Cheers and whistles accompanied President Trump’s prizefighter-like arrival in the House chamber to deliver his State of the Union address in February. While Republicans leaned into the aisle to shake Trump’s hand, several Democrats refused to turn his way, and their House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, remained seated. From the rostrum, the president took in the peculiar mixture of sustained applause and stark silence with a lofty smile. Then he began, and nothing in his words or manner gave the impression that the legislative branch arrayed before him was intended to be his coequal.
In truth, they no longer were his coequal. The president now dictated what they did, what they didn’t do and even how they behaved. Trump saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Announcing a new round of tariffs that he planned to implement on unspecified “countries that were ripping us off for decades” (to replace his previous tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down), Trump breezily said, “Congressional action will not be necessary.” He predicted that his executive orders on prescription-drug pricing would never be overturned by any future administration, but then he turned to Senator John Thune, the majority leader, and Representative Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, and casually added, “John and Mike, if you don’t mind, codify it anyway.”
About halfway into his record-setting 107-minute address, Trump challenged every member of Congress to stand if they agreed with the principle that America should first protect its citizens rather than “illegal aliens.” While the Republicans stood, clapped and hooted, Trump leaned over the lectern and glowered at the unanimously seated and stone-faced Democrats. “You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up,” he told them. The Democrats, he declared later in his speech, were “pro-crime.” They were “sick people.”
A few House Democrats, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, openly jeered the president. Another, Representative Al Green of Texas, was escorted from the chamber by Capitol security officials for holding up a sign that read, “Black People Aren’t Apes!” (in reference to the president’s Truth Social post that month of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes). More notable, however, were the empty seats: Roughly half the Democrats in both the House and the Senate chose to boycott the address.
That so many members of Congress refused to take part in their one annual public event counted as yet another first of the Trump era. “I went because I’m an institutionalist,” Representative Terri Sewell, an eight-term Democrat from Alabama, later told me. “This body can still be a powerful voice for good. That’s the reason why I did it. But it’s increasingly harder to stomach, to be honest.”
The Republican members, for their part, dutifully issued statements praising Trump’s address. “Last night, President Trump highlighted the wins of his administration and the Republican-led Congress for the American people,” began the news release of Representative Dave Joyce, a seven-term congressman from Ohio and an appropriations subcommittee chairman. But Joyce offered a more somber assessment a few months later, when I asked him if he felt that Congress had assumed an overly submissive posture toward Trump.
“I think we have, unfortunately,” Joyce replied. He recalled the first State of the Union address he attended, in 2014, just after President Barack Obama had threatened to use his pen to sign executive orders and take other executive actions to pass his agenda if Congress failed to do so. “I was sitting next to a Democrat, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ But we’re just as bad. We continually cede power to the executive. The president blows things up, and then we just go home,” Joyce said. On occasions when Trump has expressed displeasure over a legislative matter — as he did over the release of the Epstein files and the failure to pass voter restrictions — Republican congressional leaders have complied by going into recess rather than holding votes they knew would anger the president.
“At this point,” Joyce concluded, “there’s no will to overtake that.”
The question is whether that will has been permanently extinguished. On Nov. 3, American voters will decide which party controls the House and the Senate for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. In theory, at least, the outcome of their decision should be enormously consequential. If the Republicans somehow manage to defy the current ill portents — an unpopular leader, a sluggish economy and a costly war with no end in sight — then the president will have a final two years to place his indelible stamp on American life. Should the Democrats regain control of both chambers, or at least the House (as they are expected to do), then Trump’s opposition will possess the legislative and investigatory tools to bring the president’s agenda — and potentially the entire Trump era — to a decisive halt.
But the two scenarios rest on the assumption that Congress still functions as the founders planned when they devoted Article I of the Constitution to the legislative branch. Among those functions, described in Section 8 of Article I, are the exclusive power to impose taxes, fund government agencies, declare war, regulate commerce with foreign nations and, above all, “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing Powers.”
Few Americans — including members of Congress themselves — believe that the legislative branch is fulfilling its duties as the founders intended. As Representative Jim Himes, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut who has served in the House for 18 years, told me in June, “Congress is somewhere between dysfunctional and irrelevant — and is despised by the people.”
Congress was already unpopular decades before Trump became president. Since 1974, according to Gallup polling, its approval rating has averaged a dismal 28 percent. As of July, Congress has the lowest favorability ranking, 9 percent, of any institution in America. A low regard of this magnitude cannot be ascribed to one person.
