GOP will 'tear itself apart' trying to push Trump agenda through Congress: analyst

Donald Trump is entering office with a Republican-controlled Congress — but one of the most fragile in modern history, wrote Hayes Brown for MSNBC.

And it's one he says Democrats can easily exploit.

The important thing to remember, Brown wrote, is, "One should never underestimate Republicans’ willingness to punch one another in the face out of spite. In many ways, a large number of the policies laid out in Project 2025 may not even need an organized resistance: At least in Congress, all Democrats need to do to notch a win is sit back and let the GOP tear itself apart, especially on the looming fight over taxes."

House Speaker Mike Johnson has a tiny majority, with a margin of just a couple seats. And his path to retain the gavel is already quite rocky, with a Raw Story report revealing there is already a plan to try to remove him.

But even if he survives that, just passing the things Trump has pledged to do — like his tax plan — is going to cause huge fractures in the GOP caucus, Brown wrote.

This was already the case when the GOP won back the House in 2022, noted Brown. The infighting that cost Kevin McCarthy the speakership and caused weeks of paralysis in Congress "centered on far-right members of the Freedom Caucus who pushed dead-end legislation to slash spending on the social safety net or otherwise to own the libs, be it by attacking transgender health care or yelling about gas stoves.

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"With President Joe Biden in the White House and with Democrats running the Senate, it was an impractical strategy that undercut any leverage Republicans might have used to extract smaller concessions in the face of Democrats’ united opposition."

With Trump in charge and the House GOP actually on the hook to pass an agenda, that fighting will only grow more intense, he wrote.

"The GOP can afford to lose only three votes on any given bill before it fails," he wrote. "That margin could shrink even further in the weeks to come as the seats several of Trump’s Cabinet picks will vacate remain pending special elections. Even if the far right is completely placated in every bill Johnson puts forward, swing-seat Republicans still exist. Many of those front-line members barely staved off their opponents in the last election."

The bottom line, he concluded, is that the GOP has maybe a year to try to get anything passed before it becomes impossible and campaign season starts working against them in 2026 — and "with the whole of Washington in Republican hands, Democrats will be well within their rights to point out that the people holding the matches are also the ones stepping on the firehose."