What Can Trump Do With United Government?

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will possess a sizable prize that very few of his predecessors since Richard Nixon have enjoyed in their first two years in office: united government.

Following his inauguration, Trump will step into the Oval Office with the benefit of having the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate under the control of a loyal GOP. Republicans will have control of 53 Senate seats and 220 House seats. While the Republican majority remains narrow—indeed, the smallest in in the House in American history—Trump will still have a massive window of opportunity.

Although these moments don’t last long, these are the months that offer presidents their most realistic path to legislative achievement of historic significance.

Over the next two years, Trump will have the chance to make consequential changes on a number of key policy fronts with congressional approval, including immigration, taxation, and fossil fuel energy production.

But success, history shows, is anything but automatic.

The contemporary period of congressional-presidential relations started in January 1969, when Nixon—a Republican—succeeded Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who had withdrawn from the race. As Nixon took office,  Democratic majorities returned to the House and Senate, where the party had been in control since 1955. (Democrats had 248 seats in the House and 57 in the Senate).

Nixon’s victory and the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, were the start of the modern era of divided government. Now the two branches are frequently under the control of different parties—and with partisan polarization vastly expanding the space separating Democrats from Republicans, many presidents have spent much of their time behind the Resolute Desk facing off against a Congress controlled by an uncooperative opposition.

Even during the so-called honeymoon periods, divided government has made it difficult for presidents to build on perceived mandates, as President Ronald Reagan learned between 1981 and 1983, when House Democrats—with 243 seats—served as a powerful check against his effort to dismantle core elements of the social safety net. For instance, when Reagan attempted to reduce early retirement benefits under Social Security in 1981, Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a fighting liberal from Massachusetts, pounced—teaching Republicans what the third rail of U.S. politics looked like.

At times, united government has provided the exception. Most famously, President Barack Obama took office in 2009 and spent his capital aggressively and effectively. Taking power after the dire financial crisis that began in 2008 and amid the ongoing quagmire in Iraq, Obama worked with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to move forward a robust legislative trifecta that included the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a massive economic stimulus, and the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, made possible because Democrats controlled 257 House seats and 59 Senate seats (including two independents who caucused with Senate Democrats).

Republicans, still shell-shocked from the fallen status of their party under former President George W. Bush, initially didn’t put up much of a fight other than voting no on the bills. The stimulus bill helped move the nation out of a severe recession. The Dodd-Frank Act remade the regulatory infrastructure within which financial world operated. The ACA, which has become increasingly popular over time and survived legal and political attacks, vastly expanded access to health care coverage and ended certain kinds of inequitable practices by insurance companies; ACA also resulted in a huge expansion of Medicaid coverage throughout the states, red and blue.

More recently, outgoing President Joe Biden experienced similar success with united government. From 2021 to 2023, the House and Senate were under Democratic control (222-213 in the House; 50-50 in the Senate). Even though the Senate majority was as narrow as could be, with Vice President Kamala Harris forced to serve as the tiebreaking vote, Biden relied on aggressive party leadership on Capitol Hill—as well as procedures such as reconciliation—to push major legislation over fierce Republican resistance.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could kick and scream as much as he wanted, but Biden, who brought with him extensive legislative experience, tapped into his Lyndon Johnson-like skills to obtain the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The success brought instant comparisons to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, masking some of the underlying weaknesses of Biden’s administration—from his deteriorating condition as a result of age and electoral discontent stemming from inflation, immigration, and chronic economic hardship.

Whereas united government can empower a president, as it did with Obama and Biden, success is anything but inevitable. When Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency in January 1977, Democrats were feeling downright giddy. With 61 Senate seats and 292 House seats, the outlook seemed great. The Republican Party had been discredited as a result of Nixon’s dramatic downfall in 1974. Carter seemed to have a wide-open playing field to erase the memories of Nixon and Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford, from the history books.

It turned out that there was trouble ahead, however. Carter’s relationship with legislators was rocky from the start. The consummate Washington outsider, Carter continually took steps that angered colleagues on his side of the aisle. In 1977, he killed water projects that powerful members of his party were counting on. He refused to court members with the same kind of enthusiasm and respect that they had become used to. He prioritized issues, such as conservation, that deeply divided his own party. And he spent the first few years fighting for policies—including giving control of the Panama Canal back to the Panamanians—that energized the GOP without providing electoral reward to Democrats.

