MASTER OF THE SENATE — The firehose of news from the White House risks obscuring what ranks as one of President Donald Trump’s most stunning feats: This was the week that he finally broke the Senate. Several key GOP Senate holdouts on the nominations of Trump’s diciest and most problematic Cabinet-level nominees — Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — finally caved this week, greasing the path to confirmation for two politicians who once would have seemed unimaginable for their posts. The moment represented the culmination of a long-running Trump project to bring the Senate to heel. It’s an endeavor that began roughly a decade ago when, as a longshot on the campaign trail in Iowa, Trump served notice that no one was off-limits — not even a Senate heavyweight like John McCain. Trump’s disparagement of McCain’s military service and subsequent defiance in the face of calls to apologize was the first signal of his disregard for the institution and its denizens. Since then, he has dished out demeaning nicknames, mocked senators’ spouses and parents, and driven their colleagues out of Washington — and that’s just in his own party. He has systematically pounded members of the so-called greatest deliberative body on earth into submission, dared those in his party to defy him and consistently dangled the prospect of a MAGA-fueled primary challenges over their heads. The once-powerful legislative chamber is now too wizened and shell-shocked to oppose him on anything grander than esoteric points of policy, a place so diminished that senators threaten their own party colleagues with primaries. Even Kennedy’s wealthy former running mate felt emboldened to announce recently that she, too, would bankroll Senate primary challenges to those who opposed him. That was one of today’s takeaways when, despite his obvious qualms, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), said he’d back Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Young is no apple-polisher by nature — he is a Marine Corps veteran and heir to the hawkish, internationalist, Hoosier foreign policy legacy of Richard Lugar and Lee Hamilton. He hails from an unquestionably red state, but declined to publicly back Trump during the 2024 election. Similarly, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — a physician and a member of the Finance Committee and the chair of the Senate HELP committee who has admitted to “struggling” with the vaccine-denying Kennedy’s nod as Health and Human Services secretary — decided to fold today, delivering the key committee vote to recommend his confirmation. A day earlier, another Republican who was on the fence on Gabbard, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), did the same. What it reveals is that, under its current Republican majority, Trump is himself the master of the Senate. It’s in part because of his application of smash mouth politics, but also because under his watchful eye his most obsequious Senate allies have willingly handed over power. Consider Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a Trump loyalist, who warned members of his own GOP conference in November that “we’re gonna try to get you out of the Senate” if they cast any votes against Trump’s nominees and legislative agenda. “President Trump and JD Vance are going to be running the Senate,” he said, not long after the November election. It’s a view that’s at odds with Senate history — some of the most ambitious presidents in our history have been vexed by the chamber’s obstinance, including from members of their own parties. In 2009, President Barack Obama rode into office accompanied by a 60-vote Democratic majority in the Senate. But as he tried to pass progressive health care legislation, he was stonewalled by multiple Senators from his own party. Their opposition to any version of the Affordable Care Act that included a public option stalled Obama’s momentum during his first year in office, led to a protracted fight over health care and contributed to a sense of dysfunction that resulted in huge Democratic losses during the 2010 midterms. In his first term, Trump learned the hard way in 2017 how seriously the Senate took its power to check the president when he tried to force through an ACA repeal that blew up after three Republicans bucked him, symbolized by a very public thumbs down from McCain. It’s a lesson that pre-Trump presidents internalized. President Bill Clinton’s Democratic Senate allies forced significant changes to his 1993 stimulus package and reigned in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending bill. Six Senate Republicans helped scuttle President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. The Senate, in its constitutional role of advise and consent, has overwhelmingly tended to defer to presidents on their Cabinet choices. But what makes this year so unusual is that rarely have there been so many boundary-pushing nominees — nominees whose qualifications and backgrounds have troubled even Senate Republicans. The Gabbard and Kennedy nominations aren’t guaranteed. But it increasingly looks like they’ll be confirmed. If so, it’s an unconditional surrender that’s both a testament to Trump’s application of hard and soft political power to a body that once took pride in resisting it, and to the extreme polarization that courses through Washington. In other words, include this among the list of second-term Trump accomplishments: the Senate is now no different from the House, they just have longer terms. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s authors at cmahtesian@politico.com and cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie and @calder_mchugh.
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