Trump has nonetheless taken an already weak legislative body and made it subservient. He left office in 2021 only after his followers violently raided the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a failed effort to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results and keep him in office. The fact that a majority of House Republicans voted against certifying the election mere hours after the riot, coupled with the role of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader at the time, in acquitting Trump of impeachment charges weeks later, created a permission structure for Trump’s eventual return to power. That ugly episode also left its mark on Congress, Himes said: “It’s a huge unhealed wound that continues to separate the two sides of the aisle.”
Trump’s deep thumbprints on the Republican-controlled 119th Congress are unmistakable. It achieved a near historic low last year in the number of bills passed, with prioritization placed on Trump’s tellingly named One Big Beautiful Bill tax legislation. This year, the president has strong-armed the House into funding an unpopular war in Iran after having vowed on election night, “I’m not going to start a war — I’m going to stop wars.”
At the same time, Trump has defied congressional authority through his tariffs and his National Guard deployments, by tearing down agencies and erecting new federal buildings — all with the barest of pushback by Republicans on Capitol Hill. Those in his party who have occasionally stood up to Trump — such as Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, by forcing him to agree to release the Epstein files, and Senators Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, by, respectively, voting to impeach him and suggesting in 2023 that Trump’s “time has passed him by” — have been harried out of office.
“They’re just petrified of Trump,” said Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who served in the House for 36 years before voting to impeach Trump in January 2021 and subsequently deciding not to seek another term. “Name the issue. It’s just amazing. No one’s got a spine.”
Upton elaborated further on the fear among Republicans: “Look, I know the pressure. If you signal you’re going to vote the wrong way, leadership calls you in. Then the White House starts to turn the screws. Then you start getting threats on social media. I’ve had very serious threats to my home. We put in security cameras that connected directly to the Police Department. And now they have trackers who look for you in restaurants. Today it’s worse than ever. Remember, Trump has the command over the Republican Party in every state and county. There’s no anti-Trump Republican bastion.”
But Trump’s bullying influence on the legislative agenda, and on legislators themselves, does not adequately capture how he has shaped Congress. It is his pugilistic, attention-seeking conduct that now permeates the Capitol, and hardly by coincidence. Trump has backed candidates in his own image and has set off a state-by-state redistricting war of attrition in which centrist swing districts have been replaced by hyperpartisan ones. Most of all, Trump has reshaped Congress by example — by showing how bragging, lying and name-calling can amount to a formula for success.
“There’s a degree to which Trump has normalized disreputable behavior among people who’ve been here for a long time,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who came into office two years before Trump’s first term and is now leaving after unsuccessfully running for the Senate. “But it’s also attracted disreputable people. Under Trump, the quality of my colleagues has noticeably decreased.”
Moulton made clear to me that he wasn’t just talking about Republican colleagues and that Trump’s lovers and haters alike have taken on his self-absorption. His view is shared by members on both sides of the aisle. “What you see now are too many people who come in viewing Congress as their green screen,” Joyce said. “And they’re going to make a name for themselves and don’t give a damn about anything else.”
In seeking to understand how Trump has left his mark on Congress, which I’ve been covering for more than a decade and a half, I interviewed more than 30 current and former members from both parties and chambers, as well as congressional aides from both parties. In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, wrote in a statement: “President Trump and the White House have worked closely with our partners in Congress to deliver on many important promises to the American people.” She added: “President Trump will continue working with Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, lower costs for working families and deliver on the commonsense, America First agenda that Republicans were elected with an overwhelming mandate to enact.”
Its current noisy state of brokenness is complicated to untangle. If Trump bears some responsibility, so do the lawmakers who have sublimated themselves to him — and so, for that matter, do the voters who maintain that they want Congress to work together to solve the nation’s problems but then send to Washington individuals who have no interest in doing so. “Internecine warfare is what has become vogue,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who has decided not to seek another term after serving for 22 years. “You’re elected not to get along with the other side and get good things done for the country. You’re elected to fight and kill the other side.”
The man charged with maintaining a semblance of order and unity in this increasingly dystopian ecosystem is Johnson, the House speaker. In publicly struggling to do so, Johnson represents the latest de-evolutionary stage of Republican House leadership that began with John Boehner and Paul Ryan and was then followed by the speakership of Kevin McCarthy, who tenuously held the gavel for all of 269 days — “the incredible shrinking speakership,” as the Democrat and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi characterized it to me — before his fellow Republicans ousted McCarthy and replaced him with Johnson in October 2023.
