policies—across-the-board tariffs, mass deportations, a purge of the “deep state,” pressing Ukraine to end its fight against Russia, pulling away from NATO. Asked about Trump’s wildly impractical campaign promise to stop taxing tips, Thune said only that the idea was “on the table.” Would Trump’s priorities be packaged in one big bill or two staggered ones? And which chamber would take the lead? All this was “an ongoing conversation—I’ll put it that way,” Thune said, as an aide hurried him off.
Thune, a fourth-term senator from South Dakota, is an awkward leader for Trump’s ruthless Republican Party, in part because even Democrats invariably describe him as amiable and honest. A senior Democratic aide told me that Thune is “incapable of lying.” Kevin Woster, a former reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader who covered Thune for decades, told me that the senator used to hold weekly conference calls with South Dakota journalists. When Thune tried to sell Republican talking points about the perfidy of whatever Democrats were doing, Woster recalled, “I’d ask him, ‘But, John, Republicans really did the same thing, didn’t they?,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re really at fault, too. That’s true.’ Who does that?” Before Thune became the Party leader, journalists would crowd the hallway outside his Capitol office. Unlike Mitch McConnell, the taciturn and cunning leader at the time, Thune genuinely tried to answer questions. He was seldom cutting or caustic, and rarely tossed off a memorable line that might begin or end a newspaper article. As a veteran congressional reporter told me, Thune could be counted on for a reliable “middle quote.” A Republican aide who knows Thune described him to me as hypercompetitive but also “Midwestern nice.” (“Southern nice”—like Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who is the Speaker of the House—can be double-edged, as in “Bless your heart!”) Lamar Alexander, a former Republican senator from Tennessee and a friend of Thune’s, noted a contrast between him and the two most recent Majority Leaders, McConnell and the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer: those men are renowned for their guile, and “you don’t think of guile when you think of John Thune.”
We sat down in mid-March for an interview in Thune’s grand new office, and I asked him how he communicated with Trump, given their differences in style and substance. “Very carefully,” he said, with a chuckle. Did he find it difficult to work with a President so little concerned with accuracy? “Well, I mean, we’re very different personalities,” Thune said—“a very big personality” and “a boring Midwesterner.” He argued that Trump had “qualities very useful for his job,” such as “enormous stamina.” Although Trump is beginning his second term as President, Thune expressed sympathy for him as “somebody who hasn’t been around a legislative body for any length of time” and for whom “in some ways it is all a little bit of a foreign language.” Thune said that he ran for leader “to be a bridge to the White House.” He added, “I’ve always felt like I can sort of get along with anybody,” noting that his relationship with Trump “on a personal level has gotten more comfortable over time.” He concluded, “I’m straight with him, and he’s straight with me.”
Thune’s candor often stood out in the course of Trump’s rise to power. During the 2016 race, Thune condemned Trump’s expressions of bigotry as “inappropriate.” After the leak of the “Access Hollywood” video, on which Trump boasted about grabbing women by the genitals, Thune was one of the first Republican senators to demand that Trump quit the race “immediately,” though the election was only a month away. And, even after Trump’s victory, Thune never masked his opposition to the President’s most cherished plans. In a 2017 television interview, he objected to the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, adding that “a lot of my colleagues” shared his view. He has called across-the-board tariffs “a recipe for increased inflation” that would punish South Dakota farmers and ranchers by setting off trade wars. He has consistently stood with what he calls “our trusted intel community” on the conclusion that Russia indeed meddled to help Trump in the 2016 election; he has called Vladimir Putin “a murderous thug” whose invasion of Ukraine proved “the value of NATO.” Thune also often praises wind energy—a booming industry in his home state—even though Trump considers turbines loathsome eyesores.
Trump’s demand that Congress refuse to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election win elicited one of Thune’s few memorable turns of phrase: he told journalists that the request would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate. After January 6th, Thune called Trump’s role in the riot “inexcusable.” Linda Duba, a friend from South Dakota and a retired Democratic state legislator whose children used to run in track meets alongside Thune’s, told me that she once asked him what working with Trump was like. “Not fun,” Thune had said. Another old friend was blunt: “I think he thinks Trump’s an ass.”
Trump, for his part, used to mock Thune as a McConnell lackey—“Mitch’s boy.” After the “shot dog” comment, Trump accused Thune of “weakness” and sought to back a primary challenge against him. Trump mouthpieces tried to block Thune’s ascent to Party leader; Tucker Carlson, for example, declared that Thune hated “Trump and what he ran on.”
The senators, though, keep their ballots secret. Without fear of Trump’s retribution, they chose Thune, by a vote of 29–24. The selection of a non-MAGA Party leader suggested that Senate Republicans may not be as reflexively devoted to Trump as many liberals assume. It was also a measure of the senators’ cynicism: Thune represents what they might stand for if Trump weren’t looking. Yet the gap between the senators’ private votes and their public fealty to Trump also poses a risk to Thune’s status as leader. With each biennial congressional election, more MAGA diehards have joined the Senate while Reagan-Bush holdovers have left (or reinvented themselves as America First converts). Given Trump’s towering popularity among G.O.P. primary voters, only a handful of the fifty-three Republican senators have been willing to risk even a slight public break with him. And, were the President to turn against Thune again, some MAGA true believer would surely be eager to replace him. John Barrasso, a Wyoming senator who was considered a leading contender to succeed McConnell, now serves as the second-ranking Republican in the chamber. After the November election, he staked out his position as a MAGA champion by declaring, while standing next to Thune at a press conference, that Trump’s return marked “the remaking of the Republican Party for the better.”
When Thune gave his first floor speech as Senate leader, he pledged, in effect, to stand up to the President. He vowed to preserve the filibuster—a Senate rule that checks the power of a majority by requiring sixty votes to cut off debate and get almost anything done. It would take only a simple majority to change the rule if the Majority Leader scheduled a vote on it, and Trump, during his first term, unsuccessfully demanded some thirty times that McConnell and the Republicans do so. It is axiomatic on Capitol Hill that Trump will resume that push the next time the Democrats use the filibuster to thwart him.
To everyone’s surprise, however, the new Trump Administration has made the filibuster almost beside the point. Instead of trying to bulldoze the Senate, Trump has simply driven around it. He has sought to govern by fiat, through executive orders, brazenly ignoring federal spending statutes and daring courts to try to stop him. Several Republican senators told me they worried that Congress—paralyzed by decades of partisan gridlock—had already ceded too much of its power to the executive branch. As Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency swings its chainsaw through congressionally mandated federal spending, Trump is now threatening to push the legislature from ineffectiveness to obsolescence.
