President Donald Trump didn't need a long speech to identify the problem. Sitting in the Oval Office, he named Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) as two Republicans who still find ways to make Democratic priorities easier and Trump's agenda harder.
Trump rips McConnell, Murkowski from Oval Officehttps://t.co/t4L10Mz7Ub
— The Hill (@thehill) June 12, 2026
For voters who watched Trump's first term get slowed by Republicans with cold feet, the names sounded familiar.
McConnell is no longer Senate Republican leader; Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) holds that job as majority leader. Yet McConnell still carries weight on defense spending as chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and his instincts remain clear.
When Trump needs Republicans to move as one, McConnell too often sounds like a man searching for the exit ramp.
Murkowski has made her brand on being the Republican who wanders off at the worst possible moment. The Senate passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement package by a 52-47 vote, funding ICE and Border Patrol through the end of Trump's term.
Murkowski was the only Republican to join Democrats against it. When the country needed border enforcement funding, she chose the same side as the people who fought Trump's immigration agenda from the start.
The Senate's trouble didn't stop with Murkowski. Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) spent time during the same vote-a-rama trying to reshape or redirect a disputed $1.776 billion fund connected to claims of government targeting. From the New York Post:
The Senate approved $70 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of President Trump’s term early Friday, following weeks of delays amid intra-GOP sniping over a $1.776 billion settlement fund meant to help victims of government weaponization.
The 52-47 final vote approving the legislation came just before 5 a.m., after Republicans defeated more than two dozen amendments in a so-called “vote-a-rama,” including one offered by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would have redirected payments from the settlement to members of law enforcement who were injured in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Thune urged Republicans to keep the bill narrow so it could survive the House. Even when the bill passed, the spectacle showed how quickly a few Republicans can turn a governing moment into an intramural fight.
Cassidy has already paid a political price for crossing Trump. He lost his primary after years of anger over his 2021 vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. Tillis has also become one of the names conservatives watch when the question isn't whether Democrats will resist Trump, but which Republicans will help them do it.
The memory of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) still hangs over these fights. In 2017, McCain cast the late-night thumbs-down vote that helped sink the Republican healthcare repeal effort, defeating the bill 51-49.
Conservatives remember the moment not merely because one bill failed; they remember it because a Republican senator waited until the critical hour to break the promise voters had heard for years.
Trump's second term depends on speed, discipline, and Republican votes that stay put. Democrats will, of course, oppose him, bureaucrats will stall him, and courts will test him. None of that surprises anyone. The deeper frustration comes when Republican senators campaign as conservatives and then become procedural artists when Trump's agenda reaches the floor.
McConnell and Murkowski aren't random names in Trump's complaint; they're symbols of an old Washington habit: promise the voters one thing, then explain why it can't be done once power is available.
Tillis and Cassidy fit the same warning in different ways; short-termers and lame ducks can become dangerous because they stop fearing the people who sent them there.
Trump's Oval Office criticism landed because it carried a familiar truth: the swamp doesn't always wear a Democratic label. Every so often it wears an R, quotes procedure, talks about institutional norms, and waits for the worst possible moment to reappear.
Keep PJ Media in the fight for the stories the permanent political class would rather smooth over. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT for 60% off today.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member