Even from his place of exile during the Biden presidency, Trump called the shots in Johnson’s ascent, remembering how the Louisiana congressman led a futile legal challenge to the 2020 election results. He also remembered how Johnson’s rival for the speakership, Tom Emmer, voted to certify the 2020 results. Trump made calls to members, and Johnson became the last man standing. “He’s speaker for one reason: Trump got him there,” Upton told me. “So you won’t find one item of disagreement between the two of them.”
As speaker, Johnson is third in line to the presidency. But his job has unofficially been recast as the chief operating officer of Trump’s legislative business, the Capitol Hill counterpart to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. An outspoken Christian, Johnson is also not without cunning, and in accompanying the president to MAGA rallies and U.F.C. events, he has signaled that proximity to Trump is more important than the veneer of constitutional independence.
That said, his inability to project authority of his own has become a dominant leitmotif of the 119th Congress. Traditionally, the speaker sets the House agenda, one in which legislation is developed in committees, then scheduled for consideration by the House Committee on Rules — which also sets the terms of how each bill is debated, known as “the rule” — and finally brought to the floor.
That formal process has now largely fallen out of favor under Johnson. The bills that do emerge from a committee structure seldom undergo a bipartisan markup. Nor does the Rules Committee’s edict count for much, especially for Republican members who would prefer preventing a bill from coming to the floor over having to cast a vote on the measure. “When I first got here,” McCaul said, “if you voted against the rule, Tom DeLay” — then the House majority leader — “would have you kicked out of Congress, essentially. Now they’re openly disrespectful. They’ll vote against the rule. There’s no party discipline.”
Historically, the 435-member House has been the more unwieldy of the legislative chambers, with the Senate and its 100 members viewed as the more dispassionate and deliberative body. But in the Trump era, the Senate has descended into its own version of glacial self-parody. “The House failure is driven by the Senate’s failure to work as well,” said Patrick McHenry, a former North Carolina congressman who briefly served as acting speaker during the 23-day interregnum between McCarthy’s ouster and Johnson’s election. “The House gets delivered a few packages where everything has been larded into it, because the Senate no longer is capable of following what for 200 years had been a normative process of handling wins and losses week after week. Now you play for keeps on a couple bills, and that’s your whole agenda.”
Still, the Senate’s Republican majority leaders — first Mitch McConnell and now John Thune — have retained some desire for bipartisan legislating and, in the process, independence from Trump, resisting, for example, his call to eliminate the filibuster (a procedure that dooms any nonbudgetary legislation lacking 60 votes). By contrast, the Republican House majority has committed itself to executing the president’s will with a deference that has at times resembled enthusiastic servility. “If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads,” Representative Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas, happily acknowledged just after Trump was re-elected. The same day Trump was sworn in to a second term, Johnson pronounced him “the greatest president of our lifetimes.”
“When Trump came back into power,” Pelosi told me, “he demanded exactly what the founders didn’t want to happen. He demanded that Congress yield to him.” She added: “And in becoming so weak, it’s caused a situation where they can barely come to the House floor and pass a simple rule. It seems like every other week there’s a new embarrassment on the floor. But they made it happen.”
Trump has not only neutered his fellow Republicans. He has also deranged the Democratic opposition, including some of its most recognizable figures. Last year, the manic chant of Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader — “We will win! We will win!” — alongside Representatives Maxine Waters and Al Green outside the Treasury building to protest the DOGE government budget cuts was roundly mocked. The former Democratic congressman Tim Ryan groaned on X: “I just don’t even know what to say anymore when I see this kind of stuff. Is it Saturday Night Live or real life? Does anyone really think this is the future of the country? This is the only alternative to Trump’s America? It’s just so depressing.”
When I brought up to Pelosi how her party had responded to Trump’s State of the Union address with boycotts, jeers and Al Green’s sign about apes, Pelosi countered by recalling Trump’s address in 2020, when as speaker she stood directly behind him and in full view of the television cameras ripped up the text of his remarks immediately after he had finished delivering them. The history-making lawmaker had, in that moment at least, succumbed to Trump’s reality-show theatrics.
“The day I tore up his speech — they must have hated that,” she said with evident relish. “Well, he lied to Congress the whole time. Every page I tore up had lies in it. So I’m not a good person to talk to about respecting the president in that chamber, when he demeans us the way he has.”
In March of this year, Representative Suzanne Bonamici, Democrat of Oregon, held a series of town halls with her mostly liberal constituents. Such in-person events were commonplace when Bonamici first took office in 2012, but that is no longer the case. “The whole tone has changed,” Bonamici lamented in her office one afternoon in late June. “Whenever we announce that I’m going to be somewhere, we have to have security, because the threats against members of Congress have increased significantly.”
