When Donald Trump first took the oath of office in 2017, former Republican Rep. Mark Sanford was about 50 yards away, not exactly sure what to think.
A few months before the election, Sanford had declared in a New York Times op-ed that he had no stomach for Trump’s “personal style and his penchant for regularly demeaning others.” But, for the good of the party, the MAGA skeptic endorsed the man who then stood before him.
For the next two years, Sanford — a libertarian-minded Freedom Caucus member — was a frequent Trump critic. Days after Trump took office, he said he heard from constituents that Trump’s travel ban was “moving from weird to reckless.” In the weeks after, he told Politico that Trump “represents the antithesis, or the undoing, of everything I thought I knew about politics, preparation and life.” In March of that year, he tried to sink Trump’s health care replacement for the Affordable Care Act.
Sanford’s slights were so frequent that Trump eventually called him a “nasty guy” in a closed-door meeting with lawmakers. And two years after Trump took office, a Trump-backed primary challenger ousted the former South Carolina governor turned congressman from office.
Back in 2017, the Republican Party in Congress was teeming with Trump skeptics — both publicly and privately. To hear Sanford tell it, there was a first generation of naysayers: Sen. Jeff Flake, Sen. Bob Corker, Rep. Justin Amash and himself. Then, a second generation: Sen. Mitt Romney, Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
On the other side of the congressional GOP’s Trump equation, there were so few true Trump supporters in 2017 that, to this day, the president still refers to some Republican lawmakers who quickly endorsed him as his “originals,” one such lawmaker recently bragged to NOTUS.
But as Trump begins his new term, virtually all the Trump skeptics have left Congress or lost — replaced by MAGA diehards and other Republicans who largely have Trump to thank for their positions of power. Most GOP lawmakers now are, truly, Trump devotees.
As Sanford said, the GOP resistance to Trump is just a thing of the past.
“It’s gone,” he told NOTUS. “It’s extinct.”
“Those folks have been weeded out,” said Sanford, who opted to watch the college football championship at a friend’s house rather than go to the inauguration on Monday.
Even if efforts like Republicans for Kamala Harris fell short, these GOP lawmakers suggested it was important to have dissenting voices in the party to criticize Trump when he steps out of line. Whereas many of them might be the first ones to speak out on Trump’s decision to pardon almost every Jan. 6 rioter, Republicans in Congress have found all sorts of creative ways to avoid condemning Trump for the move.
There’s hardly anyone in the congressional GOP willing to call Trump out.
By at least one metric — Republicans who supported Trump’s second impeachment — Trump’s detractors in Congress can literally be counted on one hand.
Of the 10 Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, just Reps. Dan Newhouse and David Valadao remain. And only three of the seven senators who voted to convict Trump — Sens. Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — are still in office. (Cassidy and Collins also face reelection for the first time since that vote this upcoming cycle, and Murkowski was probably the most publicly disapproving Republican in Congress of Trump’s decision to pardon the rioters.)
For the most part, Republican critics who left Congress have been pressured into the shadows, preferring to complain about the president privately while tripping over themselves to publicly celebrate him on Fox News.
According to Sanford, when he was in office, members would “be grumbling about Trump and what an idiot they thought he was. And then, three minutes later, when they were on television, were saying something quite the opposite.”
That’s the uncomfortable reality that several former Republican lawmakers each told NOTUS that they’re wrestling with as they witness the president’s return to the White House. There’s a choice to be made in Trump’s Washington — and it is Trump’s Washington — for Republican lawmakers: Bite your tongue when Trump does something objectionable and try to influence decisions from the inside, or object and possibly face excommunication.
“It’s been hard,” former Rep. Charlie Dent told NOTUS. “I think a lot of them feel as I do. They’re just quiet about it.”
Dent, an unabashed Trump critic and formerly a leading GOP moderate on Capitol Hill, also watched Trump’s first inaugural address from the West Front. He still remembers trying to find something to say about the “American Carnage” speech. “The only thing I could say about that day was that President Trump discussed many of the themes that he shared during the campaign,” Dent said.
