Trump’s claims of a mandate run into reality of narrow majorities

President-elect Donald Trump’s last-minute demands for a congressional funding package were rejected by dozens of Republicans this week, foreshadowing the legislative challenges he could face next year - even with unified GOP control.

Trump’s role in sinking a bipartisan deal to fund the government - and his public insistence that any spending bill lift the debt ceiling - led to a failed vote on the House floor Thursday evening. More than three dozen members of his own party voted against the deal he’d endorsed hours earlier. The Senate passed a new bill to avert a government shutdown early Saturday; the bill did not include Trump’s debt limit demand.

The drama highlighted the limits Trump faces in bending his entire party to his will, as Republicans hold a narrow margin in the House and remain ideologically split over government spending.

“It’s the most incongruous messaging to say: ‘Don’t vote for this bill, it’s bloated spending. By the way, get rid of the debt ceiling so I can spend more,’” said Marc Short, who was director of legislative affairs in Trump’s White House. Short warned that the “last 24 hours does not portend well” for Republicans’ plans to tackle border and tax policies in 2025. “Once is going to be hard enough, as you can see from this exercise.”

Trump has repeatedly described his election victory as a “mandate,” telling Time magazine recently that “the mandate was massive.” Trump won the election comfortably, prevailing in every battleground state as Republicans seized full control of Congress. He also became the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years, improving on his 2016 performance.

Yet the election results reflect a country that remains deeply divided, leaving the GOP with narrow margins in Congress next year. Trump’s win hinged on about 230,000 votes across three “blue wall” states that could have tipped the race to Vice President Kamala Harris. His margin of victory in the popular vote, roughly 2.3 million, is smaller than President Joe Biden’s of more than 7 million votes in 2020. And Republicans will have an even slimmer House majority in the House than they did this year.

“It was a definitive win but it was not the kind of overwhelming victory that suggests that our country has made a very clear statement of what it would like to see going forward,” said Amy Walter, editor in chief of the Cook Report with Amy Walter. “This is our third presidential election in a row where neither party can really claim to have a big enough mandate to do things that the base is happy with but may not be popular across the board.”

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump transition spokesperson, noted in a statement to The Post that Trump won the popular vote and 312 electoral college votes.

“Anyone trying to belittle his decisive victory is either in denial or trying to delegitimize the mandate he has to govern before he gets to the Oval Office,” Leavitt said. “Just like he did in his first term, President Trump will work with anyone who wants to help him deliver on the American people’s priorities: securing the border, ending inflation, and ending the wars around the world.”

With little room for error, congressional Republicans have begun to flesh out an agenda to push through tax cuts, border funding and other priorities they are still debating through reconciliation - a process that circumvents the 60-vote threshold in the Senate. Senate Republicans favor moving on border funding first, given their slim House majority will be even more depleted in the first months of the year before special elections replace members who have been poached to join the Trump administration.

Trump narrowed the Republican House majority by tapping Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York to be United Nations ambassador and Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida to be national security adviser. He also initially selected Matt Gaetz, then a congressman from Florida, for attorney general. Gaetz withdrew - but only after resigning from Congress amid allegations of misconduct.

Border funding is seen as easier to pass than the tax legislation.

Since winning the election, Trump’s efforts to publicly pressure congressional Republicans have mostly been limited to a push for recess appointments that was met with resistance in the Senate.

But that changed Wednesday, when he insisted that any legislation to keep the government funded would need to address the debt limit, going so far as to suggest that Republicans who didn’t agree with him would face primary challenges.

The following day, he wrote on social media that Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the House Freedom Caucus who opposed a clean debt ceiling increase, was “another ambitious guy, with no talent. … I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary.”

After House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal to suspend the nation’s borrowing limit failed, Trump wrote Friday morning: “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’ This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”

While Trump has far more unified control over the GOP than he did in 2016, his demands via Truth Social amount to an early test of his influence over Congress, especially as his allies say raising the debt ceiling is his top priority.

“I know his number one goal is we get this taken care of before Jan. 20. … He just wants this taken care of before he gets into office,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma).

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it “definitely would” help if Trump clearly articulated his demands to Congress with more than a day or two of notice. “I assume that is what will happen once he’s inaugurated - there’s a Cabinet, a legislative office, and obviously he’s not in office yet.”

Peter T. King, a former Republican congressman who served during Trump’s first term, said the GOP caucus has also grown more unruly - even as Republicans back Trump more staunchly than they did in 2016.

“I think Trump’s job is easy compared to Mike Johnson’s,” King said of the House speaker. While past opposition to Trump often came from moderate lawmakers, King said, the group that defied the president-elect Thursday included staunch conservatives opposed to raising the debt ceiling.

In the first Trump administration, Republicans passed sweeping tax cuts in 2017, despite relatively narrow majorities in the House and Senate. Yet Trump also faced limitations, and he struggled to enact some key priorities even as Republicans controlled Congress his first two years in office. During that time, Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Lawmakers declined to appropriate the money Trump wanted to build a wall at the southern border - leading to 35-day government shutdown that ended with Trump declaring a national emergency to fund the project unilaterally.

At the end of his term, in 2020, Republicans rebuffed Trump’s push for bigger stimulus checks to citizens during the pandemic. Trump threatened to veto a roughly $900 billion spending package and urged lawmakers to increase its “ridiculously low” relief checks to $2,000 - something Democrats supported. GOP lawmakers ultimately struck down the proposal.

This week, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) said congressional Republicans have yet to see Trump lobby them aggressively to suspend the debt limit.

“If he himself had picked up the phone and made a bunch of calls the result would have been different,” she said. “If it had been a hill he wanted to die on he would have. When he’s ready to die on a hill for an issue, he’ll do it.”