No one threatened Bonamici at her March town hall meetings. But she told me: “People are anxious. They’re scared. They’re worried. They’re asking: ‘What’s happening to our democracy? You’re not doing enough. Do something!’”
Shortly before my visit to her office, Bonamici announced she would be filing a House resolution to impeach Trump’s secretary of education, Linda McMahon, the former professional wrestling executive. Since McMahon’s appointment to Trump’s cabinet in 2025, she had made no secret of her intention to dismantle the Department of Education. By June, she was making good on her promise. “That’s what really put me over the top,” Bonamici said. “I came here to improve public education, and I just can’t stand by while this lawless woman destroys the Department of Education. So when people at home are terrified and saying, ‘What are you doing?’ — this is something that I can do.”
But what was Bonamici doing, really? Not legislating, given that her resolution was stillborn in the Republican-controlled House. Instead, the congresswoman, a progressive, was following in the footsteps of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Ralph Norman and other right-wing House Republicans who made a noisy show of trying to remove various members of the Biden administration. That no one was removed was beside the point. The point was to be seen joining the battle, a righteous war-against-whatever that was memorably expressed by Trump when he responded to a would-be assassin’s bullet in 2024 by shaking his fist and bellowing, as blood trickled from his ear: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“People now want scrappy fighters,” said Representative Julia Brownley, a seven-term California Democrat who will retire from the House in January. “The scrappy fighter as opposed to the legislator — scrappy wins.”
How this duality permeates Congress was best explained to me by former Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat who held his swing-district seat in New York for a decade before losing to Mike Lawler, a Republican, in 2022. “There are two business models in Congress,” Maloney said. “One business model is legislating. That’s Pelosi. Her business involves listening and stitching together competing interests to get a big enough number that it will be passed and signed into law. The other business model,” he went on, “is being a social media influencer. That’s A.O.C.” — the progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — “who’s an extremely influential and talented content creator, but she is not a legislator. It’s just a different business she’s in. And in that business, the incentive structure doesn’t reward listening and compromising. As a social media influencer, you find it difficult to do the work of legislating. If anything, the two business models are in competition with one another. There’s almost no one you can point to who does both.” (Ocasio-Cortez did not respond to an interview request. Her office disputed Maloney’s characterization.)
Maloney was describing a political phenomenon that didn’t exist when he first took office in 2013. One of his Democratic colleagues from the same class, Representative Marc Veasey of Texas, made a similar observation.
“You remember that Paul Newman western movie ‘Hud’?” Veasey asked me while sitting in his office one afternoon in late July. “There’s this kid who really looks up to the Newman character, because he’s swashbuckling and funny and lives the good life. And his granddad, who’s a serious rancher, says to the kid, ‘Lonnie, little by little the country changes because of the men we admire.’ And he tells the kid that he has to decide on his own who he’s going to follow. And that’s the choice elected officials now have when they come here,” said Veasey, who is not seeking an eighth term after his district was recently gerrymandered out of existence on Trump’s orders as part of an effort to maintain Republican control of the House. “You’re either going to be someone who believes in the institution of Congress, or you’re going to be a cosplaying warrior that gets a million likes on social media.”
Veasey, echoing Maloney, Brownley and Bonamici, was acknowledging how much easier it has become to be a “cosplaying warrior” than a serious-minded institutionalist. That tension became further evident to me when I visited the office of Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California. Lieu, a retired Air Force colonel and lawyer with a wry demeanor, has been the lead sponsor of 13 bills that have become law during his 11 years in Congress, an impressive showing. But what blared from the wall of his office lobby was a framed 2017 Washington Post article with the headline “On Twitter, He Declares a Thumb War.” The article was about Lieu’s countless anti-Trump postings on what is now called X, where he has 1.5 million followers.
Like Bonamici with her impeachment resolution, Lieu’s war of thumbs fulfills a do-something craving in an otherwise do-nothing Congress. “I wake up every day looking at the news, something the administration has done,” he told me. “And the majority of the time I go, W.T.F.? And so I go to work thinking, OK, how do we stop this W.T.F. thing from happening?”
As with other members of Congress, Lieu was a mostly anodyne Twitter scribe before the summer of 2015, when Trump — then a candidate best known for his star turn on the reality-TV show “The Apprentice” — demonstrated how to properly weaponize it. Social media played an undeniably crucial role in Trump’s 2016 victory. But in a collective body like Congress, its usage has been more insidious.
