With GOP control of Congress, an incoming administration of MAGA loyalists, and a friendly judiciary he helped shape, the only immediate check Donald Trump will have on his power will likely have to come from within his own party. But Trump commands fealty from Republicans. So is a new party bent to his will—and that demonstrated little willingness to stand up to him even before he delivered them a red wave in this month’s election—really going to defy him now?
Maybe, according to the next Senate Majority leader. “Every president is going to come in and try to do as much as they can by executive action as possible,” John Thune said Tuesday. “Congress, in some cases, is going to be the entity that sometimes will have to put the brakes on.”
The comments from Thune, who will succeed Mitch McConnell as Republican leader, would seem an assurance that the upper chamber will seek to retain Congress’s power as an equal branch of government, not simply act as a rubber-stamp for Trump. But, of course, his predecessor rarely served as a curb on Trump’s authority—despite regarding him as “despicable” and “stupid”—and it’s far from clear Thune, a McConnell ally, will approach the president-elect any differently.
McConnell was mainly an enabler, making the occasional rhetorical break from Trump but never doing so in a meaningful way that would compromise his longstanding political goals—particularly the rightward swing of the Supreme Court. Thune’s tenure has yet to begin, but his conference already seems to have scuttled one of Trump’s appointments with Matt Gaetz, the now-disgraced former Florida congressman the president-elect initially chose to serve as his attorney general. That suggests Thune’s Senate Republicans may be interested in putting some guardrails in place.
But where, exactly, will those guardrails be? Will they merely make it harder for an accused sex trafficker to become the nation’s top law enforcement official? Or will they impede Trump’s other whims and malignant impulses?
Thune wasn’t the first choice among some in the MAGA world. Several, including top adviser Elon Musk and Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had backed Rick Scott—the Florida senator who seemed more prepared to acquiesce to Trump’s demand to be able to bypass Capitol Hill and make recess appointments.
Thune hasn’t exactly closed the door on that request. But he has seemed interested, at least, in maintaining his ability to exercise his own power as a senator. That doesn’t make him honorable. But it could make him a reasonable target for Democrats seeking to stop or slow Trump’s worst impulses—and potentially put him on a collision course with Trump himself.
Of course, this isn’t about policy. “The things we want to achieve at present are by and large the same, Thune told the Brandon Valley Area Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday. “How we get there is another matter, and we’ll have to work through that.” With Democrats in disarray and Republicans eager to act on what they see as a mandate, any friction within Trump’s party could be the best hope of limiting him—for now.
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