In the mid-March interview, Thune acknowledged that, “right now, there’s a tension” between the Senate and the executive branch. He said several times that the Trump Administration was “testing limits”—including through “stuff that DOGE is doing.” Yet Thune insisted that “the Senate has a unique role in our democracy, and our job is to defend that role, and at times, if necessary, to push back.” DOGE’s handiwork “will get litigated,” he predicted, and, “at the end of the day, the structure works, and, I think, the institutions stay standing.” Thune, in other words, was counting on the judicial branch to protect the legislative branch.
Saxby Chambliss, a former Republican senator from Georgia and a friend of Thune’s who talks to him often, told me that Thune is ready for “adversarial conversations” with Trump, and that he will “be as tough as he needs to be.” Joe Manchin, the Democratic-turned-Independent former senator from West Virginia and another close friend of Thune’s, agreed. He said that, with MAGA loyalists now dominating the House of Representatives, and the Democrats flailing at one another over their own impotence, Thune was “the keeper of the seal.” It would be up to Thune alone to “convince the White House that we have three equal and independent branches of government.”
In a city aptly described as Hollywood for ugly people, Thune could pass for an actual movie star, with pale-blue eyes, a square jaw, and Mt. Rushmore cheekbones. Now sixty-four, he has salt-and-pepper hair that is still thick enough to part neatly on the side, and the broad shoulders, thick arms, and narrow waist of a basketball player. His morning workouts at the Senate gym are legendary. Until a recent knee injury, Thune held the informal title of the fastest man in Congress. (He has likened that honor to “the best surfer in Kansas.”) The phrases “looks the part” and “central casting” come up in nearly every conversation about him. John McCain, a two-time Presidential contender, used to joke that he would have won the White House had he looked like Thune. The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who liked to respond that McCain’s wife, Cindy, “would be happier, too,” told me that Thune “is a guy you really want to hate—so tall, good-looking, beautiful wife—but you can’t, because he is so genuinely nice.” Some journalists who cover the Capitol have given Thune the nickname Hot Grandpa.
Thune’s physicality played a role in the chance encounter that started his political career. He grew up in the tiny town of Murdo, South Dakota, the fourth of five children. His father, a decorated Navy vet who’d been a star basketball player for the University of Minnesota, taught and coached at the town high school, where Thune’s mother was a librarian. High-school sports were virtually the only entertainment in town. Bruce Venard, a friend of Thune’s whose family owns an auto-repair shop there, told me, “In those days, if you wanted to be somebody, you showed it on the basketball court, on the football field, on the track.” Thune was a standout in all three sports. In one high-school basketball game, he sank five of six free throws. Later, at a store, he ran into Jim Abdnor, a Republican congressman from a nearby town who often turned up to cheer for high-school sports teams. “I noticed you missed one,” Abdnor teased him. Thune’s parents were Democrats. But Thune became Abdnor’s protégé.
In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan first won the Presidency, Abdnor took George McGovern’s Senate seat. Thune, who’d graduated from high school the previous year and followed his older brothers to Biola University, an evangelical school near L.A., volunteered for the campaign. After earning a business degree at the University of South Dakota, in 1984, he joined Abdnor’s Senate office as a legislative aide focussed on tax policy. (Abdnor, who never married, hired a series of young men from South Dakota, forming a kind of surrogate family. Some lived with him in his apartment near Washington, working as a combination of driver and aide. They called themselves the Li’l Abdnors.)
Abdnor lost his seat to Tom Daschle in 1986, and Thune followed his mentor to the Small Business Administration. Adbnor’s connections then set Thune up for a series of political jobs back home, including state railroad director and executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party. He was elected to the House at the age of thirty-five and ran for the Senate six years later, in 2002, against the Democratic incumbent, Tim Johnson.
In retrospect, the parallels to the 2020 Presidential campaign are uncanny. Thune led by more than three thousand votes on Election Night, but by morning the tables had turned. Late returns showed an unusually high turnout on a large Oglala Sioux reservation. Thune lost the race by just five hundred and twenty-four votes. South Dakota is sometimes called the Mississippi of the North because of pervasive racism toward its Native American minority. Operatives and donors urged Thune to demand a recount, reasoning that, even if the effort failed, allegations of reservation ballot stuffing would galvanize the Party’s base—much as President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in predominantly Black cities energized his core supporters in 2020. But Abdnor, who was serving as an adviser to the Senate campaign, had always preached a more high-minded politics, and Thune decided to concede. Lee Schoenbeck, a former Li’l Abdnor who volunteered on the Senate campaign, told me that supporters “went out and made affidavits and did all the things that happened in 2020, and John just said, ‘No, I am not doing it.’ ”
Several Li’l Abdnors, who keep in touch with one another, told me that most of them disdained Trump’s incivility and lawlessness. Schoenbeck said, “The attack on America’s Capitol is something I don’t think Jim Abdnor could ever have gotten over, and that is all I am going to say about it.”
Two years after losing the 2002 Senate race, Thune challenged and beat Daschle, then the Democratic leader. In his victory speech, Thune addressed Abdnor: “Jim . . . we got your seat back!”
Thune arrived in Congress at a time that now looks like a high point of its power and effectiveness. In the nineties, lawmakers debated issues, committees drafted bills, and the parties compromised to tackle urgent problems. Congress sent Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton major legislation on trade, crime, environmental protection, financial regulation, civil rights, and other issues. Negotiations between the parties even closed the deficit, briefly. Philip Wallach, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the author of a timely book, “Why Congress,” told me that, looking back, “it’s really amazing—nothing like that has happened in the last fifteen years.”
Wallach argues that the Founders intended Congress to defuse the kind of polarization currently vexing our politics. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison worried about what he called “the violence of faction”—he feared that rival parties would put their own interests ahead of the common good, that a party in the majority would tyrannize the minority, and that an all-or-nothing battle for the upper hand would tear apart the Republic. Presidential elections could provide no remedy, because they are winner-take-all contests; the same is generally true of court verdicts. Congress is the sole branch of the U.S. government in which opposing factions can broker mutually acceptable solutions. In the Senate, especially, a tradition of unlimited debate—the origins of the filibuster rule—all but forced compromise by blocking a simple majority from taking action on its own. The necessity of power sharing also meant that Congress could provide a check against despotism even if the same party held the Presidency and a majority in both houses.