“People become social media darlings up here, and they raise a lot of money off of it,” Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas, told me. “And the more you can differentiate yourself from mainstream Republicans or Democrats, the better off you are. But it’s become the biggest headache for leadership right now.” Just one individual, he explained, could create havoc: “Because you have these very thin majorities, the price of somebody’s vote goes up that much higher.”
In case I wasn’t sure who he was referring to, Womack then leaned toward me and said, “Read: Anna Paulina Luna.”
More than any other member, Luna, a 37-year-old second-term Florida Republican, personifies the kabuki-like state of Congress in the Trump era. She is both camera-ready (a former swimsuit model and an Air Force veteran) and reverential of the president (whom she has nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize while also introducing a resolution to have his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore). I met with Luna one afternoon in late June in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building, where she was completing a TV interview. The congresswoman was in high spirits, having just employed procedural measures to block all business on the House floor until the Senate agreed to pass Trump’s voter-ID bill. “I don’t care who in this chamber hates me for it,” she posted on X.
“Why should we give the Senate a win when they won’t give us one?” she asked me while walking briskly back to her office. “The craziest thing is how the House leadership will just lie to other members, saying I’m being a troublemaker or obstructionist. I’m just legislating.”
More accurate, Luna has legislated the way Trump would if he were in Congress. Her strong-arming in support of the SAVE America Act caused Johnson to abruptly cancel votes and send members home. But the Senate remained unmoved and chose not to take up the voter-ID bill before recessing for the summer, leaving Johnson with nothing to show for his capitulation. “People joke about how Johnson is a puppet of Trump,” Himes, the Democratic congressman, told me. “But he’s also a puppet of Luna.”
For those dismayed by the mindlessly hyperpartisan turn Congress has taken in the Trump era, Luna represents an intriguing study in potential. On the one hand, she has a 94 percent conservative voting scorecard, according to Heritage Action — and as she boasted to me, “I’m pulling our conference to the right.”
But Luna has not shied from working with Democrats on a curated basis. Early last year, she teamed with Brittany Pettersen — a new mother, like her — to push for a House rule change that would allow new parents 12 weeks of proxy voting. (Johnson ultimately agreed to a compromise measure.) This April, Luna and Teresa Leger Fernández spearheaded a successful bipartisan effort to force the resignations of two members accused of sexual misconduct, the Democrat Eric Swalwell and the Republican Tony Gonzales. In late July, she and Representative Ro Khanna introduced legislation to ban federal officeholders and candidates from using campaign funds to pay for their legal defenses against sexual harassment or abuse charges. That same month, Luna was also co-author of a bill, with Representative Rosa DeLauro, that would limit liability protections for pesticide manufacturers.
“Never develop a pattern of predictability,” Luna told me with a satisfied smile. She insisted that her go-it-alone style was not in the furtherance of some greater ambition and that after two or three more terms she intended to leave politics for the private sector. Until then, it remains unclear whether Luna can build an actual legislative record while making life difficult for her colleagues.
“Maybe you can extract virtually anything you want out of a willing leadership,” Womack said of Luna. “But then you no longer have a team of like-minded people ready to do the blocking and tackling for the conference. You have free agency, and free agency is what’s hurting this country now. And both sides have it.”
Then, referring to the House Democratic leader, Womack said, “And if we lose this majority, God forbid: Hakeem Jeffries, welcome to our world!”
How did we get here? How did arguably the most accomplished deliberative governing body in the history of the world become so febrile and decrepit? Did it all begin with the decision to install C-SPAN cameras in the House chamber in 1979? Or with the torpedoing of Judge Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination by Senate Democrats in 1987? Or with Newt Gingrich’s bomb-heaving speakership from 1995 to 1999?
It happened — as a Hemingway character described falling into bankruptcy — gradually, then suddenly. I began covering Congress in 2010, when the so-called Tea Party wave led to a Republican takeover of the House and the end of Pelosi’s initial reign as speaker. Raucous, perhaps even obnoxious, though that freshman class may have been, they saw themselves as reformers rather than arsonists. The man they elected to replace Pelosi, John Boehner, owed his position to the 87 new House Republicans. “Boehner wasn’t bitching about us much at the time, because we’d handed him the gavel,” said one of them, Womack, now a subcommittee chairman on the House Appropriations Committee. “Still, it was a very significant majority. The kind of majority where even with a few knuckleheads, you could impose your will. The kind of majority that you won’t see again, thanks to redistricting.”
