Posted on Tuesday, January 14, 2025

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by Matt Kane

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On November 5, the American people delivered President-elect Trump a historic mandate to advance the agenda he championed on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, several Republican senators have already turned the cabinet confirmation process into their own personal vanity project. Even before the process has officially commenced, they have signaled that they may resist confirming, or outright vote against, some of Trump’s nominees. Republicans in that camp would do well to remember—for the good of the country and their own political future—that the electoral mandate was given specifically to President-elect Trump, not the Republican Party as a whole.

Trump far outpaced many Senate Republican candidates on Election Day. He won all five swing states with concurrent Senate races, yet the Republican Senate candidate won in just one of them—Pennsylvania—and by mere thousands of votes despite Trump winning by over 100,000. In the other four swing states—Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all four Republican candidates came up short.

Whether a president-elect squeaks out a marginal Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote, achieves a Nixon/Reagan-esque landslide, or winds up somewhere in between as most do, a president has the absolute right, and even obligation, to follow through on as many campaign promises as possible. But for those who believe margins and public perception matter, President-elect Trump’s victory was an undeniable landslide given the current state of the electoral map.

Trump achieved the largest Electoral College victory for a Republican since the 1980s, and he became the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris became the first major party nominee to not flip a single county since President Herbert Hoover, a historically unpopular president due to his presiding over the Great Depression.

Despite this clear mandate, a potential hijacking of Trump’s appointments by a minority of Republican senators looms.

The confirmation process was intended to ensure that nominees were professionally qualified for their specific roles. It was never intended to become an exercise in sifting through personal lives to tarnish reputations over matters unrelated to the nominees’ potential future duties.

Though the Republicans now hold a 53-47 Senate majority in the 119th Congress, the effective balance of power for confirming Trump’s appointees is more like 50-50, which is due to opposition from Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and hand-picked Mitt Romney replacement John Curtis. While those three alone are not enough to derail a confirmation, just one of the other 50 Republican senators defecting would essentially put the Republicans in the minority. This insubordinate behavior toward the voters who elected them to implement President-elect Trump’s agenda is even more glaring when considering how Republicans rolled over during Joe Biden’s appointee confirmation process four years ago. Most of Biden’s nominees were comfortably approved—often with Republican support—despite a 50-50 Senate.

Categorically unqualified picks such as Pete Buttigieg and “Rachel” Levine deserved legitimate scrutiny and examination during their confirmation hearings. Yet Buttigieg received votes from 37 Republicans to lead the Department of Transportation in spite of not having prior transportation experience. And Levine garnered Republican support for a crucial health position despite suffering from gender dysphoria.

But the same Republicans who voted for Biden’s appointees are opposing Trump’s while all Democrats in the minority continue to remain in lockstep opposition. Democrats are never to be applauded given how their radical and divisive agenda has torpedoed the United States for so long. But in this instance, they can at least make the argument that they were put into power by voters who demanded they resist the Trump agenda. Republican senators have no such justification. Senators like Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, and John Cornyn have cloaked their obstruction as mere “due diligence,” “thorough vetting,” or “letting the process play out” rather than saying what they really think—that President Trump has no right to overturn the status quo.

All Trump appointees must remain firm in their commitment to seeing the confirmation process through to a vote. If they ultimately come up short, they will have done a tremendous service to Trump and the American people by forcing RINOs to out themselves. If backroom public pressure campaigns designed to make nominees withdraw before an official vote are successful, it prevents us from knowing for certain who the internal saboteurs are who need to be primaried.

While some have cautioned against primarying long-entrenched Republican senators, there is no tangible risk in doing so. Many RINOs hail from deep red states, meaning that if they survive a primary challenge, they will still defeat their Democratic opponent. But if they lose to a MAGA primary challenger, then a RINO Senate seat becomes a MAGA one. The irony given how self-serving these RINOs are (as evidenced by their disinterest in helping Trump despite their voters overwhelmingly supporting him) is that they could avoid a catastrophic primary altogether if they simply worked to help confirm President-elect Trump’s appointments.

A major reason for the magnitude of Trump’s win was not only his personal appeal as an outsider, but also his mission to replace long entrenched bureaucrats with appointees who are outside of the system and are in touch with the desires of the American people. It is only natural for the insiders to do everything in their power to resist this influx of MAGA-aligned appointees whose presence threatens the status quo.

Being confirmed after a confirmation process headed by the uniparty establishment, Trump’s outsider appointees will emerge more battle-tested and committed to truly advancing the MAGA agenda.

Matt Kane earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Stony Brook University. His work has been posted by President Trump, RealClearPolitics, and American Thinker. X/Twitter: @MattKaneUSA Truth Social @MattKane