When a former U.S. ambassador reached out to Donald Trump seeking his endorsement for a congressional bid, the president declined. In Trump’s mind, he’d already done enough.
The president said he wouldn’t endorse the candidate ever again because, to him, the person would be called “honorable” for the rest of their life. “I literally changed your name,” Trump told the candidate in a conversation relayed to NOTUS by a person familiar with what was said.
Trump’s stance is indicative of a defining feature of his political view: Loyalty is worth rewarding, but rewards don’t last forever. Changing someone’s name or the physical appearance of Washington does, though, and that’s the defining legacy Trump is focused on.
“He was in a friend-gathering mode before,” one GOP political operative said of Trump’s relationship with Republicans in Congress. “And now he doesn’t give a shit.”
This is where the president and the Republican Party he has torn down and rebuilt now find themselves. Yes, Trump has stocked the party with loyalists. No, he doesn’t particularly care about what happens to them after he’s gone.
NOTUS spoke with more than a dozen Republican former and current lawmakers and officials for this story — some who love Trump and some who decidedly do not. But they all agreed that Trump’s lasting legacy on the Republican Party is, well, Trump himself.
Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pennsylvania), who has long criticized Trump, told NOTUS that if the president “cared about the election prospects” for the GOP, “he wouldn’t be asking for a billion dollars for a ballroom. He certainly wouldn’t be talking about it every day.”
Trump is staring down difficult midterms followed by his lame-duck years, a period recent presidents have largely spent doing whatever is best for their party. Barack Obama raised gobs of money for Democrats and campaigned for anyone who asked him to. George W. Bush spent the end of his presidency lying very, very low. But Trump is knee-deep in his own personal obsessions — aesthetics, revenge — and has done little to suggest he’s preparing to fortify the party for a post-Trump future.
He hasn’t exactly been subtle about his feelings.
“I don’t care about the midterms,” Trump recently told reporters, as a counter to how he believed Iranian leaders were assessing his will.
Some Republicans think November’s elections will be the final test to determine Trump’s future influence over the party. Former Rep. Fred Upton, who represented Michigan and was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump in 2021, said November will serve as a “real punch to the gut” or “pat on the back” depending on if Republicans can hold to the House or Senate or both.
“If either of them flips, all of a sudden, the revenge tour that Trump has been on the last year and a half changes dramatically for the worse for his administration, in terms of subpoenas, in terms of hearings, in terms of getting anything done,” Upton said.
Others think Trump is already off to a bad start.
“I think he’s endangered the midterms by alienating MAHA, alienating DOGE, alienating people who didn’t want another war,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who has reason for a grudge after Trump went all-out to oust him from Congress.
Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, said Trump is the “unequivocal leader and best messenger for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress moving forward.”
“The American people elected President Trump in a landslide in 2024 alongside Republican majorities in the House and Senate — and they expect Republicans in the 119th Congress to keep delivering on the clear America First mandate voters issued. There has never been a president in American history who has fought harder and done more to keep his promises than this President, and anyone suggesting otherwise must be delusional,” Wales continued.
Some congressional Republicans are more broadly frustrated by how Trump treats them. One House Republican pointed to their experience at the White House congressional Christmas party last year, where they said Trump skipped the customary meet-and-greet and instead just gave a speech, outdoors in December, from the bottom of the residence steps. They added that they’d felt more welcome at the Biden-Harris party the year before.
Should Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans expect congressional oversight will overshadow any Trump priorities.
Some Republicans in Congress privately think Trump’s policy decisions have already hamstrung the party’s chances to maintain the House, and some are nervous about keeping the Senate — a possibility that seemed unlikely a year ago.
Others think the president’s earlier focus on a fund to compensate people who claimed they were harmed by the so-called weaponization of the government — including the scores of individuals who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — was a pointless distraction. The administration eventually rescinded the plan but not after a weekslong public debate that dominated peak primary season.
“Our candidates, instead of spending time talking about the positive effects of working families, tax cuts, regulatory reform, those things, we’re talking about a bogus payout fund for punks, so that doesn’t help,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) told NOTUS.
Trump has been the dominant force in Republican primaries this year. His power to pick and choose winners has forced incumbent Republican representatives and senators into early retirement. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) lost his primary last month to the state’s Trump-endorsed attorney general, Ken Paxton. Trump’s allies spent millions of dollars to defeat Massie and at the end, the president’s closest allies gloated about his predicted downfall.
And as the president heads to the halfway mark of his last term, it’s clear he is trying to cement his legacy — one centered around the Trump imprint on physical fixtures rather than an abstract and changing political party. Trump has reverted to his real estate and development background and steered his focus to beautifying the nation’s capital with — to name a few — a golf course takeover, a significant White House remodel and the refoiling of D.C. statues back to their gilded origins.
Still, many Republicans feel the tradeoff has been worth it. Trump kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court judges, expand the party and secure the border.
“He’s definitely been the power behind our party’s growth. I mean, there’s no question the party has grown, we’ve grown in majorities everywhere,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told NOTUS. “The question is, how do we sustain it?”
Border crossings are at a 50-year low, according to a Pew Research analysis. The problem was addressed with such expediency that many lawmakers running for reelection feel the issue does not carry the same weight it did in the last election.
Past the midterms, there is still a looming concern among Republicans, many who will admit it only privately, that Trump has prioritized his personal interests over the Republican Party’s. Only those no longer in his good graces take the swing, however.
“I would certainly say the family’s business, or the ability to increase their net worth, definitely seems like a priority, because that’s happening at a record pace,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said of Trump’s legacy.
Davidson defended Trump, calling him “very unselfish,” citing his refusal to take a paycheck due to “his decision to serve our country.”
Cornyn, who spent his primary campaign trying to get into Trump’s good graces only for the president to endorse his opponent a week before the runoff, was blunt in his assessment of how much Republicans should go out of their way to help Trump now.
“I’m not going to be a thorn in his side intentionally, but I’m also not going to go out of my way to try to appease him,” he said. “A lot of us have bent over backwards trying to get along, and obviously that doesn’t make any difference to him at all.”
Hamed Ahmadi and Igor Bobic contributed to this report.