Today veterans of both parties speak affectionately of Boehner, an avuncular, merlot-swilling conservative who served 10 terms representing Ohio’s Eighth District before becoming speaker. In retrospect, however, the story of Trump’s conquest over Congress begins with Boehner’s inability to contain the right-wing populist fever that brought him to power. “I remember these Team Boehner lunches,” McCaul said. “And he would be like, ‘I don’t know how to deal with these guys.’ He would try to punish them, but then they’d go on nighttime cable and just dump on John Boehner. It weakened his leadership.”
By 2013, the knuckleheads had taken over. In June of that year, a sprawling bipartisan farm bill went down in defeat after right-wing members inserted a food stamp job requirement amendment that Democrats would never support, amounting to a “poison pill.” Maloney, a Democratic freshman at the time, was standing next to Boehner on the House floor as the votes were tallied. “I said, ‘Mr. Speaker, a lot of us believed in this bill and took hard votes because we thought it could get passed,’” Maloney recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘No shit, kid.’ And walked away.”
A few weeks later, Boehner blocked the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform bill from coming to the House floor, even though there were enough votes among both parties to pass it. But those 218 votes, Boehner pointed out, didn’t come from the “majority of the majority” — meaning that there weren’t enough Republican votes to put the party’s imprimatur on the bill — an invocation of the so-called Hastert rule, named for the previous Republican speaker, Dennis Hastert. Fearing an internal revolt that could cost him the gavel, Boehner instead bowed to the nativism in his party rather than allow Congress to overhaul America’s broken immigration system.
But the worst of 2013 was yet to come. In October, a few Tea Party renegades insisted that a stopgap government funding bill include a provision that would defund or delay Obama’s signature health care legislation, which was met with resistance from Senate Democrats and caused a government shutdown. “It didn’t make any sense,” Joyce, the Ohio Republican, recalled. “And it accomplished nothing. All it did was lead to more shutdowns over more stupid stuff.”
In January 2015, Representative Seth Moulton began his freshman year in Congress. “A lot of older members welcomed me,” he recalled. “And they always added, ‘Don’t worry, it hasn’t always been this bad, and it’ll get better.’ The thinking was that we had a Black president, and all the Republicans were a bit racist. But once Obama left office, things would return to normal.”
From its random origin to its bizarre conclusion, the odyssey of the one major bipartisan legislative triumph of the 119th Congress shows how the process of lawmaking now lives on the razor’s edge of Trump’s impetuousness.
Senator Elizabeth Warren was returning to her office from a speech she had just given at the National Press Club on Jan. 12 this year when an unfamiliar number popped up on her phone. “Let’s talk about credit-card interest rates,” Trump said by way of greeting.
They had never spoken before. Trump routinely referred to Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, as “Pocahontas” (for having incorrectly identified herself as part Cherokee during her academic career), and her regard for him was similarly low. Moments earlier at the press club, Warren blamed the president for the rising cost of living. Trump had apparently learned of this.
They traded words for a few minutes, according to Warren. “He seemed stung by the notion that I thought he wasn’t doing enough on costs,” she told me. “He was ready to hang up. That’s when I said, ‘One more thing, Mr. President.’”
If Trump really wanted to address affordability, she says she told him, there was already legislation in the works that would do so. It was the housing bill that she and a Republican, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, had been working on for over a year. The president seemed unaware of the bill’s existence, though he posted on Truth Social five days earlier: “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations.”
Now, on the call with Warren, he made “some vague comment that he knew a lot about how housing gets done,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, if you put your shoulder to this bill, we can get it across the finish line.’ And he said that yeah, he could do this.”
Three days later, Trump issued an executive order, repeating the line from his social media post: “Neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests,” it read in part. “People live in homes, not corporations. My Administration will take decisive action to stop Wall Street from treating America’s neighborhoods like a trading floor and empower American families to own their homes.”
A little more than a week after his brief conversation with Warren, the president hosted a dinner at the White House residence. Among the guests were Vice President JD Vance; the White House legislative affairs director, James Braid; and several House Republicans. Trump brought up the subject of private-equity firms’ buying up residential housing.
“We know that over the winter, he was presented with polling evidence that capping interest rates and banning private equity are incredibly popular things,” one of the dinner guests, Representative French Hill, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told me.
Another dinner guest, Representative Mike Flood, chairman of the Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance, told me that Vance most likely contributed to Trump’s interest, having highlighted the issue to Republicans at a closed-door meeting at Trump’s resort in Doral, Fla., a year earlier: “JD told us, ‘When I was on the campaign trail, the No. 1 thing I heard from people in their 20s and 30s was that Wall Street is buying up their homes.’”