For Trump’s second inaugural address, Dent gave away his tickets, opting to watch from his Pennsylvania home with his wife.
Dent has watched many former colleagues fall victim to Trump-backed primaries or internal ideological wars.
He was struck, he told NOTUS, by Speaker Mike Johnson handing Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner’s gavel to the more Mar-a-Lago palatable Rep. Rick Crawford. Although the official line on Turner losing his gavel has been about Turner investigating Havana syndrome, many familiar with Capitol Hill and Trump suspect there’s more to it.
“That’s kind of a sign that the MAGA wing is thoroughly ascended,” Dent said.
Dent also knows that Republicans will face tough political headwinds with a GOP incumbent. There’s a tension he hopes Republicans now in Congress grapple with. If lawmakers swallow too many tough legislative pills, if they pledge their allegiance to Trump too many times, they’ll likely lose to Democrats during the midterms. Dent hopes that Republicans keep that in mind — and remember that Trump is now a lame duck.
“Republicans do need to think about the future of the party,” he said.
So far, Republican lawmakers are shrugging off those concerns, though Dent speculated that Trump would “continue to put his allies in Congress in very uncomfortable predicaments every day.”
Trump’s first inaugural address was Rep. Fred Upton’s eighth watching as a congressman. The Michigan moderate spent the next four years agitating Trump, and he was eventually one of the 10 House Republicans who voted for the president’s second impeachment.
After retiring in 2022, Upton spent Trump’s second inauguration skiing in Utah. Even when he was off the slopes, he told NOTUS in an email, he was not “glued to the TV.”
He’s disturbed, he said, by the removal of former Chairman of Joint Chiefs Mark Milley’s portrait in the Pentagon, the termination of former national security adviser John Bolton’s security detail and the Jan. 6 pardons. But he’s doubtful many Republican lawmakers will have much to say about any of that.
“It will be very hard for any of them to counter the pressure of threatened primaries as we have already seen,” Upton said.
As he returns to Washington, Trump has doubled down on his primary-threats strategy to keep lawmakers in line. Last month, he threatened to back primary challengers to the Republicans who opposed his plan to raise the debt ceiling. This month, he re-upped his threat to support a challenge to Rep. Chip Roy, one of the few Republicans who supported Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential primary.
If anyone knows about keeping Trump criticism quiet, it’s former Rep. Mo Brooks. Of Trump’s Republican critics, his is perhaps the most tortured relationship with the president.
Brooks backed Sen. Ted Cruz back in 2016, and he tentatively issued support for Trump when Cruz withdrew his bid. Brooks welcomed Trump to the Capitol in 2017 for his inaugural address.So passionate was Brooks’ support for Trump by 2020 that he refused to certify the election. And he was so enmeshed in Trump’s scheme to remain in power that Brooks asked Trump for a pardon. When Brooks ran for Senate in 2022, he expected Trump’s support.
But Brooks, too, was not on Capitol Hill for Trump’s second inaugural address, having lost Trump’s endorsement to Sen. Katie Britt, which all but handed her the Senate seat.
“I had no desire whatsoever to watch or listen to Donald Trump,” he told NOTUS.
Brooks said he’d rather be spending time with his 14 grandkids, eight kids and wife. Or working on his “rather long honey-do list.” (He said he spent the day after the inauguration addressing one such item: digging up his house’s concrete foundation to clear up a sewer line.)
“Donald Trump has, time and again, convinced me that he is the most dishonest elected official that I have ever — excuse me — that the public has ever had to interact with.”
“And the paradox with Donald Trump is he seems to make dishonest statements just for the fun of it, as a challenge to see if anybody has the gumption or the wherewithal to take him to task for the dishonest statements he makes,” Brooks said.
“He sees it as a game,” Brooks added, “and he’s winning it.”
Is there anyone, NOTUS asked, Brooks thinks is seriously willing to criticize Trump on Capitol Hill now?
“A lot of Democrats,” he said. “No Republicans.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.