Beginning in January 2025, Republicans in Washington will achieve what’s commonly known as a governing “trifecta ”: control over the executive branch via the president, combined with majorities for their party in both the House and the Senate.
You might think that a trifecta, which is also referred to as “unified government” by political scientists, is a clear recipe for legislative success. In theory, when political parties have unified control over the House, the Senate and the presidency, there should be less conflict between them. Because these politicians are part of the same political party and have the same broad goals, it seems like they should be able to get their agenda approved, and the opposing minority party can do little to stop them.
But not all trifectas are created equal, and not all are dominant.
Research shows that political gridlock can still happen even under a unified government for reasons that are likely to be on full display when Republicans assume leadership of Congress and the presidency.
Majority size matters
A unified government will make President Donald Trump’s ability to enact his agenda much easier than if, for example, Democrats controlled the U.S. House, as they did during the second half of his first term, from 2021-2022. But tight margins in both congressional chambers mean that, even with a trifecta, it won’t be a cakewalk.
Trump will be the sixth consecutive president with a trifecta on Day 1 of his presidency. But history – and simple math – show that presidents with trifectas have an easier time passing partisan legislation with bigger majorities. Bigger majorities mean majority-party defections won’t easily sink controversial or partisan legislation. A bigger majority also means that individual members of Congress from either party have less leverage they can use to water down the president’s policy requests.
Trump also held a trifecta during the beginning of his first term in office; in particular, a big Republican majority in the House, which passed major legislation with relative ease and put pressure on their Senate colleagues to comply. Trump signed a major tax reform package in 2017 that was the signature legislative achievement of his first term.
But Trump will have a much smaller advantage when he takes office for the second time. Every president since Bill Clinton has entered office with a trifecta, but Trump’s seat advantage in the House on Day 1 will be the smallest of all of them after all the votes are counted. Trump’s relatively small advantage in the Senate also may put in jeopardy his already controversial proposed cabinet nominations.
Majority party troubles
In addition to the nearly guaranteed opposition from Democrats in Congress, Trump and other Republican leaders can expect continuing internal divisions within their own party.
In a closely divided House or Senate, there are plenty of tools that Democrats, even as the minority party, can use to stymie Trump’s agenda. This most notably includes the filibuster, which would force Republicans to garner 60 votes for any nonbudgetary legislation Trump might wish to pass. But even dominant legislative trifectas, again like the one former President Barack Obama enjoyed when he took office in 2009, can’t prevent divisions within political parties, as different politicians jockey for control of the party’s agenda.
Despite entering office with a 17-vote advantage in the Senate, Obama’s signature legislative achievement – the Affordable Care Act, also sometimes known as Obamacare – had to be watered down significantly to win a simple majority after backlash from conservative Democrats.
Obama’s trifecta was bigger in size; but in a polarized America, a large majority also means an ideologically diverse one.
If Republican infighting in the most recent Congress repeats itself, Trump is likely to face similar pushback from members of his own party in his second term. For the past two years, the Republican-led House has been repeatedly riven by leadership struggles and an often aimless legislative agenda, thanks to a lack of cooperation from the the party’s far-right flank.
This group of lawmakers will largely remain in the next Congress and will be large enough to stall any party-line vote that Speaker Mike Johnson hopes to pass. The potential for continued chaos – especially with a passable legislative agenda on the line – is monumental. If the past is any indication, even a task as fundamental as passing a budget could be challenging, much less major reform to policy areas such as immigration.
Competing pressures
Despite Congress’ reputation as a polarized partisan body, members of Congress ultimately serve multiple masters. The Republican divisions in the current Congress reflect the competing pressures of national party leaders in Washington and the local politics of each member’s district, which often cut against what party leaders want.
For example, some Republicans represent heavily Republican districts and will be happy to go along with Trump’s agenda, regardless of how extreme it is. Others represent districts won by President Joe Biden in 2020 and might be more inclined to moderate their positions to keep their seats in 2026 and beyond.
Trump has also made life difficult for himself by using Congress, as many incoming administrations do, as a hiring pool for his incoming administration. He’s said he would nominate three Republican House members elected for the next Congress to high-level posts in his administration, knocking Johnson’s seat advantage down to the low single digits.
Hunt is an assistant professor of political science at Boise State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.