Republicans are starting to panic as President Donald Trump continues to cause problems mere months before the 2026 midterm elections.
Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that Speaker Mike Johnson is scrambling to figure out a way he can put Trump’s voting restrictions into the Pentagon budget bill and pass it. The House has already passed the legislation as a standalone; the problem is that it won’t pass the Senate. But the Senate parliamentarian made it clear that including the voting bill in the Pentagon budget violates the “Byrd Rule,” which states that all budget bills contain only the budget.
There’s a concern among Republicans that, given Trump’s hype over the bill, if it doesn’t pass, it will leave MAGA feeling “demoralized,” said Ornstein.
The goal of Trump’s voter restrictions is that it aims to curb Democratic votes while also issuing a poll tax, “which ought to be unconstitutional and illegal, is the core part of it,” said Ornstein. “But he wants to take out the mail-in voting, not just because it can hurt Republicans a lot — they use mail-in voting plenty — but also because he needs to get something through and then blame the Senate. Because frankly, if Mike Johnson had to choose one house to go over to the Democrats, he of course would rather have it be the Senate.”
Now that Trump is attacking members of his own party over the “The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act,” Republicans are growing both angry and scared.
Sargent cited a recent NBC report talking about what’s going on inside the Republican Senate caucus. The report says, “some Republican strategists worry the party’s chances of holding the Senate are dwindling.”
Trump has openly attacked Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), who is one of the most endangered Republicans in the House, and he’s going after several Senate incumbents at a time when he should be helping them with their elections. Meanwhile, the GOP isn’t merely complaining about tone or strategy; they fear Trump’s fixation on revenge, loyalty tests and symbolic projects like his White House ballroom, all of which are distracting from the issues voters actually need lawmakers to do something about.
It has become the poignant lesson that has been a problem for the past ten years: when a party becomes so dependent on one leader that it can’t criticize him, it can end up trapped by his worst instincts. That is the central tension running through the discussion.
Another striking thing in the NBC report, Sargent said, is that Republicans say they’re afraid of Trump setting them up to take the fall for any midterm election losses. As one GOP senator put it, Trump “will blame it on us and the fact that we didn’t pass the SAVE Act.”
“He likes to dominate people, and he’s a bully, and he’s f—— things up as fast as he can, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it,” the senator added.
Democrats, meanwhile, see an opening, said NBC News. They argue that Trump is acting like a self-interested bully who is more concerned with his own personal dominance than he is with governance. In the end, they believe Trump’s behavior could cost Republicans their majorities.