What surprised Flood was how firm Trump seemed to be in wanting a housing bill that would ban institutional investment in single-family housing. “It became clear to us when we walked out of there that a housing bill isn’t going to go anywhere unless it has that provision in it,” he told me.
Trump’s demand constituted a new plot twist in what had already been a monthslong legislative melodrama. Warren and Scott had spent much of the previous year intricately layering a housing bill with both progressive and conservative initiatives. It was far less munificently funded than Democrats would have preferred, but it was also far more expansive than Republicans were accustomed to. As the clock ticked on the 2025 legislative calendar, Thune agreed to attach the housing package onto the annual military funding bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act. Thune’s tactic was by now a familiar one, McCaul told me: “Now you have these must-pass bills, and then people want to put all their other bills on it, like a Christmas tree.”
Over in the House, Hill was not happy to learn that the Senate was trying to use the N.D.A.A. to force a mammoth housing bill down his throat. He had given Flood and the housing subcommittee’s ranking member, Representative Emanuel Cleaver, the go-ahead to hold meetings about housing reform, and he wanted more time. Scott replied that the White House supported the N.D.A.A. in its current form.
Too bad, Hill replied in effect. “There were provisions in that bill I had no support for in the House,” Hill told me, referring to items written by Warren and other senators that expanded the federal role in housing markets. In refusing to cave, the Arkansas Republican had the support of the committee’s ranking member, Maxine Waters, who was Hill’s ideological opposite but who also had been working on housing policy since she served in the California State Assembly half a century ago. Along the way, Waters had developed her own thoughts about how to address the country’s housing crisis and expected a legislative process on the topic to include her. “The Senate had offered us a bill where no amendments could be made,” she told me. “And Hill and I were both, ‘Uh-uh, not this way.’ I have to tell you, I was very pleased with his determination not to be run over by the Senate.”
Now it was late January, and Trump had weighed in with his own demand for what should be in the housing bill. Democrats suddenly had a surprising ally in their longstanding battle against private-equity firms. “You’re speaking my language,” Cleaver remembered thinking. Warren and her staff began advising the White House about what the legislative language would look like. Scott’s team was less enthusiastic but viewed it as the price of admission for Trump’s support. As one Senate Republican aide told me: “This was not a Tim Scott production. This is a thing Donald Trump wanted.”
Hill, on the other hand, was suspicious of the policy and believed that most of his conservative colleagues felt the same way. “I don’t think at that time there would have been Republican votes for it,” Flood said. On Feb. 9, two weeks after the White House dinner, the expansive housing bill made it to the House floor and overwhelmingly passed, 390 to 9. But the bill did not include a private-equity ban — which, as the White House sternly noted in a statement that same day, was “a key priority” for the Trump administration.
Hill conveyed to the White House that he was open to working on a ban but wanted to get the language right. Late that month, the chairman and other members of the Financial Services Committee met for coffee in the Treasury Cash Room with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Braid, the White House legislative affairs director, to discuss a private-equity ban.
But the White House had already signaled its impatience with the House. And now a new player was carrying the water for the president’s pet policy: Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a staunch Trump ally whose brand of conservatism was less corporatist than that of Hill, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the administration of George H. W. Bush. After Trump began publicly stating his opposition to private-equity firms’ purchasing single-family homes, Moreno directed his staff to draw up language that would ban the practice, which they revised with feedback from a Democratic colleague on the Banking Committee, Senator Raphael Warnock.
Warnock recommended to Tim Scott, whom he calls “Brother Chair,” that Moreno’s text be incorporated. Scott’s committee voted to “strike and replace” the existing private-equity language in the Senate housing bill with Moreno’s. Now it was Moreno working directly with the White House on the provision.
In March, the Senate passed its own housing bill, 89 to 10. Its path through the House was, as always, complicated. Major legislation of this sort typically went through the Rules Committee, which — as a gesture of appeasement by Johnson to ensure conservative support for his speakership — included two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, Representatives Chip Roy and Ralph Norman. They would almost certainly block consideration of the Senate housing bill because of some of its progressive elements, like Warren’s “innovation fund,” which would allow federal housing grants to be used for community infrastructure projects.
