Trump has claimed his victory was a mandate. Washington’s realities are already challenging that

By CNN

Published December 20, 2024 5:14 PM

CNN

By Steve Contorno, CNN

(CNN) — Donald Trump has yet to arrive in Washington, but he is already confronting the limitations of his electoral mandate.

Trump’s eleventh-hour attempt to blow up a carefully negotiated bill to keep the government funded into March did not achieve the outcome he had sought: clearing a debt ceiling battle looming early in his next presidency.

It did, however, expose a lingering rift among House Republicans that had been hiding behind the GOP’s post-election euphoria and made clear Trump’s sway over his own party remains far from absolute. In a stunning turn, 38 Republicans defied the president-elect on Thursday. By early Saturday morning — 48 hours after Trump threatened primary challenges for anyone who supported funding the government without eliminating the debt limit — 170 House Republicans and dozens of GOP senators voted for just that.

The chaotic episode one month before Trump returns to the White House served as a reminder that governing has foiled plenty of successful politicians, and it foreshadowed the challenges ahead for Trump as he navigates a narrow House majority and a Senate full of people who expect to outlast the president-elect’s four years in Washington.

Trump has asserted his decisive November victory should clear any roadblocks standing in the way of his agenda. He has demanded fealty from fellow Republicans while often overstating the breadth of his win. Though he is the first Republican in a generation to win the popular vote, Trump ended up with less than 50% of the country behind him and his Electoral College margin was sizable but hardly historic.

“The beauty is that we won by so much,” Trump told Time Magazine in a recent interview. “The mandate was massive.”

Yet, Trump in the last month has already faced several high-profile defeats at the hands of his own party before even taking office.

The president-elect appeared this week to punt on an effort to get his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, a US Senate seat in the face of quiet but unwavering opposition from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In the weeks after President-elect Trump tapped Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state, DeSantis had faced intense public pressure to appoint her as a replacement, with Elon Musk (and his mother) and other MAGA-aligned Republicans publicly lobbying for her.

Multiple sources with knowledge of their recent interactions told CNN the president-elect had made his preference known to DeSantis through private back channels. DeSantis relayed back to Trump a delicate message: He had nothing against Lara Trump, but he felt the optics of appointing her to such a high-profile post were problematic and he was looking elsewhere to fill the seat.

On Monday, the president-elect told reporters he didn’t expect DeSantis to name Lara to the post and distanced himself from the campaign pushing his daughter-in-law all together.

“Ron is doing a good job,” Donald Trump said. “That’s his choice, nothing to do with me.”

And on Saturday, Lara Trump publicly withdrew from consideration for the potential vacancy, posting on X, “After an incredible amount of thought, contemplation, and encouragement from so many, I have decided to remove my name from consideration for the United States Senate.”

President-elect Trump previously abandoned his first choice to serve as his attorney general, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, after it became clear the Florida firebrand lacked support to avoid a contentious — and potentially unsuccessful — nomination vote. Trump had long considered his pick to lead the Justice Department the most critical post in his Cabinet and now has settled for a fallback, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

One of Trump’s top allies in the Senate, Florida’s Rick Scott, overwhelmingly lost his bid to lead the incoming Republican majority to Sen. John Thune, who had previously encouraged his party to move on from the former president. While Trump didn’t formally endorse in the race, Scott was publicly backed by many of the president-elect’s top allies, including Charlie Kirk, the founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA, and billionaire Musk.

Despite these setbacks, Trump has managed to assert himself as the predominant figure in his party ahead of his return to Washington.

While the Gaetz nomination faltered, Trump has marched ahead with a series of unconventional Cabinet picks that continue to test Republican senators. Trump has stood by former Fox anchor Pete Hegseth, his pick for secretary of defense, amid a cascade of damaging revelations, including a sexual assault allegation; concerns about his tenure leading a veterans charity; questions about past alcoholic consumption habits; and an unearthed email from his mother calling him “an abuser of women.”

Hegseth’s mother retracted her remark during an appearance on Fox News, and Hegseth has denied many of the allegations raised against him.

Republican support for Hegseth on Capitol Hill appears to have stabilized amid Trump’s insistence, and senators so far remain open to Trump’s other controversial choices to lead his government, including anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence.

Trump’s allies have demanded unquestioned loyalty from Republican lawmakers and have publicly threatened those who may consider defying the incoming president on any front.

“For every US senator out there, you must confirm Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Bobby Kennedy, Pam Bondi and Trump’s entire Cabinet, or you will face a primary challenger immediately,” Kirk warned at a Turning Point USA event Friday in Arizona.

By Friday evening, Trump’s allies — particularly his co-agitator, Musk — had spun their derailing of the government funding vote as a victory. Musk, who posted dozens of times about the vote on his social media website, X, in recent days, shared a picture of the 1,500-page bill they helped kill next to a smaller stack depicting the bill that ultimately passed.

“Your actions turned a bill that weighed pounds into a bill that weighed ounces!” Musk wrote triumphantly.

Still, there are clearly frustrations building among Republicans that Trump has expended so much of his political capital (and their time) on quixotic causes before he is sworn in to office. Some publicly grumbled that Trump and Musk had not actually won any spending cuts in the smaller bill House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed through Friday with the help of Democratic votes. Others found their tactics to be confounding.

“I will eat sh*t sandwiches — which is budget bills and debt ceiling increases — so that Trump has a great runway,” Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw said Friday, “but you’ve got to plan ahead to do that.”

Just before the House voted Friday night, Trump lamented to one GOP lawmaker in a call that the spending deal couldn’t include a hike in the debt ceiling, an issue that he knows now he will have to confront in his presidency. The debt limit is set to return in January, but lawmakers likely would have until mid-2025 to address the ceiling.

The source familiar with the call told CNN that Trump seemed frustrated yet resigned as reality began setting in that despite his massive influence over the GOP, there are some issues that some conservatives will not bend on for him. Lawmakers on Friday finally convinced Trump he couldn’t achieve his goal without a costly shutdown.

Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota told reporters that he wasn’t surprised the debt limit — a legal cap on how much the federal government can borrow that takes an act of Congress to lift — wasn’t addressed in the short-term funding package.

“That’s a pretty valuable commodity for the Democrats to give up. And so I’m sure they’ll want a pound of flesh someplace to address that — it has to be expected they’ll try it,” he said.

Trump allies, though, are signaling this is only the beginning.

“If you think the last 48 hours have been unique,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said Friday on his podcast, “every day coming in when President Trump takes over is going to be like this.”

This story has been updated with new developments.

CNN’s Lauren Fox, Kristen Holmes and Andrew Millman contributed to this report.

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