For as long as there have been American presidents, there have been appeals to Congress to approve the White House’s legislative agenda. The reasoning is straightforward: In our Madisonian system, we have competing co-equal branches, rather than an executive that can do as he or she pleases.
With this in mind, for generations, administrations have pressed federal lawmakers to advance their priorities. It’s American Politics 101.
At least it was. Donald Trump keeps declaring that Congress has already given him what he wants, so he no longer needs the legislative branch to do much of anything. Consider the message the president brought to Larry Kudlow, one of his former economic advisers, during his latest Fox Business interview. Trump, reflecting on his inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act, said:
Plenty of people said, ‘You can’t get it done. Don’t do it. It’ll be bad.’ And we put everything together and this was a four-year package and we put it together and we got it passed. … There was something in there for everybody, and that’s how we got it passed. And so in theory, we’ve gotten everything passed that we need. Now we just have to manage it, but we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.
He said effectively the same thing in October during an event in Japan, saying, in reference to the Republican Party’s domestic policy megabill, “We got everything done. I said, ‘Put it all into one bill and if we get it done, we’re done for four years.’ We don’t need anything more from Congress.”
A week earlier, Trump said he and his team “don’t need any more votes” from Congress.
A month before that, at a press event in England alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Republican boasted that the GOP megabill is “so big that we really don’t have to pass too much anymore.” He added, “We can just do this for four years — implement.”
In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, his legislative agenda, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Most modern presidents from both parties have a laundry list of bills they’d love to see congressional lawmakers take up, but the current president is apparently under the impression that he signed one large bill into law, and he can now coast until January 2029.
The historically unprecedented rhetoric stands out for a few reasons, starting with the fact that Trump remains indifferent toward governing and policymaking.
It’s also a brutal message for his party ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The president is basically telling the American electorate, “Vote for Republican candidates who’ll spend the next two years just sitting around.”
But I continue to think the more nefarious piece of the puzzle is Trump’s implicit acknowledgement of a radical vision: He appears indifferent toward Congress because he’s already seized many of the responsibilities that are supposed to rest with lawmakers, including the power of the purse.
Trump’s impression of Congress as an irrelevant institution is an extension of an authoritarian worldview: He’s already acquiring power as GOP leaders on the Hill render themselves irrelevant, voluntarily ceding ground to the executive, which necessarily leads him to believe “we don’t need anything more from Congress.”
It’s emblematic of a governing crisis that’s likely to get worse before it gets better.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
