President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on November 17, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Republicans in Congress have bowed overwhelmingly to President Donald Trump, rarely challenging him and instead forfeiting their legislative prerogatives by allowing him to dictate their agenda. Even as the president's plummeting poll numbers put them at political risk for doing so, most Republicans in Congress still focus on remaining loyal to Trump.
Now a recent study in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics has figured out why.
"Congress is portrayed as compliant with President Donald J. Trump’s agenda because he is intimidating its members," wrote Syracuse University professor emeritus Jeffrey M. Stonecash in the study. "This neglects an alternative explanation that focuses on the increased congruence of presidential and congressional electoral bases. Trump is the beneficiary of a geographical realignment that took decades and has created a high degree of overlap of the two bases."
He added, "This analysis tracks that process from 1952 to 2024. It has produced a situation in which policy concerns overlap and encourage congressional compliance."
In his conclusion, Stonecash wrote that "it has taken a long time, but the Republican Party now enjoys considerable unity of electoral bases and purpose. Donald Trump clearly pressures members to accept his agenda, but his advantage is that he starts with a congressional party that shares his electoral base more than any other Republican presidents have experienced. Poll after poll show that his support among Republicans is strong."
Speaking to PsyPost's Eric W. Dolan, Stonecash said that "the media presents congressional compliance with Trump as due to fear of him. One man has intimidated Congress and abolished the separation of powers. While there is a grain of truth to that, what we are witnessing is primarily the result of a lengthy realignment that has created a geographical overlap of presidential and congressional electoral bases."
He continued. “That base is conservative socially and economically.”
Speaking with AlterNet in August, cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan explained that Trump supporters remain extremely loyal to him because they are attracted to his ability to demonize individuals who are not in fact responsible for their suffering, but who they wish to believe is.
"We are social beings, and we're emotional beings primarily," Hassan wrote. "So a key point in my BITE [Behavior, Information, Thought and Emotional] model of authoritarian control is information control. I emphasize how these destructive groups, like the Trump movement, are lying all the time. And part of the appeal is really about using emotionally leading rhetoric to scare people, to create 'the other,' to demonize."
Also in August, University of Bristol cognitive scientist Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky added that many Trump supporters engage in trollish behavior against non-supporters because of a "dark triad' of psychological traits.
"If you look at internet trolls and their personality profiles, you find that they score very high on what's called the dark triad of personality: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and [narcissism]," Lewandowsky explained.