U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 25, 2025. REUTERS Nathan Howard
Ninety-five days from the midterm elections and President Donald Trump’s policies appear to be on the ropes. Not so much with Democrats, says New York Magazine columnist Ed Kilgore, but from Senate Republicans.
The word for the day, said Kilgore, is retribution. And it appears to be rolling out of the red side of the Senate “at the very moment the GOP should be transforming itself into a lean, mean fighting machine for November.”
“Trump’s most insistent demand at the moment is that ‘his’ Senate Majority Leader John Thune cancel its crucial … August recess to agitate the air over the SAVE America Act, for which there is not even majority support in the Senate, much less the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Democratic filibuster. There are even fewer votes to satisfy Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans just kill the filibuster outright, exposing them to the wrath of a future Democratic majority.”
Kilgore said it’s not even clear right now there is a majority for the budget resolution funding of Trump’s hated Iran War and creating a “slush fund” to encourage states to adopt elements of the SAVE America Act.
Thune is taking most of Trump’s punches at the refusal of the Senate to do his bidding, but Kilgore said Trump’s real problem are all the Republicans he’s pushed out in primaries who have had enough of him.
Two lame duck senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) are demanding explicit “in writing” commitments by the administration to abandon two toxic byproducts of the IRS’s settlement of a Trump lawsuit: the so-called “anti-weaponization fund and presidential immunity from future tax audits.
“[W]hy would he expect any cooperation from Cornyn and Tillis?” asked Kilgore. “The former is ending a four-term Senate career because Trump at first tolerated and then endorsed his primary opponent, Ken Paxton. The latter preemptively announced his retirement just over a year ago in response to Trump’s threats of backing a primary challenge after he voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Two other newborn Trump haters are Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Trump purged Cassidy from primaries because the lawmaker voted to convict him of impeachable offenses after Trump’s failed Jan. 6 coup. Cassidy now opposes both the anti-weaponization fund and public financing for Trump’s ballroom. Trump has sided against Murkowski in primaries, but she persevered, so Kilgore said Trump should not expect her to toady to him.
“If you sow the wind with disloyalty to your party’s senators, you will reap the whirlwind in reciprocal disloyalty when you need their support,” said Kilgore. “Blustery threats and authoritarian posturing cut little ice with people who have succumbed to or survived threats of political excommunication and career extinction. That’s ultimately why Trump is spending precious days and weeks browbeating the scapegoat John Thune and denying Senate candidates life-saving time on the campaign trail.”
But what should you expect from the president who cost his party a Senate majority in 2021 when he “barnstormed through Georgia attacking that state’s election integrity,” said Kilgore.