Although Carter managed to move a large number of bills during his first 100 days, they were not the kind of legacy-making legislation that Obama and Biden later pushed through. Heading into the midterms, Carter admitted in an interview with the New York Times that he might have overestimated the power of the presidency and underestimated the power of Congress. Nor did his initiatives bring any apparent political payback, as became apparent with Reagan’s victory in 1980.

Democratic President Bill Clinton also found that united government is not always an elixir to gridlock. After defeating Republican President George H. W. Bush, Clinton entered Washington hoping to rebuild his party following 12 years of Republican rule in the White House. He would count on 258 House Democrats and 55 Senate Democrats to do his bidding. There were a few instances when he successfully put pressure on everyone in the party to support him in order to push important legislation, such as a progressive tax bill in 1993 that raised taxes on the wealthy and started a long process of deficit reduction. In 1994, Congress passed the largest crime bill in the nation’s history, which dramatically increased federal sentencing for crimes, poured federal funding into the prison system, and increased community-based policing.

Clinton’s ban on assault weapons infuriated gun rights organizations while marking a major success for those seeking more stringent regulation. Over time, the anti-crime bill would become extraordinarily controversial within the Democratic Party as a result of the disproportionate effects felt by Black Americans within the carceral state. At the time, however, many in the party saw this as a significant victory that directed funds toward more effective community-based crime prevention and thus undercut Republicans, who had always claimed that they were the party of “law and order.”

Much of the first two years of Clinton’s administration, however, didn’t go so well politically. Some problematic cabinet nominations tied the administration up. Clinton also decided to invest much of his political capital on a massive health care bill that didn’t go anywhere. In June 1993, the Time magazine cover story featured a picture of a smallish Clinton looking up at the headline: “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency.” The legislative debate on the health care bill dragged on for more than a year, splitting his own party into faction and energizing Republicans. Foreign policy didn’t help matters. When two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Somalia that October, resulting in 18 U.S. soldiers being killed, confidence in Clinton fell even further.

As the health care measure consumed much of his focus, other initiatives that might have dealt more directly with the economic revitalization of deindustrialization fell by the wayside. At the same time, his support for the passage of the NAFTA agreement in 1993 seemed to move the economy in the wrong direction for working communities.

When Republicans won control of the House and Senate in the midterms for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was president, many of Clinton’s Democratic colleagues concluded that his initial two years had been a failure. Speaking to the press a day after the election, Clinton argued that voters “still believe that government is more often the problem than the solution. They don’t want any party to be the party of government. They don’t want the presumption to be that people in Washington know what’s best. … So, I’m saying that to that extent, that message—I got it. I accept responsibility for not delivering.”

The united government that will define Washington in 2025 is a formidable weapon, if Trump doesn’t waste it. Given that Republicans have proven to be extraordinarily united on most policy issues and in their support of the president-elect, he will have a massive window to achieve the kind of transformative legislation that generally eluded him during the first term.

And Trump has made clear throughout the campaign what his key demands will be, and should he obtain congressional legislation entrenching those ideas, he will push certain areas of government sharply to the right in ways that will be difficult to reverse. For all the talk about his toxic rhetoric and unconventional methods, here Trump has the chance to do what few modern presidents have been able to do, which is obtain enduring legislation that changes the country for decades to come.

Yet, he could also easily squander this opportunity. The tumult over his controversial appointments could end up taking valuable time away from a legislative agenda while Trump’s own disinterest in governing could prevent him from putting in the time and work needed to keep his coalition intact through the legislative process. His tendency to move from one issue to the other, sometimes on a whim, will make it hard for congressional Republicans to stay on track and open opportunities for a united Democratic Party to obstruct and delay. If only a few Republicans defect in the House, the majority will evaporate.

In our contemporary age, the schedule remains the same. With each day in national politics, the clock is ticking. The closer the midterm elections, the more difficult it is to keep legislators focused on what the president wants as opposed to their own survival. Even in the age of Trump’s GOP, the two interests are not always the same.

Republicans have one big opportunity to turn two years into transformative years. Democrats have one big opportunity to stop them. The outcome will profoundly influence the direction that the country’s democracy will take for decades to come.