Now for the main event…

Somewhere amid the slog of the Senate’s 27-hour session this week, I managed to steal a few minutes with Sen. Ron Johnson, the cantankerous Wisconsinite who was being courted as a key swing vote on Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Johnson is perpetually frustrated: with congressional leadership, with his Republican colleagues, with what he calls Washington’s “addiction” to spending. But if Congress is an addict, Johnson is an enabler—he told me he’d reluctantly vote for the bill despite the trillions it’s projected to add to the deficit. And on Tuesday, he did just that, justifying his vote on a personal promise from the president that he would get serious about reining in spending… in the future.  

Before the final Senate vote, Johnson relayed to me Trump’s complaint that “Democrats are always united, they’re never divided.” Yet, in the end, it was the supposedly unruly and fractured Republican conference that bowed to Trump’s will with little resistance. House Republicans crafted and passed their version of the BBB within six months—a lightning pace, really, when you consider the year and a half it took Democrats to fashion Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, or the year and change they spent on Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 

Indeed, notwithstanding media fixation on the supposed Republican holdouts, who have complained to the cameras that the BBB costs too much, or cuts too deeply, the takeaway from this legislative saga is that Trump has remade the Republican Party into a monolith. Just ask the president himself, who posted this morning, “Trump was right about everything”—an apparent attempt to whip House Republicans nervous about voting for the Senate version of the BBB, which includes steeper Medicaid cuts and adds even more to the deficit than the version the House passed in May.

Even the House Freedom Caucus, which helped oust Republican House Speakers John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, has largely kept their frustrations to themselves when it comes to Trump. Before the House even received the latest version of the bill, a senior House Republican leadership aide told me he wasn’t worried about the fiscal hawks falling in line: Trump was going to pull out all the stops to make it so. For some fiscal hawks, the real fight was just getting face time with Trump. After signaling he had some beef with the bill, Rep. Andy Ogles posted a picture of himself with a major grin outside the White House, boasting about his upcoming meeting with the president. Rep. Tim Burchett posted a White House video describing all the problems he had with the bill—and then posting afterward about how informative Trump was and calling it a “very good day.” 

A sizable number of more centrist Republicans publicly worried about their constituents losing Medicaid coverage, or about the bill’s impact on their state’s renewable energy industry, or the reduced timeframe for an increased state and local tax deduction. But they, too, were largely soothed by meeting with Trump. After all, the punishment for resistance was highlighted for all to see, with Trump threatening to back a primary against (the now-retiring) Sen. Thom Tillis and the creation of a super PAC to defeat Rep. Thomas Massie. For most other would-be defectors, those two cautionary tales were enough. Plus, they had already taken the politically risky vote for Medicaid cuts in the first go-round. The Democratic campaign ads using this as an attack line have already been written, the aide pointed out, and they’re not going to change for anyone who backs out now.

The swift capitulation reflects how Republican careers are made and broken by Trump these days. Two of the few remaining Republicans to take issue with the president at times, or otherwise not support his agenda—Senator Tillis and Rep. Don Bacon—announced their retirements this week, the latest in a long line of Republicans who have quit politics rather than submit to the Trump show: Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, the three former House speakers, the list goes on. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January 2021, only two are still in office.

Meanwhile, Trump has absolutely supercharged the careers of the deeply loyal. House Speaker Mike Johnson is perhaps the most obvious example, having made the strategic decision to endorse Trump during his reelection campaign, and then siding with the president on, well, everything. Johnson’s Trump-is-always-right mantra of governing has served him well so far: It was Trump who cajoled members into voting for Johnson as speaker, a job he still holds, even though reporters once took bets on how long he’d last. 

And then there’s new Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whose job is arguably more difficult than Johnson’s. Yes, he wields a more comfortable margin, but senators are, in theory, less willing to cede everything to Trump—they don’t have to face reelection every two years, after all. Plus, Thune and Trump started off on a more tenuous footing; Thune, an even-keeled senator some reporters refer to as “Hot Grandpa,” almost didn’t run for reelection in 2024 over worries about a Trump-backed primary challenger. 

But he did run, at the urging of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and he won. And now that he’s majority leader, Thune has decided to make nice with Trump, realizing that a contentious relationship would doom his leadership and imperil his ability to gain respect from the growing number of colleagues who owe their elections to the president. But having to navigate a vengeful and mercurial president, as well as a conference with disparate beliefs and varying willingness to be team players, has posed the biggest challenge of Thune’s political career. And the BBB is the first big piece of legislation he’s had to get passed as leader.

Thune had a major letdown early on, when he was forced to abandon his two-bill strategy and cede to Mike Johnson’s “one big, beautiful bill” plan. But in the end, he let the House do its work, and then moved the other chamber’s bill even more to the right, comfortable that they’d have to accept it. Trump could more easily twist arms in the House, and Trump is 100 percent behind it. Vice President J.D. Vance broke the tie, after all. 

Republican senators tell me Thune was transparent, inclusive, and responsive throughout the agonizing process—a major contrast from McConnell’s leadership style, which was very top-down and need-to-know (with members apparently needing to know very little). Thune has held 52 conference-wide meetings since the beginning of the year about the tax and spending bill, Sen. Markwayne Mullin told me, not including the side huddles, small-group meetings, and late night phone calls to hammer out a path to 51 votes. Sen. Kevin Cramer said he’s watched Thune walk from member to member on the Senate floor to get the latest vibe check. “Nobody has to come to him,” Cramer said. “He’s amazing.” 

Ultimately, it was Thune, more so than Trump, who convinced Sen. Lisa Murkowski to cast the deciding vote in favor, offering her a long list of policies that would help Alaska. He was also instrumental in getting the support of Sen. Rick Scott (who’d previously challenged Thune for leadership) with the promise of a vote on his amendment to slow the growth of Medicaid. Scott complimented Thune as “receptive” and having “worked his butt off.” 

Still, Ron Johnson remains grumpy, and an outlier: He’s never had much good to say about leadership, and in this case declared himself “not happy” with the process, declining to comment directly about Thune on the grounds of some advice he got from a “neighbor lady”: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all.”

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