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- Trump’s second term will be much different than his first term.
- That’s in part because of how much he’s transformed the party in his own image since 2016.
- While ideological divisions still exist, very few Republicans are actively resistant toward Trump.
This may not be President-elect Donald Trump’s first time in the White House, but his second term is bound to look much different than his first term.
The biggest factor in that difference: Trump is dealing with a GOP that’s much more friendly to him and his priorities than it was eight years ago.
When Trump was elected in 2016, he faced substantial pockets of opposition within his own party. Dozens of prominent Republicans had called on Trump to withdraw from the race in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape, there were essentially zero Republicans in Congress who owed their political careers to him, and the direction of the party seemed very much up for debate.
But over four successive election cycles — the 2018 midterms, the 2020 election, the 2022 midterms, and this year’s election — Trump has steadily remade the party in his image.
“This Republican Party is not the Republican Party of 2010,” said Daniel Schuman, a Congress expert and the Executive Director of the American Governance Institute. “It’s got some of the same constituent people, but who is in charge, and what issues come to dominate is totally different.”
Consider the difference between House Speaker Paul Ryan, who Trump had to work with during the first half of his first term, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is expected to remain in his role if Republicans keep control of the lower chamber.
Ryan had already been serving in the House for 18 years when Trump took office, and the two men had different ideas for the direction of the party, with Ryan’s small-government, traditionally conservative views clashing with Trump’s more populist ideas.
Johnson was elected in 2016, at the same time as Trump. He played a major role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He became speaker after Trump single-handedly tanked the candidacy of the man who Republicans chose immediately before him. And he was among the Republicans who flocked to Manhattan to attend Trump’s “hush money” trial. In other words, he’s personally loyal to, and dependent upon, the once and future president in a way that Ryan was not.
The same is true when it comes to the Senate. While Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s disdain for Trump is well known, his two most likely successors — Sens. John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas — have each gone to great lengths to forge a strong relationship with the president-elect ahead of leadership elections next week.
“Trump has a much stronger grip on the Republican Party than he did in 2016,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run, noting that Johnson is more willing to work with Trump than Ryan.
And it’s true all the way down. In the last eight years, scores of GOP lawmakers whose tenures predated Trump, and who were dissatisfied with the direction of the party under his watch, either retired or went down to defeat. That includes all but two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him after January 6.
Almost all who remain are either loyal supporters or willing to accommodate Trump. Large swaths of both the House and Senate GOP conference were elected after Trump took office, and every Republican in Congress has had to run in an election cycle where Trump was the leader, officially or unofficially, of the party.
Still, some divisions remain among Republicans. While the party has grown more populist on economics under Trump’s watch, there are still some Republicans who are traditional fiscal hawks.
There are also major divisions within the party on national security, with some preferring a more restrained approach to foreign policy as others continue to argue for intervention abroad. One proxy for this divide is the issue of Ukraine: Just over half of House Republicans voted against a more than $60 billion Ukraine aid package last year, while most Senate Republicans voted for it.
But when it comes to Trump the person, Republicans are likely to be far more deferential than in the past, both out of loyalty and fear.
That’s likely to have major implications when it comes to Trump’s plans to reshape the federal bureaucracy and alter American institutions.
“There are Republican institutionalists, but the Republican institutionalists are largely too afraid to do anything about it,” said Schuman.
Brent Griffiths contributed reporting to this story.