One turning point, Wallach told me, was Newt Gingrich’s Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, in 1994. Gingrich relished partisan warfare, demanded loyalty from his rank and file, and turned district elections into contests between the national parties. Political scientists have identified long-standing trends that have contributed to the deepening polarization of Congress, including the growing ideological homogeneity of each party and the breakdown of the media into echo chambers. But Wallach is surely correct that Congress, the branch of government designed to mediate factional conflicts, has succumbed to them—and even made them worse.
To more effectively wage partisan battles, Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers consolidated their own power. Instead of relying on committees to draft bills, party leaders increasingly negotiated significant measures behind closed doors, then brought them to the floor for up-or-down votes—often in the form of giant “must-pass” bills against a tight deadline, such as measures to keep funding the government. In the Senate, the concentration of power has been especially stark. Senators used to take pride in proposing amendments during floor debates, facilitating bipartisan dealmaking even against party leaders’ wishes. Yet those leaders now often block individual senators from such freelancing by allowing consideration of only a limited number of amendments and then filling those slots with innocuous proposals of their own choosing—a tactic called “filling the tree.” The former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid pioneered this strategy in the two-thousands, and his successors from both parties have kept it up ever since.
In the Congress of 1991-92, Wallach noted, the Senate adopted more than sixteen hundred amendments. In 2023-24, that number fell to two hundred. And the last Congress passed just two hundred and seventy-four bills—down from about seven hundred a year during the late eighties and fewer than any Congress since before the Civil War. Of those two hundred and seventy-four bills, the ten longest were assembled by the party leaders, and they accounted for four-fifths of all the pages of legislation passed in that Congress.
Lawmakers sometimes grouse about their loss of power. Ten years ago, Mark Begich, then a Democratic senator from Alaska, tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate a revolt against Reid’s tree-filling. Lamar Alexander, another critic of the practice, told me that being elected to the chamber now resembled “joining the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing—it’s very disappointing.” Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, complained to me that “what used to be an integral part of legislating—offering amendments, changing bills on the floor—has largely disappeared. Bills are drafted privately by the leaders of both parties, and ninety-eight other senators acquiesce to allowing two leaders to arrogate that power to themselves!” He continued, “Mitch McConnell ruled the conference as a monarch. He made the decisions, and he shared his thinking with no one.”
Thune is in some ways a throwback. At a time when cable-news coverage and online donations reward the noisiest partisans, he has built a reputation for quietly working in good faith with Democrats on the committees he has sat on, among them Agriculture and Commerce. Chris Lewis, the chief executive of Public Knowledge, a left-leaning advocacy group, told me that Thune opposed its positions on most issues, but called him “a straight shooter” who looked for “common ground” on such issues as rural broadband access. Several senators told me that, at the end of last year, Thune negotiated an agreement with Democratic leaders that allowed Biden to equal the number of judicial confirmations made during the first Trump Administration. In exchange, the Democrats agreed to drop a handful of liberal appellate nominees whom Republicans found especially objectionable, leaving those seats open. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who participates in a weekly Bible study with Thune, told me that “he was fundamental to all the bipartisan work we did in the last cycle.” For example, Thune helped initiate talks on an immigration bill, even letting legislators use his office. In the end, the bill became a classic example of partisan paralysis: when Trump indicated that he preferred to leave the border problems unaddressed, so that he could keep campaigning on the issue, the Republicans killed the legislation.
In today’s Senate, bipartisan committee work produces little major legislation signed into law. An unusual spate of bipartisan bills that were produced early in the Biden Administration—on infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, and gun control—emerged from White House negotiations with “gangs” of senators informally deputized by their party leaders, not from traditional committees. As a result, Thune has few major laws to his name. In 2017, he was one of four Republicans McConnell charged with hammering out an internal Party consensus about a tax package. But this was an all-G.O.P. effort passed through a fifty-year-old process known as reconciliation, which allows a simple majority of senators to approve certain budget-related measures.
Candidates for congressional leadership now routinely pledge to bring back “regular order”—committees drafting bills, amendments debated on the floor. Thune promised this, too—“sort of,” Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, told me. He said that he’d seen “no effort to reverse that trend and actually reëmpower senators.” Few lawmakers believe that such a restoration is imminent.
Similarly, the tradition of the filibuster—which increases the leverage of individual senators and circumscribes the majority—has grown tenuous. Each party, when in the minority, has used the filibuster to obstruct almost any action; then, when back on top, it has chipped away at the rule. When Democrats controlled the Senate during the Biden Administration, only the opposition of a pair of moderates—Manchin and the then senator Kyrsten Sinema—saved the filibuster from extinction. Now the Democrats can thank those two holdouts for preserving their best chance at constraining Trump.
Congress, stymied by gridlock, has increasingly failed to exercise even its most vital prerogative: the authority to control taxation and spending, which is the legislature’s main leverage over the executive. The first article of the Constitution, enumerating the powers of Congress, stipulates that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” But Congress, unable to pass annual appropriations bills, now often relies on so-called continuing resolutions that essentially extend current spending levels in order to prevent the government from running out of money. A recent study concluded that since 2012 Congress has used such resolutions nearly half the time. Wallach said, “This sense of fiscal autopilot is really profound.”
In his book, Wallach projected that, if Congress continued its course of the past decade, it would eventually become either a useless circus or a mere rubber stamp, in either case ceding its authority to an increasingly dominant White House. Two months into the second Trump Administration, Wallach told me that Congress appeared to be devolving into that also-ran status much faster than he’d ever imagined. Moreover, after years of shrinking congressional power, the public seemed undisturbed. “Imagine being a young person who has only lived in the twenty-first century,” Wallach said. “How seriously could you really take the idea that all policy is supposed to come from Congress? The executive branch seems like the originator of all the most important policies going back your whole political consciousness.” Trump’s attempts to ignore or bully Congress look like a natural progression, not an aberration. “If Trump says, ‘I am going to embrace the idea that the White House is in charge and get a lot done,’ I don’t know how shocking that is to people,” he went on. The Republicans in control of Congress, he noted, had so far barely mustered any opposition to Trump’s strong-arming: “If we follow this trajectory, Congress will certainly be more marginal than ever before in American history.”
When factional loyalty supersedes all, a President whose party controls Congress hardly needs to worry about the courts, which have little enforcement muscle of their own. A President determined to go it alone could arbitrarily hand out or withhold federal grants, contracts, and jobs; impose or remove selective tariffs according to whim; exploit his public office for personal profit; promote friends’ interests; direct or squash criminal prosecutions; reshape regulations to benefit favored businessmen. In fact, Trump has already attempted all these things. A President unencumbered by congressional oversight might wield such powers over media companies, universities, labor unions, trade associations, and the donors to advocacy groups or political campaigns. By rewarding obeisance and muffling dissent, he could make voting out the ruling party more and more difficult. That is how authoritarians operate around the world.
Lamar Alexander reminded me of a maxim from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative icon. Scalia said that “every tinhorn dictator” and “President for life” has a Bill of Rights; it’s the separation of powers that has kept Americans free.
When Trump first took office, in 2017, Thune joined other Republican congressional leaders in what amounted to an opportunistic bargain. They basically ignored the new President’s falsehoods, insults, conspiracy theories, protectionism, xenophobia, and the rest of it. In exchange, they tried to capitalize on his supporters’ passion in order to score G.O.P. victories on issues such as tax cuts and judicial confirmations. With characteristic forthrightness, Thune, who was then the third-ranking Senate Republican, told the Times that Republicans had accepted Trump’s tendency to “say things on a daily basis that we’re not going to like.” But, he added, if senators “stay focused” and “get that stuff enacted—those would be big wins.”
McConnell took this bargain to a duplicitous extreme. He was publicly enthusiastic about the agenda of the new Administration, but behind the scenes he conspired daily with Paul Ryan, then the Speaker of the House, to curb Trump’s impulses. Both lawmakers describe their efforts in a new biography of McConnell, “The Price of Power,” written, with his coöperation, by the journalist Michael Tackett. Ryan explains that he and McConnell saw Trump as “an amoral narcissist” with “zero regard” for the Constitution who would “shoot the messengers” whenever they explained the limits of a President’s power.
McConnell gave Tackett access to private oral-history recordings he made during the first Trump Administration, and they are scathing. In the recordings, and in later interviews, McConnell describes Trump as unfit for office; “uncontrollable”; “not very smart, irascible, nasty”; “beyond erratic”; “stupid” and “ill-tempered”; a “sleazeball”; and “despicable.” After the 2020 election, McConnell said that Senate Republicans were “counting the days” until Trump left office. McConnell called Trump’s role in the January 6th assault on the Capitol “an impeachable offense,” and Tackett describes the Majority Leader’s decision to vote against impeachment anyway—on the basis that Trump had left office, and voters and judges would keep him out of politics—as “likely the worst political miscalculation of McConnell’s career.”
By opening up to Tackett, McConnell essentially dropped his mask. Lindsey Graham, a former Trump critic who has reinvented himself as the President’s golfing buddy, told me that McConnell had been too honest. “Mitch has burned every bridge” and squandered his influence, Graham told me. Thune “would never do that,” because of that Midwestern niceness. Yet Thune, a McConnell lieutenant and confidant throughout Trump’s first term, has hardly distanced himself from the former Majority Leader. In interviews, Thune has said that he still asks McConnell for advice, crediting him with “an outsized influence” on issues such as national security.
In fact, the Trump takeover of the G.O.P. so dispirited Thune that in 2022 he contemplated retiring. He lamented to journalists that too many “quality people”—Reagan-Bush Republicans—were leaving the Senate. If Democrats ended the filibuster, Thune added, the Senate “won’t be a fun place to be.”
A friend of Thune’s told me that the senator had gone through a period of soul-searching that bordered on depression: “He was asking, Where did his life go? And what had happened to his party?” But the friend said that Thune’s thoughts of retirement had collided with his feelings about January 6th: “Who is going to be there to certify that the votes are counted in the next election? Who is going to be there to stand against the crazies?” At the end of 2021, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and another friend, told the Times that she would “truly be beside myself” if Thune left the Senate. As if to persuade him to stay, she added, “We’ve just got to plow through this to the post-Donald Trump era, which I believe is coming.” Sinema, a former Arizona senator who left the Democratic Party and became an Independent, is a good friend of Thune’s. She told me that he had stayed “to protect the institution—and by ‘the institution’ I mean the American system of governance. He believes in the fundamental principles our Founding Fathers laid out. You know, the separation of powers.” (A person close to Thune told me that the senator and his wife “ultimately concluded that he had more to give and wanted to leave it all on the field.”)
In 2024, when Thune announced a bid to succeed McConnell as leader, Trump’s hostility posed the biggest obstacle. The favored MAGA candidate was Rick Scott, of Florida, who had previously tried to oust McConnell. Such contests have always been settled privately among senators, out of shared pride in the institution’s independence, but Scott seemed to enlist MAGA celebrities to undermine Thune. He went on the podcast of the far-right provocateur Laura Loomer, and afterward she slammed Thune on social media as “a snake” who wanted to “KNEECAP Trump’s second term.” Musk called Thune the Democrats’ favored candidate; Tucker Carlson accused him of plotting “a coup” against Trump’s agenda.
Thune’s secret weapon was a floating dinner party. For years, almost every week that the Senate was in session, he gathered a rotating group of six to twelve fellow-senators for a jovial dinner at a restaurant near the Capitol (Bistro Cacao, La Loma). Thune mostly hung back and listened as his colleagues drank wine and traded gossip, jokes, and updates about their families. The dinners stood out as a rare recurring opportunity for building camaraderie among lawmakers who sometimes had little in common. Senator Markwayne Mullin, of Oklahoma, a former mixed-martial-arts fighter who dropped out of college to take over his father’s plumbing business, told me that at these dinners he’d made a surprising discovery about Cruz, an Ivy League-educated lawyer known for ideological grandstanding. “Ted Cruz is the funniest guy in Congress,” Mullin said. “If he fails at the Senate, he’s got a life as a comedian.” Sinema and Collins were frequent guests, as was Steve Daines, a Montana senator who was often mentioned as a potential dark-horse challenger to Thune in the race for Party leader. Manchin told me that Thune always graciously charged the tab to his political-action committee—“I jumped him one time and got to pay before he could grab it”—and that “those dinners became his political base.” Manchin admired Thune so much that he offered to caucus with the G.O.P. if Thune needed an extra vote to become the Republican leader.
Several of these dinner companions—notably Mullin, Graham, Daines, and Senator Kevin Cramer, of North Dakota—were also close to Trump. All four told me that they had undertaken a quiet campaign to help Thune win Trump over. Graham said that their message about Thune was “He wants you to be successful, and everybody likes him.”
In the run-up to the 2024 Presidential primaries, Thune voiced his hope for “other options” besides Trump; he eventually endorsed his fellow-senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina. But behind the scenes Thune was selling himself to the former President, too. Mullin told me that he helped “coördinate the very first phone call,” and that Thune “took it from there.” After that, Mullin said, “one of them would call me and say, ‘Hey, I just got off the phone with your buddy,’ and you saw a relationship develop.” He argued that it testified to the character of both men “that they could bury it that quick.” Thune endorsed Trump in February, 2024, visited him at Mar-a-Lago the next month, and returned again in September.
Trump himself never publicly backed any candidate. But by November Mullin was discreetly suggesting that Trump was for Thune. Mullin told me, “If John Thune had asked Trump to endorse him, I am confident he would have.”
In the end, Graham said, it was Thune’s appearance that brought Trump around. Graham insisted to me several times that “Trump likes the look—the look matters a lot to Trump. Just look at the Cabinet.”
Trump’s second Inauguration carried echoes of January 6th. maga pilgrims again converged on Washington. Trump moved his swearing-in ceremony indoors, owing to inclement weather, and the next day Republican lawmakers gave constituents tours of the Capitol. Roving bands of Trump superfans filled the halls. In their “Stop the Steal” regalia, many could have passed for January 6th rioters; I saw T-shirts emblazoned with mottoes such as “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty—1776.” Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, showed up again, too. He was sprung from prison on Inauguration Day, when Trump pardoned everyone convicted of crimes connected to the attack. The following day, at a Dunkin’ beneath the Capitol complex, Rhodes held forth to astonished journalists about the righteousness of the assault.
I joined the Capitol press corps chasing Republican senators in pursuit of their honest reactions to the pardons. The mob, after all, had targeted them. Collins, pausing before she disappeared into an elevator, called it “a terrible week for our justice system.” And Senator Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, said that granting impunity for the violence had made the Capitol “less safe.” Nearly all the others dodged the question.
Evoking the January 6th riot was in some ways a fitting start to Trump’s second term. He had already begun a sustained assault on the power of the legislative branch. On December 17th, Elon Musk had débuted the Department of Government Efficiency, which at the time consisted only of a month-old social-media account. Thune, Johnson, and their Democratic counterparts had just worked out yet another continuing resolution to keep the government’s lights on, and they’d inserted thirty billion dollars in funding for disaster recovery. Republican aides in both chambers told me that the Trump transition team had signed off on it all. But Musk used his new account to spread misinformation about the deal, including false claims that it would give lawmakers a big pay raise and fund a bioweapons lab. By the afternoon, he’d threatened to back primary challengers against any Republican who voted for the resolution. “The waste and corruption will never stop,” he declared, unless “@DOGE ends the careers of deceitful, pork-barrel politicians.”
Trump jumped on Musk’s bandwagon. Then, without consulting either Thune or Johnson, he declared that any continuing resolution must also raise the limit on federal borrowing—to save him the unpleasantness of handling that chore himself when the debt reached its cap. This was an impossible demand. Many House Republicans refuse on principle to vote for a debt-limit adjustment; securing one requires weeks of negotiations and Democratic coöperation in both chambers. Still, with Musk and Trump attacking the agreed-upon deal, House Republicans voted it down.
Neither Thune nor Johnson dared complain. Johnson, who is widely perceived to owe his Speakership to Trump’s endorsement—the Speaker ballots are public—even pledged to follow Trump’s swerve. Trump humiliated him nonetheless, declining for weeks to assert confidence that Johnson would remain Speaker. “We’ll see,” Trump told journalists.
Thune is less dependent on his favor, and Trump has opted to flatter him. At a January meeting with Senate Republicans, Trump praised Thune as “very elegant,” senators present told me. Trump invited Thune to sit with him and Johnson at the Army–Navy football game, and named Thune’s son-in-law, Luke Lindberg, to a top Agriculture Department post. By March, Trump was calling the Majority Leader by a fond nickname: Big John.
Yet Trump has tested Thune, too. In the final stage of the Senate’s Republican-leadership race, Trump insisted that the contenders agree to support recess appointments; by installing nominees with Congress out of session, he could bypass the Senate’s constitutional authority to “advise and consent.” Then Trump forced Senate Republicans into confirmation votes so politically painful that they couldn’t hide their discomfort. Questioning Tulsi Gabbard about her appointment as the director of National Intelligence, Republican senators begged her to agree with them that Edward Snowden was a traitor for leaking sensitive documents and then fleeing to Moscow. During hearings on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s nomination to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana physician, prodded him to repudiate his baseless fear-mongering about vaccines: “Will you reassure mothers, unequivocally and without qualification, that the measles and hepatitis-B vaccines do not cause autism?” Both nominees refused to comply. Except for McConnell, every Republican senator acceded to Trump’s wishes anyway.
Trump’s nominee for the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, challenged the Senate even more fundamentally: Vought insisted that Congress did not have exclusive control over federal spending. In 1974, after President Richard Nixon refused to spend money as directed by appropriations laws, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act to clarify that no President can unilaterally withhold such funds. The Supreme Court confirmed the next year that the Constitution forbids it, too. Yet Vought testified that Trump had actually campaigned on the idea that the Impoundment Control Act itself was unconstitutional. Trump and Vought were asking senators to surrender some of their most crucial power.
By the time Vought’s nomination came up for a vote, on February 6th, Trump had openly defied spending statutes by issuing an executive order that froze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans. He’d summarily fired seventeen internal agency watchdogs, ignoring legislation that barred such terminations without cause and without notifying Congress thirty days in advance. And doge had grown into a shadowy team furiously slashing congressionally authorized programs and civil-service jobs, starting with Musk’s announcement, on social media, that he’d put the United States Agency for International Development through “the wood chipper.” Despite all this, every Republican voted for Vought’s confirmation.
Trump, bucking his party’s traditional commitment to free trade, has used emergency declarations to impose sweeping tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. He has repeatedly threatened levies and then deferred them, seemingly on impulse, sometimes after an ingratiating phone call from a C.E.O. or a foreign leader. Even more dramatic, on February 28th, Trump abruptly upended congressionally mandated support for Ukraine. In a televised meeting, he upbraided President Volodymyr Zelensky for insisting that only U.S. security guarantees would stop future Russian aggression. That morning, three Republicans had met with Zelensky, in a show of solidarity. After Trump’s outburst, the Republican senator Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, deleted a social-media post celebrating his meeting with Zelensky.
Thune, faced with this blitz, has so far ducked open conflict with Trump. According to Mullin and others, Thune privately explained to the President that recess appointments were too impractical to pursue except as a last resort: the move requires majorities in both chambers to vote to adjourn simultaneously, and forces the appointees to work without pay and benefits, for up to two years. Mullin said, “I am sure the President did not understand that, because I did not understand it, either.” But “one person in particular had a very strong conversation with the President about it, and that was Leader Thune—and when was the last time you’ve heard the President talk about it?” In public, however, Thune pledged allegiance to the idea that “all options” were “on the table” to get Trump’s picks confirmed, “including recess appointments.”
When Trump and Musk blew up the December spending deal, Thune feigned normalcy. At midnight on a Friday, minutes after the government had technically run out of money, the Senate passed what amounted to the original deal, but broken into pieces to hide the resemblance. “It is what it is,” Thune said to reporters, shrugging off the needless chaos.
After Trump’s pardons for the January 6th attackers, Thune, speaking to reporters, grappled audibly with his instinct for honesty. “I think that he needs to—I mean, as I’ve said, obviously—look at these things on a case-by-case basis,” he stammered, repudiating the indiscriminate nature of the pardons. But in his next sentence he said that he was focussed on “the future, not the past.”
Thune has protected vulnerable Republican senators from having to cast potentially embarrassing confirmation votes, but only to the extent that he could avoid crossing Trump. Mullin told me that Thune instructed Republicans to allow Collins the flexibility to vote no on some nominees, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—a former Fox News host dogged by allegations of heavy drinking, sexual assault, and financial mismanagement. (He denies the drinking and the assault.) According to Mullin, Thune reminded his Republican colleagues that Collins, who’s up for reëlection next year in Maine, “is probably the only Republican who can get elected to a statewide Senate seat there.”
Yet Thune showed less consideration for Tillis, who is seeking reëlection in North Carolina, where he faces a credible Democratic opponent and may also confront a primary challenge—perhaps from Lara Trump, the President’s daughter-in-law. The night before the vote, Tillis informed Thune of his plan to oppose Hegseth. He would have been the fourth Republican to vote against the nomination, thus dooming it. Thune refused to shield Tillis from Trump, forcing him to tell the President personally. That enabled Trump to pressure Tillis into a yes vote, partly by threatening to back a primary opponent. Hegseth squeaked through. (Both the Times and the Wall Street Journal reported Thune’s role; with the senator under pressure from the right to rush confirmations, his staff had incentive to confirm the stories.)
When Trump is outlandish, Thune often recasts the President’s words and deeds in benign terms. At a luncheon after Trump’s Inaugural Address about “America’s decline” and “horrible betrayal,” Thune toasted him for recapturing the “optimism” of President Reagan. Thune has also tried to describe Trump’s arm-twisting of Zelensky in nobler language. After the President called Zelensky “a dictator without elections” and bizarrely faulted Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, Thune told reporters that Trump merely wanted “a peaceful conclusion to the war,” andso did Ukraine. But the Oval Office spat with Zelensky was harder to euphemize. “Last week was a missed opportunity,” he told reporters, disappearing into his office without saying who had missed it, Trump or Zelensky.
When we met in mid-March, Thune told me that he had not talked much to Trump about Ukraine, though the President had conveyed in general terms “what he is trying to achieve there.” Thune said, “I think he’s now, at least, he’s starting to . . .” He paused. “There’s more pressure being applied with the Russians.” Thune noted that, in public statements, he’s always been clear about “who is at fault” in the region, and that the U.S. commitment to NATO must remain “iron-clad.”
Thune has acknowledged, diplomatically, that he sees tariffs “through a slightly different lens” than the President does. But he prefers not to talk about Trump’s forecasts that across-the-board tariffs will be a major long-term source of revenue, potentially to be collected by a new External Revenue Service. Thune has focussed on White House statements suggesting that the levies on Canada and Mexico are intended only to push those countries to crack down on the flow of fentanyl. In television interviews, Thune confidently portrayed the new levies as “targeted,” “a means to an end,” and for “a specific purpose” only.
When I pressed Thune about Trump’s tariffs one day as he was walking through the Capitol, he was less sanguine. “I think they’re—hopefully—temporary,” he said. He crossed the anteroom of his office suite while I followed up with a question about whether he or the Senate could have any say in the matter. Thune stopped to think before turning back to respond that there was “a lot of executive-branch authority when it comes to tariffs.” He sounded almost mournful.
Despite Trump’s systematic disregard for Congress’s authority, many Republican senators, at least publicly, have brushed off worries about the separation of powers. “Who is saying that?” Mullin asked, asserting that only Democrats had expressed concerns. In another conversation, he insisted that DOGE was eliminating only “fraud and abuse.” When I asked if he thought that the entirety of U.S.A.I.D. was fraudulent, he shot back, “Have you seen it?”
Thune, in contrast, has tried to sound as though he is backing the President while still affirming fidelity to the Constitution. In a floor speech on February 6th, he took up the theme of “double standards.” He accused the Democrats, accurately, of ignoring Biden’s deviations from congressional spending statutes, such as in his failed attempt to forgive student loans, or his impractical requirement that programs for expanding rural broadband infrastructure prioritize union labor. Yet Thune was also clear that he agreed with Democrats on the fundamental issue. Congress had already “bequeathed and given up way too much power to the executive branch,” he declared, and he was “not deaf” to complaints about the Trump Administration.
Thune’s threading of the needle has been most effortful when it comes to the furious cuts to congressionally mandated programs. He has charitably called Musk’s DOGE work a “careful scrub” of federal spending and “not unusual” for a new Administration. On February 11th, as Musk ratcheted up his rampage, Thune told reporters that DOGE cuts were just part of “the natural give-and-take” between the executive and legislative branches. The courts “have a way of mediating or refereeing” such disputes, he said.
By early March, that give-and-take seemed to enter a critical stage. On the fifth, the Supreme Court preliminarily upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking Trump’s freeze on two billion dollars in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. The next day, a federal judge in Rhode Island found that the White House had “put itself above Congress” in ignoring a court order compelling the release of billions of dollars in other appropriations. On the day of the Supreme Court’s decision, I ran into Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, as she was leaving an Ash Wednesday observance in the Senate chapel. She’d been texting with Musk, and she told me that “his brilliance does not extend to understanding how government works, what our laws are, what the separation of powers means.” Congress, she said, would reclaim its authority in the spending bills for the next fiscal year, which begins in October, “with much more precise and careful legislating.” She expressed confidence that Thune would protect the Senate’s authority, though she acknowledged that he faced “an extraordinarily difficult balancing act.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior. She told me that she’d recently sent a letter to the heads of the agencies she oversees reminding them that they cannot make major changes to staffing or facilities without notifying congressional appropriators well in advance. She said that Congress should “look inward” at its failure in recent decades to make a more vigorous defense of its powers: “It’s not all about taking potshots at Trump or DOGE or Elon Musk. It’s about the Senate saying, ‘No, actually, we have a role here when it comes to determining the direction of spending.’ ” But, she continued, the Trump White House “wants to do everybody’s job, and if they are rolling over or ignoring the legislative branch we should not allow that to stand.” Murkowski said that Thune deserved “some latitude” as he quietly sought ways to protect the separation of powers. With a smile, she said she was sure that he’d get the job done, “with a little help from his team.”
Musk himself showed up at the Capitol that afternoon for a lunch with Senate Republicans. Wearing his customary “Tech Support” T-shirt under a sport coat, he smirked and raised his eyebrows at a waiting crowd of journalists. Every Republican had stood to applaud him the previous night, during Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress. But several senators told me and other journalists that, in private, Musk had faced polite but firm complaints about his failure to notify lawmakers before making vast cuts in congressionally authorized spending, often alarming their constituents. Graham said that it had been “political malpractice not to consult Congress.” According to the senators, Musk had sought to assuage them by announcing his cellphone number, to facilitate better communication. Some noted, with satisfaction, that he appeared to have read the Supreme Court opinion issued that morning. And Graham told me and other reporters that Musk had pumped his fist in a dance of joy when senators described a rarely used legislative procedure that might retroactively legalize some DOGE cuts. The procedure, known as rescission, allows an Administration to make cuts if it submits a list to Congress in advance and majorities in both chambers approve them.
All the Republican senators have been eager to express their support for the idea of DOGE. But several left the Musk meeting gushing to reporters about the rescission proposal, clearly relieved that there might be a fix for the glaring problem that DOGE posed to the separation of powers. A rescission process would also surely force the Trump Administration to restore cuts so drastic or arbitrary that they couldn’t pass Congress. Mike Rounds, an old friend of Thune’s and South Dakota’s junior senator, told me, “They are going to break some things, and when that happens we want to repair them as quickly as possible.” Still, several senators weren’t sure that Musk now understood that only Congress could control federal spending. Rounds all but winked at me when he said that that part of the discussion was “still ongoing.”
Thune, pressed about the rescission approach as he headed toward the Senate floor, sounded far from convinced. “We’ll see—obviously, a rescission package needs to be submitted by the White House,” he said with a frown, tacitly questioning whether Trump and Musk would agree to such oversight.
When he was on his way back to his office, I pursued him again. Wasn’t it backward to slash spending and then ask Congress to legalize it? Thune started to explain the standard rescission process—the way it might have been done in, say, the Reagan or the Bush years. “It’s a tool that is available to the Administration,” he said. “If they identify savings within different agencies and departments that are real and they want us to act on them . . . ”
But Musk and Trump were not just proposing future savings, I pointed out. They were eliminating programs and firing thousands of federal employees before asking for the consent of Congress. “Well, that’s”—a long pause—“a different issue.” He grinned, pointed a finger at me, and disappeared into a doorway, as though poking fun at his own evasiveness.
Rounds told me that Thune’s strategy was to hold the Republicans together in order to preserve “the relevance of the United States Senate.” Unity would give the senators a better chance “to have a say when it comes to modifications” of the President’s actions—presumably through budget and spending bills later this year. Although Republicans wanted to “reduce the size of the executive branch,” Rounds added, the senators “have to do our due diligence.” Like Thune, Rounds said that he looked forward to courts ruling on Trump’s expansive assertions of executive power. He told me that “none of us” could support unchecked executive authority, and that Trump was now “creating an atmosphere” that would force the courts to clarify the separation of powers, possibly bolstering the authority of Congress over rule-making agencies. “This will bring it to a head,” he predicted.
Yet the White House had already started raising questions about how binding it considered court rulings. In a post on social media in February, Trump declared, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Vice-President J. D. Vance, a lawyer who has mused in the past about defying the Supreme Court, wrote in a post of his own that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
At a press conference, Thune went out of his way to rebut Vance directly. “Do I believe that the courts have a very, very valid role and need to be listened to and heard in that process?,” he said. “The answer is yes.” But it is unlikely to be so simple. So far, the Administration appears intent on insisting that it does follow court rulings while nonetheless contesting decisions in higher courts, shifting to new legal rationales, finding work-arounds, dragging its feet, and, arguably, inventing pretexts for noncompliance. (The deportation flights were over international waters by the time the judge ordered the Administration to turn them around!) In the meantime, though, some of DOGE’s demolition may come to seem irreversible. Foreign-aid workers are returning home. Fired federal employees are taking other jobs. New tenants may soon occupy federal office space. Ron Bonjean, a strategist who has worked as a senior adviser to Republican leaders in the House and the Senate, told me that the Trump Administration would surely rejoice if just a small part of its extra-legislative cuts survived judicial scrutiny. Shrinking the government by even a quarter of what Trump has already done in a few weeks would be “insanely victorious” for any other Republican Administration. Trump might even relish the chance to spar with the courts when he loses. Bonjean told me that Trump wants “headlines about ‘Look how much money I am trying to save.’ ”
That leaves Republican senators caught between their desire to preserve their own authority and the political imperative to stay on Trump’s good side. Bonjean told me, “None of the senators like seeing their power usurped by the executive branch, but they know they are in a tough spot politically.”
In truth, much of Trump and Musk’s hatchet work—wiping out U.S.A.I.D.; laying off tens of thousands of employees across Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Aviation Administration, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education; slashing medical and scientific research—is highly unlikely to win a majority vote as a rescission package, even in a Senate with fifty-three Republicans. Carefully targeted bills to claw back less than three billion dollars each failed to pass the Senate under George W. Bush and the first Trump Administration, despite Republican majorities. The federal bureaucracy may be inefficient, but each program tends to have vocal supporters—whether they’re meat-packers, drug manufacturers, or pediatricians.
Whispers of discontent from Republican senators are not hard to detect. Some murmur that “soft power,” such as foreign aid, is a much cheaper way to buy influence than military operations, or that cutting fifteen per cent of the Department of Veterans Affairs in a single blow must surely jeopardize crucial services. A few conservatives have carefully raised their voices. Senator Jerry Moran, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has introduced a bill to roll back cuts to that department; he wants the government to keep paying U.S. farmers to send food abroad, too. Senator Katie Britt, of Alabama, has called for the restoration of research funding in Birmingham. The chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have warned the Administration that it cannot change the U.S. role in NATO without congressional approval.
