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HE WON WHATMAGASALTSALTGDPYour browser does not support the element. was supposed to be a close election by a convincing margin, even clinching the popular vote. His fellow Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. He had laid out a bold agenda and expected his party to follow. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush boasted in 2004. Yet what the president had hoped would be his signature policy, a partial privatisation of social security, the state pension scheme, never even came up for a vote. Moderate Republicans revolted, allying with Democrats to fend it off. Similarly ambitious plans for immigration reform flopped as well. “Popularity is as fleeting as the Texas wind,” Mr Bush reflected towards the end of his term.Donald Trump is familiar with this dynamic. In his first term, his promised repeal of Obamacare was thwarted at the last minute by John McCain, a Republican senator and former presidential nominee. He was talked out of his pledge to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan by the national-security grandees he appointed to senior jobs. And even though he shifted the judiciary to the right by appointing lots of judges, the courts scuppered many of his administration’s initiatives. Will he again see much of his agenda undermined or reshaped by fellow conservatives?This time, Mr Trump has been careful to appoint ardent loyalists to senior jobs in the cabinet and the White House. But he has less authority over Republicans in Congress, who have a pivotal role in advancing his agenda. The Senate, for instance, must approve his choices for more than 1,000 jobs, including all the members of the cabinet. Many of Mr Trump’s campaign pledges cannot be fulfilled without legislation from Congress.There is not much margin for dissent. The Republicans have a slightly firmer grip on the Senate than in 2017, with 53 rather than 52 of the chamber’s 100 seats. But that still means Mr Trump can afford no more than three defections on any given vote, assuming Democrats close ranks. As for the House of Representatives, Mr Trump has the smallest majority for a president entering office since George H.W. Bush was inaugurated in 1989 with the Republicans in the minority (see chart ). He has made matters worse by nominating three House Republicans for jobs in his new administration. One has already resigned; if, as is likely, the other two take up their new posts, the Republicans will have a majority of just two, at least until special elections are held to fill the vacancies. That would be the narrowest majority since the 1930s. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, has worried aloud about delayed flights or bouts of flu, which might lead to unexpected defeats in the chamber.Mr Trump has assigned J.D. Vance, his running-mate and a senator for the past two years, to be his point man on Congress. The vice-president anyway has the formal responsibility of presiding over the Senate and casting deciding votes in the event of a tie. But some of Mr Vance’s former colleagues see him as slightly presumptuous. He arrived in the chamber aged 38 and began loudly questioning Republican orthodoxy on economics and foreign policy.Mr Vance’s first task is to help secure the Senate’s approval of Mr Trump’s nominees. In many cases, it will not be easy. The Senate has become more Trumpy since 2017, thanks to new arrivals like Bernie Moreno from Ohio and Jim Banks from Indiana. But there are still a few moderate Republicans, such as Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska. Former members of the party’s leadership, including John Cornyn from Texas and Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, are more institutional than iconoclastic. When the Republican caucus chose a new leader to replace Mr McConnell in November, it rejected the candidate, Rick Scott from Florida, and plumped instead for John Thune from South Dakota, a more collegial type. Mr Thune has said that he will not facilitate Mr Trump’s agenda by scrapping procedural rules like the filibuster, which sets a 60-vote threshold for most legislation to win approval.In similar fashion, Republicans in the Senate may not simply wave through all Mr Trump’s most controversial nominees. Already Matt Gaetz, Mr Trump’s first choice for attorney-general despite his louche personal life, has had to withdraw in the face of resolute opposition. Although hostility to Peter Hegseth as the next secretary of defence seemed to be evaporating after a hearing this week, the prospects of other nominees remain in doubt: as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy junior as secretary of health and human services and Kash Patel as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Several Republican senators have sounded sceptical notes about one or other of these choices. For instance Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, a doctor, has hummed and hawed about Mr Kennedy. Mr Thune, when asked whether such figures would be approved, recently said, “We don’t have, at this point, I don’t think, clarity on that.” He has himself sounded lukewarm about sending the Senate on holiday to allow Mr Trump to make “recess appointments” without the Senate’s approval.Whereas Republicans in the Senate may dilute Mr Trump’s most radical ideas out of a sense of moderation and propriety, the House may resist him as not radical enough. A majority of Senate Republicans arrived in the upper chamber before he first became president in 2017, but of the 220 Republicans elected to the House in November, only 70 predate him. During the past eight years, moderates have seen their influence wane. Tevi Troy, a presidential historian, predicts that most opposition to Mr Trump will now come from his right: “It’ll be, ‘I’m not criticising Trump. I’m criticising people who are undermining Trump.’”Far-right members of Congress are some of Mr Trump’s fiercest supporters. But many of them are also purists, who see compromise and pragmatism as forms of corruption. “What we used to have was Ron Paul,” recalls Grover Norquist, an anti-tax crusader, referring to a former Republican representative who would oppose virtually all legislation as insufficiently conservative. “When you have a 20- or 30-vote margin, you can have a Ron Paul do that, and everybody gets the joke, right?”These days the hardline Freedom Caucus has dozens of members and the joke is less funny. One of the group’s motivating beliefs is fiscal conservatism. Mr Trump, in contrast, has never shown much interest in fiscal discipline. Mr Trump and the Freedom Caucus have already clashed over the “debt ceiling”, the legal cap on the federal government’s borrowing, which Mr Trump said in December should be abolished or suspended as part of a stopgap budget bill. Republican fiscal hawks rejected the idea unless “real spending cuts are agreed to and in place”. They won that skirmish: the idea was dropped. Even so, 38 Republicans voted against the budget bill, which passed only with Democratic support.The fiscal hawks will have more chances to flex their muscles: in March, when December’s budget agreement expires, and over the summer, when the debt ceiling will be hit. A rankled and perhaps nervous Mr Trump has called for a more loyal conservative to challenge Chip Roy, the Freedom Caucus’s policy chair, in a primary at the next election. He has also chosen a former Freedom Caucus staffer, James Braid, to head the office at the White House in charge of liaising with Congress.The slender Republican majorities and the divergent dynamics of the House and the Senate will make legislating fraught and unpredictable. Small groups of representatives or even individual lawmakers may be able to hold bills to ransom. The inevitable horse-trading is bound to dilute or modify Mr Trump’s proposals. Big tests will come in the next few months, as Republicans pursue legislation on immigration, energy and the budget.On the campaign trail Mr Trump came up with lots of ideas for tax cuts, many of which evoke more eye-rolling than enthusiasm on Capitol Hill. His main goal is to extend the tax cuts he pushed through during his first term as president, in 2017. That alone will cost some $5trn over a ten-year period, according to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a pressure group. Mr Trump also wants to exempt tips from income tax ($300bn), as well as overtime pay ($2trn) and social-security benefits ($1.3trn). Few observers expect all, or even most, of these expensive giveaways to become law.In fact, some in Congress would like to revise or undo certain elements of the 2017 law. They have leverage, since most of the 2017 tax cuts will expire automatically unless Congress extends them. Mike Lawler, a congressman from New York, wants to lift the 2017 law’s $10,000 cap on state and local tax () deductions. “There’s more than enough members to prevent passage of a bill,” he says of fellow blue-state Republicans pushing for an increase to the cap. “There’s no room for error here…the reality is that if no tax bill passes, comes back unlimited.”The 2017 law also raised the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000. Mr Trump says he supports another “significant expansion”. Mr Vance, a keen natalist, thinks it should be lifted to $5,000. But the credit’s biggest champions have left the Senate and other senators have different spending priorities. For instance, Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wants to boost defence spending by $120bn over the next two years. In the long run, he says, “It wouldn’t hurt” to nearly double spending on defence to 6% of —even though Mr Trump has reportedly talked about getting the Pentagon “to do more with less”.Congress is also likely to interfere with Mr Trump’s plans to raise revenue. On the campaign trail he said that America could rake in “trillions” by increasing tariffs. He suggested a universal tariff as high as 20% on all imports except those from China, which would be subject to a 60% levy. Although Mr Trump may try to impose such rises by decree, it would be preferable to get Congress to adopt them, since he could then include the resulting revenue in his reckoning of the overall cost of a tax bill. That is important, since Republicans will only be able to get a budget bill through Congress using a process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster. Congressional rules, however, cap the cost of bills passed by reconciliation. So Congress would, in effect, be allowing Mr Trump to cut taxes or spend more if it went along with him on tariffs. Yet there is almost no chance that it will. An across-the-board tariff increase would be dead on arrival in the Senate, where free-trade Republicans still dominate.The threat of the massive tax increase that will automatically occur if Congress does not reach a compromise should ensure that some sort of budget bill is passed. That bill is also likely to advance some of the policies Mr Trump has advocated on immigration, allowing the new president to claim victory on two counts. But on the details, Mr Trump may end up deferring to Congress, rather than the other way round. “He’s more focused on just getting it done and keeping the promise,” says Paul Ryan, a former speaker of the House who helped shepherd the 2017 tax cut through Congress. Sometimes the president-elect seems to want to save face by appearing to be in command, whatever the reality. “The tactic is always to say, ‘This is horrible!’ Then you get a tiny tweak, and he’s like, ‘Amazing!’,” jokes a Senate aide. “It’s an interesting dance.”Given the difficulty of getting legislation through Congress, Mr Trump will often resort instead to executive orders. Those are vetted not by Congress, but by the courts. In theory, this puts Mr Trump in a strong position, since the courts are broadly deferential to presidential authority and since Mr Trump himself appointed 226 federal judges in his first term, including three Supreme Court justices.Yet even before Mr Trump takes office, he is being reminded of the independence of the courts. On January 9th the Supreme Court, despite its expansive view of presidential immunity, declined to stop a court in New York from sentencing Mr Trump for falsifying business records. This week it seemed minded to reject a plea from Mr Trump to delay a ban on TikTok, a popular video app that Mr Trump vowed to save during the campaign. Although six of the nine justices have been appointed by Republican presidents and are conservative in outlook, they clearly do not intend to act as a rubber stamp for Mr Trump.Although the conservative justices often vote together on prominent cases, such as their decision to overturn the right to an abortion, they do not always rule in lockstep. Statistical analysis from Dean Jens of the University of Central Florida shows that the 6-3 court is really a 3-3-3 court, with two conservative camps forming blocs as distinct as the liberal one. For example, over the past two terms John Roberts, the chief justice, voted with Elena Kagan, a liberal one, about as often as he did with two of the most conservative justices.The courts routinely thwarted Mr Trump during his first term. The Supreme Court blocked his attempt to cancel a programme that had prevented the deportation of 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to America as children. It also stopped him from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. A federal court prevented him from using defence funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico. The courts rejected his initial attempts to ban visas for people from certain predominantly Muslim countries. In all, federal agencies faced legal challenges to 246 different policies during Mr Trump’s first term, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think-tank. His administration prevailed only 54 times, losing in court or retracting the disputed edicts in the other 192 instances.Mr Trump has nonetheless signalled that he will keep trying to implement pet policies using untested legal theories. He has talked, for instance, of declaring America to be at war to permit the use of the army to help round up illegal immigrants. If he goes ahead with this ruse, it is certain to be challenged in the courts. Mr Trump may also seek to undermine Congress’s power of the purse by refusing to spend money it has set aside for particular purposes—a step known as impoundment. His acolytes have also talked about invoking an obscure rule to sack bureaucrats en masse and replace them with more loyal lieutenants.Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, expects that Mr Trump’s unambiguously unconstitutional policies, such as withholding American citizenship from babies born in America to illegal immigrants, will indeed be rejected by the courts. But he remains “petrified” since Mr Trump clearly intends to push the boundaries of his authority. He argues that despite some unusual splits, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled 6-3 in favour of conservatives on “the issues that ideologically divide society”, from presidential power to gun rights.However, Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute, another think-tank, thinks the courts’ willingness to frustrate Mr Trump “depends on the specific issue”. He is likely to have more luck reshaping the bureaucracy than attempting to evade or undermine laws he dislikes. “A president is always on much firmer ground in doing things that affect the executive branch rather than trying to create new laws or enact programmes through executive order that Congress rejected.”Mr Trump, in short, may appear a colossus, towering over national politics, but his own notional allies in Congress and the courts, let alone his ideological opponents, are not willing to let him have everything his way. Even on the right, Washington is full of people who intend to remain long after Mr Trump’s term ends in 2029. Fawning deference to the president in public will often conceal the pursuit of agendas that differ from his in private. And America’s founding fathers, for good or for ill, designed a system of government in which the gears were deliberately sprinkled with sand. Mr Trump will never get them running smoothly.
