President Donald Trump sure is making it hard to be his friend. Despite having more members firmly in the MAGA camp, House Republicans have spent most of his second term squabbling among themselves. Instead, it has been GOP senators who have been his most surprising ride or dies, helping advance Trump’s agenda at a pace that belies the body’s usual slow crawl.
As Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has struggled to wrangle his caucus, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., by contrast has been tenaciously driving the White House’s agenda forward. It was always bound to be a thankless task for Thune to keep the famously distractible president on the best route. But the past month has seen Trump throw roadblock after roadblock directly in Thune’s path, making it almost impossible to avoid this week’s major collision.
The last month has seen Trump throw roadblock after roadblock directly in Thune’s path, making it almost impossible to avoid this week’s major collision.
Budget reconciliation bills, like the one Republicans are currently shepherding through the Senate, are never easy. It’s meant to fund the ongoing mass deportation campaign, one of Trump’s key priorities. The bill is a workaround after the Democrats’ successful filibuster earlier this year saw money for immigration enforcement stripped from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual budget.
The urge to pile on other potential GOP priorities ahead of the midterms was sharp, but Thune signed off on a plan to keep the reconciliation bill narrowly focused on providing new cash to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol — on top of the money thrown their way in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Crucially, however, in dodging the need for Senate Democrats’ votes, the partisan budget bill will require the agreement of almost every Republican in both chambers of Congress to reach a majority.
Having shut the door on a free-for-all, the odds looked good for the $72 billion package — except for one (relatively) small problem. Trump allies — including Budget Committee Chair Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — opted to add on $1 billion in Secret Service funding for security enhancements at the White House. That included $220 million for the “East Wing Modernization Project,” the official name of the ballroom Trump is constructing on the footprint of the demolished East Wing.
While the bill made clear that none of the funds “may be used for non-security elements” of the ballroom’s construction, enough Republican senators were still skeptical to place the bill’s passage at risk. A briefing from the head of the Secret Service did little to quiet those concerns. A ruling from the Senate parliamentarian last week that the funding didn’t fit the strict rules of the budget reconciliation process must have been something of a relief then, giving GOP senators a convenient excuse to strip the ballroom provision from the bill entirely.
But as soon as one problem was solved, Trump threw an even bigger one their way in the form of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund with virtually no oversight.
There are more problems with the fund’s shady structure than we have time to unpack here. The short version is that in settling a lawsuit against his own administration, Trump ordered the acting attorney general to draw money directly from the Treasury and create a board to disperse payments to people who claim to have been persecuted by federal prosecutions under the Biden administration. According to the settlement, the five members of that panel will report directly to the president (with one member appointed in “consultation” with Congress) and have an obligation to keep exactly who has applied for those funds, let alone receive them, confidential.
To say this was not well received on Capitol Hill would be a massive understatement.
Some Senate Republicans immediately began considering ways to potentially throw limits on the fund into the reconciliation bill via amendment. Democratic senators, meanwhile, didn’t hide their excitement at the thought of providing their own amendments to block the fund, all of which would receive a vote under Senate budget rules.
A two-hour meeting between GOP senators and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the Capitol did nothing to quell the furor. Punchbowl News reported that “around 25 of them, an exceptionally high number for these closed-door meetings — took turns blasting the proposal and lamenting that they were being put in this situation.”
Trump’s allies in the upper chamber are growing tired of swerving around the president’s whiplash-inducing whims.
It is revisiting the point that this whole mess is getting in the way of what was supposed to be the president’s top policy priority: immigration. Trump had said that he wanted the ICE funding measure on his desk by June 1. But instead of sending the funding bill to the House before a weeklong Memorial Day recess, senators instead were forced to flee Washington rather than face a series of politically embarrassing votes.
Trump has, naturally, not taken well to these shows of defiance from legislators. A Republican senator told MS NOW on Friday that the White House indicated the president could veto any reconciliation bill that excludes funding for his ballroom or places limitations on the “anti-weaponization” fund, with the latter a particular focus of the threat. (When asked about the claim, first reported by Semafor, a White House official told MS NOW that it was “not accurate.”)
But the Senate’s acts of rebellion come from a unique kind of frustration, sparked when someone you’re trying to help is only making the task harder. Trump’s allies in the upper chamber are growing tired of swerving around the president’s whiplash-inducing whims. It may not be long before they stop swerving altogether, simply continuing forward over what has gone from a roadblock to merely a road bump.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.