When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Republicans didn’t just win an election — they inherited unified control of government and, with it, a mandate they treated as a license to govern at speed. Fourteen months later, the party looks considerably different from the one that swept into power, and not entirely in ways its members intended.
The core agenda of Trump’s second term has been sweeping in ambition, if uneven in execution. The first year alone saw dramatic shifts across trade and industrial policy, a new wave of tariffs, a deregulatory push across multiple sectors, a reorganized approach to artificial intelligence and energy production, and a significant reshaping of the federal government’s footprint. Republicans moved quickly, and in doing so, exposed fault lines within their own coalition that are only now beginning to show.
The Tax Agenda
The clearest legislative achievement of the term so far has been on taxes. The unified Republican Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025. The legislation extended and expanded the tax cuts first introduced during his initial term, while adding new breaks on tipped income and overtime pay.
Republicans have since leaned heavily on those provisions as a political asset heading into midterm season, framing any Democratic opposition as a straightforward vote to raise taxes on working Americans. Whether the law’s benefits filter through to voters’ pocketbooks in a meaningful way before November remains an open question.
Trade: Ambition Meets the Courts
On trade, the administration moved with characteristic aggression. On April 2, 2025, which Trump branded “Liberation Day,” the White House announced sweeping tariffs on nearly all of America’s trading partners, going well beyond what most economists and foreign policy analysts had anticipated. Markets responded badly, with equities losing close to $3 trillion in value in the immediate aftermath, before a partial pause and a shift toward bilateral negotiations stabilized sentiment somewhat.
The more durable blow came from the judiciary. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not grant a president authority to impose tariffs, effectively invalidating the legal foundation of Trump’s broadest trade measures and cutting the effective average tariff rate nearly in half. The administration moved to find alternative legal footing, but the ruling represented a meaningful constraint on what had been one of the term’s most defining economic instruments.
Immigration: A Signature Issue Grows Complicated
Immigration was always intended to be the centerpiece of Trump’s second term, and by the administration’s own metrics, the numbers are striking. The Department of Homeland Security reports more than 622,000 deportations since inauguration day, and 2025 marked the first year of negative net migration in the United States in at least half a century. Those are figures Republicans are not shy about citing.
Yet the political picture has grown more complicated than the White House anticipated. High-profile enforcement actions, including the detention of college students and the separation of families with legal residency, generated significant backlash that extended beyond the usual critics. A Quinnipiac poll found 57 percent of voters disapproving of how immigration enforcement has been conducted. Even inside the administration, the language has shifted: White House deputy chief of staff James Blair reportedly advised Republican lawmakers to stop emphasizing “mass deportations” and refocus their messaging on the removal of violent offenders, a notable retreat from the framing that defined the 2024 campaign.
Ukraine: The Issue That Exposes the Old GOP
Few issues have laid bare the Republican Party’s transformation more starkly than the war in Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, condemnation from both parties was near-universal, and congressional support for arming Kyiv was overwhelmingly bipartisan. That consensus is now a relic. The GOP of 2026 is a party genuinely divided on whether aiding Ukraine serves American interests at all, and the fault line runs not just through Congress but through the White House itself.
The Trump administration’s approach to the conflict has been, at best, inconsistent. The White House temporarily halted military assistance to Ukraine early in the term as a negotiating lever, leaned heavily on European allies to shoulder more of the financial burden, and has floated the prospect of a peace settlement that would require Kyiv to cede significant territory — a position that sits uneasily with a wing of the party that still views Russian expansionism as a direct threat to Western security. Critics have accused Trump of pressuring Ukraine while giving Moscow considerably more room to maneuver, a charge the administration rejects but has struggled to fully rebuff.
The sanctions question has sharpened the internal tension considerably. In early March 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a 30-day waiver allowing India to purchase Russian oil, citing the need to ease supply pressures stemming from rising energy prices. A handful of Republican senators, including senior figures on the Armed Services Committee, broke publicly with the decision, arguing that easing financial pressure on Moscow while Russia was reportedly providing intelligence to Iran on targeting American forces was both strategically incoherent and dangerous. Most of their colleagues, however, declined to comment when pressed — a silence that spoke volumes.
At the level of public opinion, the numbers tell a clear story of a party in transition. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in spring 2025 found that only 40 percent of Republicans considered Russia an enemy of the United States, down sharply from 58 percent the previous year. Support for sending military aid to Ukraine has followed a similar trajectory, falling to 43 percent among Republicans by early 2026, according to Chicago Council polling. Those figures represent a dramatic reversal from the early months of the invasion, when Republican voters were broadly aligned with the hawkish instincts of their congressional representatives.
What remains is a party with two distinct foreign policy temperaments that are increasingly difficult to reconcile. One wing, associated with older Cold War instincts and traditional alliance commitments, views a Russian victory in Ukraine as a strategic catastrophe that would embolden authoritarian actors globally and ultimately cost the United States far more than the aid it withheld. The other, ascendant under Trump, frames the war as a distant European problem being subsidized by American taxpayers, with no defined objective and no credible plan for conclusion. For now, the latter view holds the upper hand — but the Republicans who dissented on sanctions are a reminder that the debate is not yet over.
A Coalition Under Pressure
Perhaps the most consequential story of Trump’s second term is not any single policy but the gradual erosion of the political coalition that made it possible. Polling suggests that only around a quarter of Americans now support most of the administration’s policies and plans, down from roughly 35 percent at inauguration. That decline has come largely from within the Republican base itself, with Hispanic voters, independents, and younger adults who shifted toward Trump in 2024 expressing the sharpest levels of disillusionment.
Congressional Republicans have not been immune to the pressure. A bipartisan bloc of senators and representatives joined Democrats to push back on significant portions of the administration’s proposed domestic spending cuts, rejecting nearly all of the $33 billion in health and human services reductions the White House had sought. Heading into a midterm election year, with history almost invariably working against the party in power, Republican strategists are left hoping that a divided Democratic opposition and favorable district maps can compensate for a policy record that has yet to fully consolidate the gains of 2024.
