Senate GOP divided over how tightly to embrace Trump

Donald Trump’s dominating victories on Super Tuesday cemented his lock on the Republican presidential nomination, but Senate GOP leaders are reluctant to fully embrace the former president given his tendency to alienate college-educated women and other swing voters.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) finally announced his endorsement of Trump on Wednesday, the same day Nikki Haley dropped out of the presidential race.

But McConnell indicated to reporters that his views of Trump — and his doubts about his palatability with moderate and independent voters — remain unchanged.

McConnell, when asked about his endorsement in light of the excoriating denunciation of Trump he delivered on the Senate floor at the end of his second impeachment trial, told reporters Wednesday that he was always planning to support the GOP nominee for president in 2024, even if it was Trump.

“On Feb. 25, 2021, shortly after the attack on the Capitol, I was asked a similar question and I said I would support the nominee for president, even if it were the former president,” he said.

When then pressed whether he felt comfortable about Trump being the nominee given the 91 felony counts he faces in four different criminal prosecutions, McConnell simply said: “I don’t have anything to add to what I just said.”

“He obviously is going to be the nominee of our party,” he said.

McConnell’s endorsement of Trump earlier in the day didn’t include much praise for the former president, and instead framed the decision as motivated by duty to party more than anything else.

“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for president of the United States,” he said. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”

Other Senate Republicans are dutifully endorsing Trump but are not embracing him.

“I’m going to support the nominee for president. I’ll say it that way right now,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who initially backed Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) for president.

Rallying around Trump raises a variety of awkward questions for Senate Republicans — such as whether to support his claims that President Biden and Democrats stole the 2020 election, a debate that played out prominently in 2022 and only hurt Senate GOP candidates.

Senate Republicans will now have to play defense on Trump’s other controversial claims and pledges, such as his promise in November to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Trump’s first effort at repealing former President Obama’s signature law famously failed in 2017 when GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and the late John McCain (Ariz.) voted against it.

Collins and Murkowski will still be in the Senate next year, having won reelection in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Biden and his family, wage “war” on drug cartels, close the Department of Education and “totally obliterate the Deep State.”

Republican senators have largely ignored Trump’s comments at campaign rallies and haven’t paid much attention to his policy agenda for a second term, either.

“My impression is each senator sets their own agenda. It’s not like we have a single agenda as a conference or caucus,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of Trump’s most vocal GOP critics.

“I think there’s a few things he’s made clear. One that he’d end the war in Ukraine on day one. I don’t know what he wants to do on Israel and Hamas and Gaza. That’s probably something we’d learn,” he said. “He’d indicated what he wants to do on tariffs, so a few things he’s made clear.”

Trump has called for slapping a 10 percent tariff on all imports and raising fees on Chinese imports by between 40 and 60 percentage points.

Many Senate Republicans aren’t ready to embrace Trump’s campaign agenda as their own but say they want to collaborate with him if he’s elected president, especially on renewing his landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which expires at the end of 2025.

“I think we are a separate branch of government, and so I do think we should have a level of independence,” said Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair Joni Ernst (Iowa), who waited until Wednesday to endorse Trump.

Senate Republican leaders didn’t coordinate with Trump when they pursued a bipartisan border security deal with Senate Democrats and the White House.

That decision came back to bite them when Trump flexed his political muscle by derailing the legislation. Trump told allies on Capitol Hill that he didn’t want to give Biden a political win and urged GOP lawmakers to oppose it.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who negotiated the border security deal, said letting presidential politics dominate the Senate agenda would likely mean little gets done on immigration reform or anything else before the election.

“To actually make law, you actually have to work with the current White House,” he observed. “But obviously if we have a bunch of folks saying, ‘Hey we don’t want to do anything until we have the election to be able to determine it’ … then in some ways we’re stuck.”

Senate conservatives last month blasted McConnell and his leadership team for negotiating with Democrats to reform asylum laws and give the president limited emergency powers to close the border instead of following Trump’s lead.

“I think Senate leadership’s handling of that was very unhelpful,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told The Hill on Wednesday.

Cruz and other Trump allies are calling on the Senate Republican leadership to embrace Trump closely, even though the likely Republican presidential nominee remains controversial with large swaths of voters, including large minorities of Republican voters who supported Haley in Colorado, Massachusetts, Virginia, Utah and other states Tuesday.

“We should be working with President Trump — who will be the nominee and who I believe will be the next president — and I think it’s important for both current leadership and whoever the next leader is to be able to work closely with the president,” he said.

Cruz said “there certainly doesn’t appear to be any” cooperation between the current Senate Republican leadership and the Trump campaign.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has gone even further by calling for an election to replace McConnell in the next few weeks so a new Senate Republican leader can actively campaign with Trump.

“We got to get somebody now who’s going to energize our base all across the country for Senate Republicans and also going to be able to get on that airplane with Trump and stand up at a rally and say, ‘Listen, we need President Trump to win,’ and be very truthful about it,” he told The Hill last week.

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), a first-term senator who voted against McConnell as GOP leader in the last race, said he wants to see much closer coordination between the Senate GOP leadership and Trump.

“I do think it’s important for us to be rolling [in] the same direction. There’s a lot at stake in this election,” he said. “You’ve got the record of the failed policies under Joe Biden and a lot of success under President Trump. So if we want to bring that back, I think it would be smart for us to work together.”

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who are both running to succeed McConnell as leader, have pledged to colleagues they will work closely with Trump if he is elected president.

Both Thune and Cornyn have raised questions and doubts about Trump’s policy judgments and electability in the past, before he dominated the rest of the GOP field in this year’s presidential primary.