Republican Lawmakers Are Already Growing Tired Of Being Bullied By Trump

According to new reports, Republicans in both the House and Senate are getting sick and tired of the bullying that they are experiencing from Donald Trump and his allies as the incoming administration seeks to get all Republicans in line. Some Republicans have suggested that they could be near a breaking point and that we could see some “bloodletting” very soon as they balk at Trump’s picks and policy positions. Things are already shaping up to be a disaster, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Donald Trump hasn't even been sworn in yet for his second term. In fact, we've got a little over a month to go before that happens. And already he might have spent all of the political capital that he had built up, which wasn't much to begin with, with Republicans in the Senate. According to a report from Politico this week, there is a lot of Republican senators behind the scenes, of course, who are getting pretty off about the fact that Donald Trump and his allies think that they can bully them into submission. Here's what Politico had to say. While Republicans are showing a united front and following and allowing, excuse me, the President-elect to choose the people he wants to push his agenda forward. Behind the scenes, there are complaints about infighting and purity tests that appear to be growing. According to Politico, following her initial hesitance toward Pete Hegseth Trump's embattled, defense secretary pick, Senator Joni Ernst came in for a raft of criticism from Republicans in her home state of Iowa.

Senator Bill Cassidy, one of four remaining senators who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 just drew a formal primary challenge. And moderate senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are already starting to catch some heat from party activists. Corey Lewandowski is now threatening, quote, there will be no resource that we won't use to get GOP Senators to toe the line. Some senators bristle at the threats and say, the prospect of political consequences alone may not produce the desired results. Politico added. So you got people like Corey Lewandowski, you've got Elon Musk and Vik Ram Swami that went to Congress this week and said, Hey, listen, if you don't support everything, Donald Trump does blindly, we're gonna fund, or I am. Elon says, your primary challengers, and some of them already exist out there, and that's not sitting well with these Republicans. Some of them, not many, probably not even a handful, but a few of them kind of getting off.

One happens to be Republican Senator Kevin Kramer from North Dakota who said to Politico quote, I don't think it makes more loyal senators out of people. Senators are not slouches. I don't know many wimpy senators. We got elected too. And in a case like Susan Collins, she wins overwhelmingly in a state that Donald Trump doesn't carry. You know, how do you not give her that room? And then Republican Senator John Cornyn added, I think this has gotten a little out of hand, the senators have a responsibility under the Constitution to do advice and consent. And really, it's not just to protect the Senate's prerogatives, it's to protect the President against surprises that don't come up during the vetting process. So these

Republican senators are like, Hey, listen, um, we gotta go through elections too, man. And by the way, we all won ours. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. Some of us even won seats in states that you couldn't win. So we know what works for our constituents and we know what doesn't. Which, by the way, is something I pointed out earlier in this week when I mentioned that Elon says, he'll find a MAGA challenger to anybody that doesn't stand with Trump. The people who won't stand with Trump are from areas where a MAGA challenger has zero chance of winning. So Elon Musk's threat has zero chance of being effective. The bullying has zero chance of being effective. These people are more independent, I will say, because they have the leeway to be more independent. Somebody like Tommy Tuberville in Deep Red Alabama, he doesn't have that leeway.