Trump’s congressional leaders never know what’s coming next from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Senate Republicans ended the week with much relief and self-congratulation. After struggling through a “vote-a-rama,” they managed to clear a budget reconciliation bill pre-funding immigration enforcement well into the post-Trump era. Majority Leader John Thune also sidelined efforts to use the bill to kill President Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” which he dropped into the middle of the legislative process like a stink bomb. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sponsored an amendment that would have barred the Justice Department from creating the fund. GOP leaders managed to gather enough votes to block the amendment while allowing endangered Republicans Susan Collins, Jon Husted, and Dan Sullivan to join Democrats in opposing Trump’s wildly unpopular fund.
So despite Trump’s antics, Senate Republicans have won this battle. But the reconciliation bill, which was supposed to be on Trump’s desk by June 1, still faces more challenges as it moves on to the House.
It is growing clearer each day that the primary obstacle to congressional approval of Trump’s 2026 agenda is Trump himself. The reconciliation bill that is causing so much GOP pain right now — a party-line measure to stuff ICE and the Border Control with money they don’t even need — would have passed almost instantly had Trump not poisoned the air with his unexpected slush-fund proposal. Trump previously complicated the process by suggesting that a “skinny” reconciliation bill strictly focused on immigration enforcement should be puffed up with a billion dollars in security funding for his unpopular White House ballroom. The president dug two holes in the road to passage of the legislation he had vociferously demanded; then his congressional allies had to fill them up.
You have to go back a bit to understand the extent to which Trump has confounded his own congressional ground troops. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act already included immigration-enforcement funding for years to come. Had the Trump administration not engaged in thuggish, gratuitous immigration-enforcement tactics in Minneapolis and other cities early this year, a largely symbolic DHS appropriations bill would not have become a flash point for Democrats’ demanding guardrails for ICE and Border Patrol. If Team Trump had just proceeded with its mass-deportation agenda in a calmer and more orderly fashion, the whole reconciliation bill Congress is struggling over right now would have been entirely unnecessary.
Trump’s habit of going off script and causing heartburn for congressional allies isn’t limited to the reconciliation bill. The president’s second term was supposed to herald the arrival of an America First foreign policy that would eschew foreign adventures and “forever wars.” Instead, an unscheduled conquest of Venezuela and an aimless war with Iran have wrong-footed Republicans, who must now find ways to defend and then pay for the president’s globalist forays. It was crystal clear going into 2026 that if Republicans wanted to hold onto Congress in the midterms, the administration absolutely had to find ways to address growing concerns about living costs. So far, Trump has spent the year doing everything possible to ignore and even thwart that agenda.
Arguably, the president’s M.O. has always been to create crises, then resolve them and claim victory. In some ways, this pattern has worked. For example, look at his unpopular and unsuccessful tariff agenda. Whenever the courts or Trump’s own irresolution have forced him to reverse ruinous duties, markets have rewarded Trump with new highs. Just this week, Trump created a new unnecessary brouhaha in Washington by appointing the least qualified person he could find, Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, to serve as acting director of National Intelligence. The latest reporting suggests Trump plans to deal with the bipartisan heartburn over this appointment — which has threatened congressional reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — by shrinking Pulte’s responsibilities or perhaps even abolishing the position. Trump dug a hole, and as his allies agonize about it, he’s thinking about how to fill it.
Perhaps the president is simply playing an extreme version of an expectations game in which he horrifies friends and enemies alike, then takes off the pressure with a TACO maneuver. Or maybe he genuinely enjoys the power to surprise the world with his odd and self-referential priorities.
In the days just ahead, even as Congress struggles to do the minimum work necessary to keep the government functioning, the president will likely be absorbed with the twin celebrations of his own 80th birthday and the country’s 250th. As Jonathan Chait observed at The Atlantic earlier this week, self-celebration is an end in itself to Trump:
Future historians looking for a set piece to embody the Trump era might linger on the forthcoming UFC cage fight at the White House. The scene is intended to convey Trump’s sense of spectacle and violent domination, the link between power and literal muscle that fascinates him. …
It is almost too on the nose for the aging president to stage gladiatorial bouts and commission victory arches as his armies overextend their power in a futile effort to subdue the Persians. The irony almost surely escapes him. His mind cannot process winning as anything deeper than looking good.
A very good way of looking good every day is to create unnecessary problems and then claim to have solved them. That’s why Trump’s second term has been such an unpredictable adventure, not just to those who fear and loathe him but to those he depends on to impose his will on America and the world.
