Profile
Sections
tv
Featured
More From NBC
Follow NBC News
news Alerts
There are no new alerts at this time
If there is one certainty in politics these days, it’s that the status quo rarely holds.
And history tells us that when one party has control of the so-called trifecta of governing power — the White House, the House and the Senate — the new status quo has a shelf life of closer to two years than four. The GOP already feels time pressure to make use of its majorities under President-elect Donald Trump, while Democrats face the pressure of how to rebound from their loss. A big question animating 2025 will be which is greater: the pressure of losing or the pressure of governing?
The periods of one-party control of the trifecta since President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 tell us as much. Just before Reagan, Jimmy Carter had the trifecta for four years — but saw his party fragment by year three. It’s the last time the Democrats had an uninterrupted four-year hold on both houses of Congress and the White House. Reagan and George H.W. Bush never got a trifecta during their presidencies, though Reagan’s party did have the Senate for six of his eight years. Bill Clinton and the Democrats got it for all of two years (his first two).
When George W. Bush was elected, he had it for less than six months before a party switch tipped the 50-50 Senate to the Democrats by one seat. Bush would end up getting the trifecta back after the 2002 midterms and holding it until the Democratic wave in the 2006 — the first time the GOP had had the trifecta since 1955!
Democrats then nabbed the trifecta for two years after Barack Obama’s 2008 election, before the GOP’s House takeover of 2010. Republicans would get it again for the first two years of Trump’s first term, only for the House to go Democratic in the 2018 midterms. And Joe Biden and the Democrats got the trifecta back after 2020 but, like Obama, Trump and Clinton, lost the trifecta in the first midterm.
That brings us to the current GOP trifecta, which will start when Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20. It’s Trump’s second time with a Republican-controlled Congress, and this time, he won’t be at war with his own party, like he was that first year in office. In fact, judging by their rhetoric and actions, Republicans are under no illusion they will hold this trifecta for any longer than two years, and they are trying to get all of their promises in legislative form before the 2026 midterms.
They realize they are simply renting their hold on power until the landlord (the American electorate) decides otherwise.
It’s not “if” the GOP will lose its grip on power, it’s “when.” And even the “when” looks predictable, if not absolutely certain. The House majority is so narrow for the GOP that without Trump’s name on the midterm ballot in 2026, it seems almost inevitable the Democrats will be in the House majority even if there’s no blue wave.
But while the “when” seems somewhat predictable, what we don’t know about this year is “how” we get to that point, which has come like clockwork in recent presidencies, when the public tires of the trifecta.
For instance, is the GOP truly united behind Trump, lock, stock and barrel, or is the party united only in not going public with its disagreements with Trump?
The contentious vote for Mike Johnson for House speaker offers some clue as to how this could come apart on Trump. The biggest problem Trump has is that while the party is united around trying to make his presidency a success, the party is not united around how to do that.
This is still a party that has a lot of folks like Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a conservative who got into national politics to focus on limiting the size and scope of government. What’s less clear to me is whether Roy’s views on conservative governance match what Trump and the newer Republicans he has brought into office believe.
From this perch, it looks as if the current GOP is divided between the idea of a strong government that gets itself involved in everything (the country’s culture as well as the economy — think library books or access to junk food or vices like pornography, as well as tariffs) versus the more libertarian version of conservatism that dominated since the Reagan era, which holds that government needs to contract and be less involved in the day-to-day lives of Americans.
The question is whether this divide in the GOP eventually causes Trump problems in trying to get his “one big beautiful bill” passed. Trump doesn’t get animated by the deficit the way the likes of Roy and some other Republicans do. Trump won’t care what the Congressional Budget Office says about whether and what his agenda adds to the deficit. If he doesn’t like its math, he’ll simply say it’s wrong and dare members of his party to defy him.
That’s likely to be a winning strategy for him legislatively, unless he somehow becomes unpopular in the GOP before the end of his first year in office. But given the very narrow majority the GOP has in the House, only a handful of Republicans’ standing on fiscal conservative ceremony could cause this bill problems and potentially expose the small government-versus-strong government divide inside the party.
Of course, cracks in the GOP coalition will benefit the Democrats only if they somehow stay united during these first two years of Trump.
And while the party stayed remarkably united in opposition to Trump in his first term, there’s already plenty of evidence that the unified opposition to Trump will fracture as Democrats ponder how to handle his second term after having spent eight years arguing his first term was an unrepresentative anomaly.
How many Democrats will be open to working with congressional Republicans in passing Trump’s agenda? More than you might think.
Even though Democrats lost the presidency and control of the House by the smallest of margins, there’s a growing belief that the Democratic brand is a mess. And there are plenty of elected Democrats who are trying to declare their own “independence,” of sorts, from the conventional Democratic brand, particularly on economic populism and on culture.
Fetterman is probably the best current example of this mindset. He’s clearly trying to make it clear to his constituents that he’s aware many of his supporters from 2022 voted for Trump in 2024.
How many Fettermans will there be in the House and the Senate? How much pressure will the Democratic leadership put on these folks to toe the party line in opposition to Trump? We don’t know the answers to these questions right now. But it’s hard to argue there’s any one leader of the party right now who could even attempt to wield that kind of influence. I don’t think Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer would get very far with many of his own Democratic colleagues if he tries to make working with Trump a pariah cause. Ditto for House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Of course, the next elections are never far from politicians’ minds. Will a large part of the Democratic base be ready to punish Democrats for working with Trump? And if so, would that divide the party or help give it a voice?
One can sense the current set of elected Democrats in Congress believe they ought to show a little humility with voters, accept the premise that elections have consequences and reckon with the fact that voters clearly decided they were tired of Democrats’ being in charge. But how long does that mindset hold among Democrats? Which Democrat or three (with eyes on the open 2028 presidential election) will see potentially weak opposition to Trump by the party in Washington as an opportunity to show toughness and become a new face of the anti-Trump resistance? And would that help the party find its voice — or hand Trump a foil that allows him to keep his own party more united than it wants to be?
Here’s what we do know: Politics is rarely static, even in peaceful times. And given how many times control of the House, the Senate and the White House have changed hands over the last 25 years, one could argue the new “status quo” of Washington and politics is change.
So bet on change this year and bet on party infighting that could easily lead to both parties’ fragmenting. The question is when does it happen and how — and which party cracks first.
Chuck Todd is NBC News’ chief political analyst and the former moderator of “Meet The Press.”
© 2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC
