For all the media folderol about Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House, new polling shows that most Americans are actually feeling pretty meh about the prospects for any of his grandiose plans. The AP Norc poll shows that Trump’s 41% approval rating is only a few points higher than it was when he was ignominiously rejected four years ago and most people don’t have any confidence that he’ll be able to accomplish most of what he’s promised.
For a man who erroneously insists that he won a landslide and claims that he’s been given a mandate for massive change, it doesn’t appear that most Americans actually support his agenda (other than eliminating taxes on tips) either:
Members of both parties say they want compromise but considering recent history it’s pretty clear that the Republican party simply is no longer organized to do that. They are in the grip of an extremist faction, led by Trump himself, that is immune to any kind of concession. From all the reports coming out of the new Congress nothing has changed on that count.
Trump and his crony oligarchs have been soaking up all the attention over the past couple of weeks, raising expectations that, in the words of his former adviser now internet influencer and activist Steve Bannon, he will enter the White House and immediately begin a campaign of “shock and awe” which will immediately upend the country and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.
No doubt Trump will issue a bunch of executive orders reversing all of those Joe Biden put in place and then claim that his actions immediately turned the economy around and fixed the border within the first week. (His allies are already saying it.) And it’s likely that he’ll very quickly issue pardons for the January 6th rioters, the only question being if he’ll let off those who assaulted police officers and planned insurrection. (I’m betting he will — the MAGA faithful will be livid if he doesn’t.) All that is to be expected.
However, there is actual governing to be done and from the looks of it, that’s not going to be quite as easy as everyone wants to believe. First of all, as quickly as they are attempting to move on the cabinet, Trump’s goal of getting them confirmed immediately is unlikely although so far, unless something unexpected happens, it appears they’ll all make it through the process eventually.
Other than that, the Congress is a total mess. We already experienced its extreme dysfunction with the circus around Mike Johnson’s election as Speaker and the chaos that erupted when Elon Musk activated the MAGA trolls to put sand in the gears of the budget and almost shut down the government just days before Christmas. It’s only getting messier.
Generally speaking when a party controls both branches of government they would have mapped out their legislative strategy long before they will have sworn in the new Congress. In 2017 when Trump was inaugurated the first time, then-Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had plans for their budget resolution hammered out a week beforehand. The Democrats did the same in 2021 (and they had to contend with a violent insurrection.) But for all of the Trumpers’ bluster, they aren’t even close to figuring out how they plan to proceed and they are facing an imminent debt ceiling, an expiring continuing resolution and before too long, the expiration of the tax cuts Trump signed into law back in 2017.
There are several roadblocks. The first is that they simply can’t agree on whether they should pass their dream agenda in “one big beautiful bill” as Trump wants them to do or break it up into two. This must be done using the reconciliation process in order to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate which the new Majority Leader John Thune has already said they will continue to honor. He is on record preferring they break up the massive agenda which includes a very expensive border bill, energy legislation and more tax cuts, wisely understanding that the prospect of getting everything want with such a small margin in the House is minimal so they need to prioritize. Johnson, naturally, wants to follow Trump’s orders and also knows that passing two reconciliation bills in one year is difficult and hasn’t been done since 2006.
According to Politico, despite being publicly polite to one another, it’s clear the Thune and Johnson are at odds and Trump has reportedly left it in their hands to work it out, saying that he’ll accept whatever they decide even though he’s made his preference clear. He has come up with one brilliant new strategy he thinks will force the Democrats to vote for his draconian policies. He wants the debt ceiling raised in the reconciliation bill and he wants to force Democrats to vote for it:
It’s entirely predictable that Donald Trump would tell Californians in the midst of an epic disaster that they will have to vote for mass deportation and tax cuts for billionaires if they want the federal help that’s routinely given to any other state. I won’t be surprised if they try it but it won’t work because the Democrats will not agree to do it and there’s even a fair chance that the Senate will balk at such a cretinous move. It would just delay the negotiations and they’ll have to go back to the drawing board anyway. (Regardless, there’s going to be a big battle over aid to California one way or another. Many Republicans are demanding that the state capitulate to Trump and the climate deniers’ delusional demands.)
Politico reports that they are so far behind that there’s almost no way they can get anything passed in the House before the end of February and it’s likely to take much longer than that. And that’s assuming these Republicans can come up with even one reconciliation bill that meets all of their standards. They have pledged that anything they spend will have to be paid for and that includes raising the debt ceiling as Trump adamantly demands and the House Freedom Caucus is already throwing its weight around. The kind of cuts that would be called for to do that will cause a firestorm and will probably start to fracture their coalition. And even if they can keep it together, they’ll have to deal with the Senate parliamentarian who will decide whether their bills meet the criteria for reconciliation packages. Thune has pledged to abide by that decision, whatever it is.
And who knows what Elon Musk and his DOGE commissars are going to do? He already killed Trump’s honeymoon before it even started. If he decides to meddle again, he might just blow the whole thing up. It will not be surprising if we’re sitting here next year at this time with Trump’s agenda sitting in a smoldering pile on the House floor. From the looks of the polling, the American people don’t particularly want or expect anything different.
Salon