President Donald Trump’s ironclad grip on the Republican Congress has always seemed impregnable. He has faced two impeachment trials, 34 felony convictions, and more than two dozen sexual misconduct allegations with the full backing and support of GOP caucuses. Yet his capitulation to rightward demands to release the Jeffrey Epstein files—and his messy fallout with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, among other developments—has led to a sense that the president’s once-impervious political will is starting to show fractures.
Trump has long commanded loyalty from his base despite a mounting list of controversies. He ended his first presidency as the most unpopular in U.S. history, largely due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Yet as he successfully fended off his second impeachment trial and faced four criminal cases—including a guilty verdict—GOP voters cheered him on and overwhelmingly cast their ballots for him in the 2024 Republican primaries. Meanwhile, only two out of the 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment won their 2022 primaries, and since then, any further intraparty opposition has been seen as a death sentence.
Perhaps not anymore.
The Justice Department’s decision earlier this year to decline to release the Jeffrey Epstein files led to a firestorm of fury from MAGA Republicans, many of whom accused Trump of breaking his campaign promise to publish documents related to the disgraced financier, with some speculating that this could be due to his own ties to the convicted sex trafficker. In mid-November, as bipartisan legislation entered the House of Representatives seeking to compel the Justice Department to reverse its decision, Trump finally yielded to his own party’s demands and endorsed the bill, which overwhelmingly cleared the House and was unanimously passed by the Senate. When the president signed the bill, he praised it, saying it would reveal “the truth about certain Democrats and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Yet many MAGA Republicans pinned the ongoing Epstein controversy as a failure on Trump’s part. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, long considered one of the most far-right members of Congress and once a staunch defender of the president, blasted Trump for opposing the release of the files. “I’ve never owed him anything. But I fought for him and for America First,” she said, lamenting that despite this, “he called me a traitor for standing with these women.” She also criticized the president’s support for Israel in the Gaza war, his attempts to cut health care spending, and his ordering of U.S. strikes in Iran. On Nov. 22, she announced her resignation effective in January, saying that her district in Georgia could not “endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president we all fought for.”
The Epstein files aren’t the only obstacle for Trump at the moment. The Republican Congress has offered the president a handful of other headaches this fall. His pressure campaign on Indiana Republican lawmakers to redraw their districts in hopes of clinching the GOP another seat in the midterms fell short when state Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray announced he couldn’t shore up enough votes to support any redistricting. The failure stood in stark contrast to California and Virginia, both heavily Democratic states that successfully pushed for Democratic-favoring gerrymandering. Meanwhile, Trump couldn’t cajole Congress into eliminating the filibuster either, despite his months-long lobbying of Senate Majority Leader John Thune to use the “nuclear option” of 51 votes to change the Senate rules. MAGA Republicans in Congress bucked Trump further on H-1B visas, 50-year mortgages, Obamacare cuts, and a proposed repeal of the Senate “blue slip” rule, which allows home-state senators to veto nominees for judges and federal attorneys they find unacceptable.
The whole cycle comes to a part of the “lame duck” trend of US presidents: term limited commanders-in-chief find their influence less heady in their second term than their first. 43rd president George W. Bush is perhaps the most famous example of this, with his major social security and immigration reform packages failing to find support amongst his own party as the unpopularity of the Iraq War and the Hurricane Katrina response lessened the political capital for backing the president. As the 2008 financial crisis led to the Great Recession, Republican presidential candidate John McCain ended up distancing himself from the Bush administration entirely.
This comes as Trump faces new challenges amongst the coalitions that helped put him back in office. The early November elections this year showed major backlash to Trump’s agenda, as Democrats won governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, especially doing strongly amongst Hispanic voters who skewed towards Trump in the 2024 election. Not to mention earlier this year Democrats held onto a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and did better than expected in Florida special House elections.
The results reflect an overall downward trend in Trump’s approval ratings—Gallup reported his rating at an abysmal 36% as of Nov. 28. With a categorically unpopular commander in chief and almost every policy underwater, many Republicans fear a 2018-style “blue wave” in next year’s midterm elections, especially with disaffected Trump voters turning away from the party. And to win back that section of the electorate, opposing the president’s more draconian policies is less risky than it would have been a year ago.
This doesn’t mean Trump’s influence is in permanent decline. He remains the central figure in the Republican Party and one of the most powerful presidents in recent history. Yet these recent losses signal the public’s growing weariness with his actions. As the populist right continues to fracture over his leadership, Trump’s role as a champion of “forgotten Americans” is under attack—and Congress may become increasingly less patient with his more divisive actions.
This article appears in Vantage’s December 20, 2025 edition.
