Donald Trump has long complained that Democrats are better at sticking together than Republicans are. He’s already revisited this gripe. In meetings with Republican leaders from the House and Senate and with the House Freedom Caucus, he reportedly insisted that Republicans need to be unified the way Democrats are.
Whether it’s true that Democrats are better at sticking together than Republicans is debatable, particularly given that, not too long ago, the Democratic Party defenestrated a sitting president seeking reelection. What is more interesting, and ominous, is President Trump’s definition of unity.
Please forgive a brief refresher course on the obvious. Traditionally, the way parties achieved political unity is by crafting some kind of rough consensus on an issue. The consensus was never perfect, and some dissenters and mavericks had to be strong-armed by party leaders or the president to fall in line (or not). In any case, party unity was mostly a negotiated thing, with input and compromise from all sides.
The red line for most legislators in such negotiations is having to take a position that jeopardizes their own reelection chances. Asking a representative from a very pro-gun district to vote for, say, a major gun control measure makes no sense, politically. Party loyalty can’t be a suicide pact and, besides, it’s better to have a dissident member of your own party in office than someone from the other party.
In short, presidents worked with party members for the good of the party. One — again obvious — way it worked was that presidents would be clear about what they intended to do. If you’re president, you don’t want your surrogates going around arguing that the president must and will do X — and would surely never do Y! — only to humiliate them by doing Y.
Another obvious thing presidents traditionally do is provide arguments — or “talking points” — about the reasons why policy decisions make sense independent of the president’s personal interest. The president is taking action to protect the American taxpayer, or because he believes it’s a fundamental issue of justice, yada yada yada. This sort of thing helps the party faithful get with the program by knowing the program.
But this is not Trump’s sort of thing.
For instance, both Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that Trump wouldn’t pardon Jan. 6 protesters guilty of attacking cops. “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” Vance said days before the inauguration.
Then Trump did exactly that. His reason? The process of distinguishing between violent goons and overcharged (in his view) nonviolent protesters was too cumbersome and complex. “F— it: Release ’em all,” Trump said according to Axios.
That’s not an argument other Republicans can use on the hustings.
The same goes for Trump’s lawless refusal to implement the TikTok ban. In his first term, Trump supported a ban and signed an executive order to that effect. Then congressional Republicans helped pass bipartisan legislation codifying Trump’s own executive order. The problem? Trump changed his mind.
Why? Because his campaign videos did well on TikTok. “They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,’” he explained.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a leader on this issue, has been forcefully persuasive that TikTok is a national security threat. Is he supposed to say, “never mind” because videos of Trump dancing to the Village People did well?
On everything from legislative strategy to energy policies to Cabinet appointments, Trump has left his own party faithful scrambling to explain and defend his actions beyond blind cult-of-personality loyalty. That would be politically manageable with supermajorities in the House and Senate, less so with a two-vote margin in the House and three-seat majority in the Senate.
For Trump unity means loyalty, and loyalty for Trump is a one-way street. When it comes to Congress, Politico’s Rachel Bade writes, Trump “is more concerned with using his political muscle to perform acts of dominance than to settle the intramural disputes that are holding up his agenda.” The lesson, a Trump transition official told Axios: “Never get ahead of the boss, because you just never know.”
It’s understandable why the Trump team would see things this way. Trump has gelded the GOP. But it’s also understandable why presidents crafted party unity the old way: the Constitution. Unlike in parliamentary systems where the majority party leader runs the whole government, Congress is a separate branch of government, and its members are elected with their own mandates and with their own political ambitions. The party will stick together as long as those ambitions are advanced by unity.
But not much longer.