The Surprising Obstacle Standing in the Way of Trump’s Agenda
Trump’s biggest congressional obstacle may be MAGA diehards.
Trump and the hard-right House Freedom Caucus have been politically misaligned of late, according to reporting from Punchbowl News. The rift began when some caucus members chose to endorse Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley over Trump way back in the GOP primary. It’s only gotten worse since then.
During last week’s Speaker debacle, the Freedom Caucus Ralph Norman and Keith Self had to be personally lobbied over the phone by the president-elect himself to begrudgingly cast their votes for Mike Johnson. And they also seem to have a problem with how Trump’s congressional liaison and former HFC member James Braid is conducting funding negotiations, taking issue with his calling in to a meeting to lobby members on freezing the debt ceiling. This was the same day 38 Republicans, many of whom were Freedom Caucus members, defied Trump and voted against the Continuing Resolution he had endorsed.
The debt ceiling keeps coming up as a major point of contention between Trump and HFC, as its members don’t seem to believe that Trump is serious about making the $2 trillion of budget cuts that Trump and billionaire friend Elon Musk have been talking about for months. This recent pattern of disagreement shows that the HFC won’t be so quick to blindly do Trump’s bidding—which could cause him some major problems on the way to getting his “big, beautiful bill” passed.