Trump Is Testing the Senate. And Guess Who’s Going to Win That One?

It’s all kind of like that scene in The Manchurian Candidate when the North Korean operative asks Raymond Shaw who’s the best liked member of the unit, and Raymond says it’s Johnny so-and-so, whatever the guy’s name was; and the North Korean man politely orders Raymond to go shoot Johnny right between the eyes, which Raymond calmly does. Normal morality and consequences are gone. There is only brainwashed servitude.

Trump will do whatever it takes to get all his picks confirmed. He and his people probably have dirt on every senator as it is. But he might not even need dirt. He just needs to go to their states and give a speech and denounce them from the stage as very weak. Actually, he doesn’t even have to do that. Social media will probably suffice in most cases. And so, the 25-or-so senators who stand against Gaetz now will drop to 15, then seven, then maybe two or three just for show (he can afford to lose three on any single vote). Honestly, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, liked well enough at home that she beat a proto-Trumpian GOP loon named Joe Miller in a 2012 write-in campaign, is maybe the last of the truly independent-minded Republican senators in that body. The rest are either suck-ups or suck-ups-in-waiting.

There were a handful of occasions during Trump’s first term when some reasonably significant share of Republicans defied Trump. There was Ukraine aid. There was impeachment, kinda-sorta. There was a defense appropriation bill, in late 2020, when Trump was a lame duck. These occasions were few and far between, but they did exist. There was a sense then, a superiority that comes quite naturally to senators, that Trump was this newbie who needed to be schooled every once in a while, even if gently.