A single senator now has the power to soil, but not spoil, the final step in what has been an extraordinarily challenged but ultimately by-the-book presidential election process.
That would happen if any one Republican in the Senate decides to join the final and surely futile protest promised by several of President Trump's most impassioned GOP allies in the House. They want to force every member of Congress to go on record in three weeks as to whether they back the losing candidate's baseless assault on the democratic process — at a moment when the winner is customarily accorded ceremonial but totally bipartisan respect as part of the peaceful transfer of power.
Avoiding those votes has become a new top priority for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It's the main reason he ended 38 days of silent acquiescence in Trump's unfounded protests and declared it's time for the GOP to accept the reality of Joe Biden as the rightful president-elect.
After finally breaking with Trump on Tuesday, McConnell started pressing all the other GOP senators to sit on their hands Jan. 6, when Congress will convene to tabulate the electoral votes cast across the country on Monday.
Forcing roll call votes on Trump's fact-free allegations of fraudulent or legally faulty election counts would put dozens of GOP members in a political bind — between proving their loyalties to the president until the final hour, on the one hand, and sticking up for the integrity of the electoral process as well as the will of millions of their constituents.
McConnell's sudden change of tactics, to enforce a fragile hold on regular constitutional order after enabling the president's attacks on it, also has a more immediate motive: holding his fractured party together ahead of the twin Senate runoffs in Georgia, where partisan control of Washington hangs in the balance.
He is getting no help across the Capitol, where a small cadre of House Republicans led by Mo Brooks of Alabama plans to object to the electoral votes for Biden from at least five states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — saying their results were fueled by widespread irregularities and malfeasance even though no court has yet found any credible evidence in any of them.
The joint session will convene the afternoon after the voting ends in Georgia, and the results there are likely to be so close that neither winner will be certain. And while Kelly Loeffler is holding her seat through an appointment that does not end until the special election is decided, the first term of her Republcian colleague David Perdue will have ended three days before — so there will be at most 99 senators in the room.
During the joint session, lawmakers are allowed to submit written objections to a state's Electoral College votes after their sealed envelopes are taken from ceremonial mahogany chests and opened, in alphabetical order, by Vice President Mike Pence. But he's supposed to rule them out of order unless the papers are signed by one member of both the House and the Senate. If that happens, the session is recessed for as long as two hours while the two chambers separately debate and vote on the objections.
That's only happened twice since the system was created in the late 19th century. The last time was in 2005, when a pair of Democrats who are no longer in office — Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California — lodged a formal challenge to Ohio's decisive 20 electoral votes for the re-election of President George W. Bush, alleging an array of irregularities in the state's election.
But unlike Trump now, Bush's opponent in that contest, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, had conceded two month earlier and did not countenance the challenge. So it was rebuffed quickly and decisively, 74-1 in the Senate and 267-31 in the House.
Even the contested election of 2000, which Bush won only thanks to his disputed 537-vote margin of victory in Florida, did not produce a similar debate because the shouted objections to Florida's electors from several House Democrats were not echoed by any senators. It fell to the losing Democratic nominee, Al Gore, to move the proceedings along and eventually announce his own defeat in one of his final official acts as the outgoing vice president.
The three other vice presidents who lost national campaigns in the past six decades — Richard Nixon in 1961, Hubert Humphrey in 1969 and Dan Quayle in 1993 — have been put in a similarly awkward position but carried it out with stoic support for the democratic process.
The same challenge will soon confront Pence, who under the rules can expect to declare Biden the new president and Sen. Kamala Harris of California the new vice president with 306 electoral votes. But, unlike his predecessors, he earned his 232 electoral votes with a running mate who almost never admits to losing anything and who has displayed no interest in upholding such norms — or encouraging any of his subordinates to do otherwise.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.