Trench Warfare and Trump's Agenda
It's Never As Easy As It Looks
At least for now, the game still has rules, and Congress has to pass legislation for The Dear Leader’s agenda to become law. That pesky 250-year-old Constitution remains a thorn in the side of Trump’s aspirations for imperial decree. But make no mistake: the process will be loud, ugly, and drenched in MAGA melodrama.
Despite feel-good-we’re-all-on-the-same-team stories like this one from Playbook, Trump’s legislative agenda will still face the meat grinder of GOP dysfunction, with a fragile House majority sharpening its knives and a restive Senate.
Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are hustling to pitch Trump on their strategies—a one-bill-to-rule-them-all approach to duct-tape the fractured House together or a two-bill plan to deliver a quick border security win before wading into the swamp of tax reform.
Deep down in that lizard brain of his, Trump knows he needs the shiny, base-pleasing border bill to land before the applause fades. The tax bill, though? That’s where the absolute carnage begins. It will attract an army of lobbyists armed with gold-plated pitchforks while simultaneously splitting the House GOP down the middle.
Why? SALT.
Sure, everyone wants the Elon Tax Cut for their billionaire buddies. After all, haven’t America’s Mom-and-Pop Main Street billionaires suffered long enough?
Still, the Freedom Caucus is hellbent on keeping the SALT cap from the 2017 tax bill—a move that screws over blue-state Republicans who desperately need a SALT deduction to survive politically. For GOP lawmakers in the Northeast, this is existential. For the Freedumb Caucus, it’s another chance to spike the football of spite against anything that smells like a win for blue states. This fight is only getting started.
Enter the Thune Gambit (which sounds like a lost episode from the original Star Trek, but I digress). Team Trump (e.g., Susie Wiles) likes the “two-track” plan.
The idea? Score a quick victory with a border-and-energy bill while kicking the tax reform can into the summer. It’s a PR play, plain and simple. Pass the border bill via reconciliation to bypass Senate Democrats, then stall long enough to let Trump’s people “perfect” the tax bill—optics first, consequences later.
But here’s the catch: if Trump doesn’t call the play soon, his second-term agenda will become another casualty of Republican infighting.
Let’s break down the weak spots:
The House (of Cards) Majority
The GOP’s narrow House majority is already hanging by a thread, and Trump’s penchant for raiding Congress to staff his administration could shrink it even further.
Every vote will be a tightrope walk, and Trump’s most rabid supporters see opportunities for grandstanding and delay as a feature, not a bug. Johnson’s job isn’t just herding cats—it’s herding feral, rabid cats who hate each other.
The Freedom Caucus Loons
These guys love chaos almost as much as they love Trump—and that’s saying something. While the Freedom Caucus has endorsed the two-bill approach, in public, rumors say that we shouldn’t bet on smooth sailing.
If the final bill deviates even slightly from their freakshow wishlist, they’ll light it on fire for sport. “You didn’t allow Border Patrol agents to mount dead migrants on the hoods of their trucks? We cannot support this outrage.”
Trump’s “Leadership” Style
Trump has always been the biggest obstacle to his agenda. He thrives on chaos and loves pitting allies against each other in Real Housewives of Capitol Hill knife fights for his amusement. Legislative strategy requires discipline and precision, neither of which are in Trump’s toolkit.
Even his top advisers, like Susie Wiles—the so-called “Team Normie”—know better than to expect him to stick to the plan when he can instead set off political pyrotechnics.
Reconciliation Risks
Passing two reconciliation bills in one year assumes the GOP’s fragile unity can hold—a bold gamble given the ideological and geographical divides in the caucus and the clock of the 2026 election looming by mid-summer.
By the time the tax bill comes up, Trump’s attention will have drifted to the latest shiny object, leaving the House, Senate, and Lobbyist Branchs to squabble over the details. The Thune Gambit might sound clever, but it’s betting on a MAGA caucus that’s more interested in performative outrage than governing.
The Timing Trap
Political capital burns hotter and faster than the Tar Barrels of Ottery St. Mary’s, and a slow rollout of Trump’s economic agenda risks burning through his second-term political capital before the end of Spring. Early legislative failures would be catastrophic for momentum, but delays are sometimes worse.
Delayed gratification enrages the toddler-brained MAGA base. Remember, they expect free eggs, cheap gas, and a foot massage on day one of Trump’s return.
Fast or slow, it’s all a problem.
Why? Externalities, that’s why. It’s not simply that power fades. It’s that Trump is terrible at managing crises unless he creates them. He can’t see beyond his ego and manias to the broader world.
The world won’t stop to let Trump and his allies unfold a perfect legislative play. Hostile foreign powers get a vote. China gets a vote. Russia gets a vote. Iran gets a vote. Economic forces beyond our ken get a vote. Nature gets a vote (remember COVID?).
The Calls Are Coming From Inside the White House
Don’t think that Team Trump will be a unified body for a moment. Expect all the palace intrigue, score-settling, buddy-fucking, infighting, DC smoke-signaling, and agenda-driving from everyone on his team.
Wilson Rule 4: Good organizations leak on purpose. Bad organizations just leak.
On things like the border bill, Thune will lay out red lines his more moderate members won’t cross or for which the impacts (to wit, for farm-state Senators) and optics will be disastrous.
Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, and others will leak like madmen how angry Trump is to see a cucked-out border bill when what we need is a moat filled with acid, patrolled by giant, immigrant-eating robot alligators.
Trump’s Waning Clout
He’s powerful now, but second-term presidents, even Trump, have been lame ducks from day one.
Every nominee Democrats block or delay, every legislative loss—it all chips away at Trump’s aura of inevitability.
This is one of the reasons Democrats must fight Trump’s nominees in a loud, public, messy, demanding way. It makes him spend his mana points on Pete Hegseth, not on ending birthright citizenship.
The war for Trump’s agenda is trench warfare: messy, loud, and brutal, with landmines of timing, personalities, and competing priorities waiting to explode.
Trump’s base expects miracles, but governing is hard work. This isn’t a Fox News segment or a rally—it’s the grind of governance, and nothing about it will be easy. The Trump base expects immediate and miraculous passage of every Trump brain fart or idea a Fox guest bleats out, but Washington, even in this fallen era, doesn’t work that way.
It’s never as easy as it looks.
Rick, you could not have delivered a better pep talk for a Monday morning and specifically for me. My husband has been avoiding politics since election day, but this column he'll like. Thank you and congrats again on your court win.
All the people claiming how a second Trump tour de farce will be more targeted, disciplined, and informed by learning from his first term makes me wonder if any of those people have met Trump. He hasn't learned anything new since grade school, and even then he probably had his mom do his homework.
Anyone expecting the same crew of misfits and self-promoters in the house to work as a unified force pressing Trump's agenda forward need look no further than Nancy Mace parading around Capitol Hill wearing a fake sling.
Thanks for that bracing dose of reality, Rick! We have to stop thinking of Trump like some Colossus standing astride The Mall and remember he's an aging narcissist with dementia leading a party of misfit toys.