While Hill deliberated over what his fellow Republicans could accept in the Senate version, lobbyists from the home-building industry swarmed the Capitol to muster opposition to the private-equity ban and other components. Keenly aware that the House Republicans were already hard pressed to hold the majority in the midterms, Hill did what he could to shield his members from political heartburn. The chairman knew that his G.O.P. colleagues generally sided with the industry interests. But they also preferred at all times to side with Trump. Appeasing both the lobby and the president would require a negotiating process. While the chairman led that effort, “French kept our body from having to vote on all that stuff,” Flood said, adding, “We sheltered in place.”
In late May, the House stirred from its torpor. A furious back-and-forth ensued between the two chambers. Hill sent over a bill that watered down the Senate’s version of the private-equity ban and did not include a provision written by the conservative Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana that would use existing federal grants to incentivize states to increase their annual housing stock. (Waters had agreed to the watered-down private-equity language in exchange for Hill’s agreeing to add tenant protections, including a resource hotline that people renting from private-equity landowners could use to contact HUD directly.) Scott and Warren, the ranking member, restored the two Senate items.
“This went on for several exchanges,” Waters recalled. Warren urged Waters to leave Hill behind in the negotiations and join her and Scott on a “three-corners” agreement. Waters refused to do so. Hill had always treated her with respect, she told me. “You may disagree violently with some of the members on the opposite side of the aisle,” she said. “But after all that goes on, the final resolving of anything is about relationships.”
Warren agreed to let Waters mediate a few remaining areas of dispute with Hill. As another Republican Senate aide pointed out to me, Waters, who is 88, had been working on housing legislation longer than some Capitol Hill staff members had been alive.
On June 16, the two committees sent out a news release: They had a deal. The Senate passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act on June 22, and the House passed it the next day. All that was left for the bill to become law was the president’s signature. That Trump had issued no public statements on the legislation for the past four months, after so forcefully expressing himself at the beginning of the year, did not seem portentous to anyone at the time. Speaker Johnson’s office announced that a signing ceremony would take place the following day at noon in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall.
Mike Flood was walking over to the Capitol for the ceremony the next morning when he looked down at his phone to see a text message. It linked to a Truth Social post from 10:26 a.m. that read: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT.”
Flood turned to a veteran congressman who was walking with him and asked incredulously, “Does this ever happen?”
Earlier that morning, the Senate had passed an Iran war powers resolution, to the president’s great displeasure. “So his day started very poorly,” Flood said. “And he was upset that the SAVE America Act wasn’t going anywhere in the Senate. French said to me later: ‘We’re going to be fine. This isn’t about us.’”
To Warren, whom Trump had returned to calling Pocahontas, the president’s turnabout made more sense than his initial support. After all, it had not been his idea to begin with. In a Truth Social post, Trump was now dismissing his former pet bill as being “of minor importance” and, significantly, “Warren centric.” As Warren later told me: “There’s nothing in this bill for Donald Trump. There are no triumphal arches or gold-encrusted ballrooms or big prizes. It was good, solid, hard-working, bipartisan legislation, and that just wasn’t interesting to him.”
But now a new danger loomed: Would the president’s state of pique cause him to veto the housing bill, possibly compelling Republican legislators to withdraw their support? It fell to Congress’s resident Trump whisperer, Johnson, to minimize the damage. The day after the president canceled the ceremony, he and Hill visited the president in the Oval Office. Also in the room were Braid; Bessent; Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff; and Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
According to three people with knowledge of the discussion, Johnson told Trump that vetoing the legislation served no one’s interests. It was a good bill, and it gave Republicans a strong economic message to campaign on.
Trump assured them that he “loved” the bill. But, he said, “I want to think about it.” He added that he had no qualms with the legislation. It just wasn’t his priority — the SAVE America Act was far more important.
Johnson checked in with Trump personally every day after that, all the way up until the night of July 10. At midnight, the 10-day constitutionally mandated threshold (excluding Sundays) for a bill sent to the president’s desk for consideration had expired. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act passed without Trump’s veto but also without his signature.
“You’re used to never knowing what the president will do till he does it,” Joyce told me in a tone of muted chagrin. “It would’ve been great optics for Trump to sign the bill in a community where it really matters.” Instead, the optics seemed only to describe the Trump era’s furious incoherence. For all the chaos, bickering and exhaustion that accompanied passage of the legislation, in the end it was enacted into law late at night, automatically, with a whimper rather than a bang.
Members of the 119th Congress on the campaign trail are likely to extol their one significant bipartisan achievement. Less certain is whether their sentiments will be echoed by the president — who, to date, has yet to mention the new law that he was once for, until he wasn’t.
Source image for illustration above: Thanasis/Getty Images.
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