On March 27th, Collins joined the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations panel in a public letter chastising the White House over news reports that it planned to ignore parts of the recent continuing resolution. “It is incumbent on all of us to follow the law as it is written—not as we would like it to be,” they wrote, adding that the President “does not have the ability to pick and choose” from congressionally mandated spending. Longtime Senate staffers told me that more pushback is likely to happen out of the view of the President or the public, in phone calls to Cabinet secretaries from congressional leaders and committee chairs.
Thune, who was surely informed in advance of the appropriators’ letter, has studiously avoided opining on specific DOGE cuts. He may well share some of his colleagues’ concerns. It’s hard to imagine the senior senator from South Dakota being enthusiastic about reducing agricultural purchases, National Parks personnel, or veterans’ services. But a Thune staffer told me that the senator would likely be happy to discuss one set of cuts: those made to the Department of Education. Like Reagan, Thune has long advocated for more local control.
By early March, in the weeks before the latest continuing resolution, the White House quietly asked Republican congressional leaders to insert provisions that would retroactively legitimate DOGE cuts, such as the erasure of U.S.A.I.D. Johnson, the House Speaker, initially sounded supportive, telling reporters that “it would not make sense” to fund “an agency that doesn’t exist.” But, even if every Republican in both chambers had consented, this backdoor approach would have given Senate Democrats clear justification for using the filibuster to block the resolution and shut down the government. Johnson and Thune privately rebuffed the White House. And when Schumer, the Democratic leader, voted to keep the government running, Thune revelled in the backlash from the left. At a press conference, he called it “something of a civil war among the Democrats.”
For now, any public attempt by Thune to check Trump would likely arouse even greater anger from the Republican base. Breaking with the President could cost Thune his leadership job. But this could change in a matter of months, if Trump’s popularity falters. Bonjean, the strategist, said that, if Republican senators hear “droves of MAGA voters calling to say, ‘I voted for Donald Trump, but we are feeling too much pain from these tariffs and cutbacks,’ ” that’s when Thune’s colleagues may tell him, “We need some air cover.”
Many Democrats outside the Senate are convinced that Thune and the Republicans will never say no to Trump. Jim Manley, a former senior adviser to the Senate’s Democratic leader Harry Reid, told me, “They’ve made their bed.” Senator Raphael Warnock, the Georgia Democrat, recently told me and other reporters that the Republicans “are being rolled” and “making themselves increasingly irrelevant.” Others argue that Thune’s strategy resembles McConnell’s miscalculated acquittal vote at Trump’s impeachment: a gamble that the courts and the electorate will hold Trump to account.
Still, several Democratic senators told me that they were reluctant to express impatience with Thune, because they still hope that he will defend the separation of powers. A Democratic senator close to Thune cited his retort to Vance’s post about judges as an encouraging sign that he will “stand up for the rule of law.” Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat and another friend of Thune’s, told me, “I’m pretty sure he understands just how dangerously close we are coming to giving away the Senate.” He added, “On that, history will judge all of us.”
When we met in Thune’s office, I asked if he’d ever spoken to Trump about the separation of powers. He replied that he’d “drawn lines in the sand about places we’re not going to go, one of which is the filibuster.” Thune gave DOGE another dignified gloss, calling it an “analysis of government spending” and a drive “to modernize a lot of our ways of doing things.” But he also told me that he’d made it clear to the White House that DOGE cannot cut government on its own (as Musk appears to have done repeatedly). “Hiring and firing decisions,” Thune emphasized, should be made only by Senate-confirmed department heads “who understand the mission of that department or agency, and which employees and which programs and functions are critical.” He added, “Some cuts they are going to need from Congress—I mean, they can’t abolish the Department of Education. It would take Congress to do that.” (A week later, Trump issued an executive order to gut the department while he seeks congressional approval to do away with it officially.)
I asked again if Thune had told the White House about such limits. “Well . . . ” he said, with a deep sigh. “I had a fairly lengthy conversation a few weeks ago,” as Congress was deciding on the continuing resolution. “I’ve had those conversations with the President. He understands that there are things that we have to do.” Thune said that he’d talked to some of the newly confirmed Cabinet secretaries, and was reassured to see that they were “pulling back” on “some of those things that DOGE got out there and did early.” All the secretaries, at least, understood that “Congress has to vote” on proposed major cuts or shutdowns.
In another rosy depiction of Trump’s moves, Thune downplayed many of the cuts as “a lot of Biden stuff they are trying to clear out.” In truth, much of the federal spending that Musk and Trump have attacked was in place long before Biden. But, echoing Collins, Thune said that he expected the White House to adhere fully to the spending legislation that Congress would pass for the next fiscal year, in part because the Trump Administration would have a chance to provide “input.” He argued that the new Administration would follow protocol “as their agenda and priorities start being reflected in some of these appropriations bills.” Such legislation, of course, will take even more than unanimous Republican support. It will require the sixty votes needed to overcome a filibuster—Thune’s line in the sand—severely limiting how many DOGE cutbacks survive in law.
By late March, about two weeks after we talked in Thune’s office, Trump was escalating his efforts to circumvent Congress altogether. More than fifty district-court rulings had halted Trump initiatives, finding them probably illegal. After drawing rebukes from multiple judges for failing to comply with their orders, Trump retaliated by calling for their impeachment, arguing that a mere district court should not constrain a President. One day, I stopped Thune in the hall and asked if he believed that the White House had “listened to” the courts, as he had said that it must.
Dodging conflict again, Thune said that the answer was yes; the Administration was “using the appeals process,” which was “typically how something like this would get handled.” When I noted that, until Trump, Presidents have typically complied with injunctions while pursuing appeals, Thune sought to defer judgment until the Supreme Court itself had weighed in more fully. Whether a President must follow a district-court order, Thune said, “that’s going to be the question.” He continued, “I assume these appeals are going to have to happen very quickly,” and that the Supreme Court rulings “will be final.”
Manchin, now watching from the sidelines, urged patience with such seeming evasions. “John plays a long poker hand,” he told me. “It might seem out of character right now—going along with some things that maybe he normally wouldn’t—but when push comes to shove, and the survival of the separation of powers and basic independence of the legislature is on the line, when someone’s got to pull the trigger, John has the ability, the character, and the strength to do it.”
After the courts declare it illegal for Trump to rule by fiat, and after the Democrats thwart him in Congress, would come Thune’s moment of truth, Manchin predicted. Would the Majority Leader keep his promise to preserve the filibuster? Or would he capitulate to Trump? “If John caves to that,” Manchin said, “then I will be extremely disappointed in my buddy.” ♦
