What will be the signature achievement of Trump 2.0?

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — On top of maintaining the House, Republicans will take control of the Senate and the White House in January, handing them complete control of Washington for the first time since early 2019.

While the incoming Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill have big ideas about how to spend their political capital, they will be limited by slim majorities in the House and Senate.

For a better idea of what to expect, I talked to CNN congressional correspondent Lauren Fox, who spends most of her time living and breathing in the rarified air of the Capitol building and the subterranean tunnels where representatives and senators walk or ride special trains back and forth from their offices.

Our conversation, edited for style and length, is below:

What’s the plan to fund the government before January?

WOLF: The current Congress doesn’t leave until January. They have a lot of work to do to fund the government. What’s going to happen in the next month or so?

FOX: The most likely scenario right now is that they come up with a short-term patch, which they’re working toward right now, that would fund the government into probably early spring.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has made clear his preference would be March. So that would give them an opportunity to punt, basically. It also gives Johnson an opportunity to get through his speaker race without having to pass what is known as the omnibus, or end-of-year, multi-bill extravaganza that we’ve seen in years past at the holidays.

That’s something that’s really revolting to his right flank. Kicking this can into March and then dealing with it then probably is beneficial for Johnson.

I would note that sticking a funding fight smack dab in the middle of the first 100 days (of Donald Trump’s presidency) would be complicated. It could make it hard to get the legislation that they want to focus on through. It just is another thing to check off the list, in addition to confirming an entire Cabinet.

Will Trump protect Johnson from challenges by his right flank?

WOLF: Trump’s election and Republicans gaining unified government – has that inoculated Johnson from challenges to his speakership?

FOX: These things can change and turn on a dime, but Johnson’s obviously got Trump’s backing. The two of them are very close, and Johnson has gone out of his way to maintain that relationship, because he knows it can be so pivotal when you’re dealing with the kind of narrow majority that Johnson has.

It’s not just that Trump’s helpful to preserving his speakership. Trump is helpful to getting people on board to any piece of the agenda that they want to move forward. If you think about down the road when they do tax reform, and you have just a handful of votes to lose, you’ve got to convince people who aren’t used to saying yes to say yes.

My sense is if they can kick the can down the road on the spending bill, Johnson has a much easier time than we saw Kevin McCarthy have two years ago with getting the speakership.

How will Republicans deal with some very challenging math?

WOLF: Passing major legislation is difficult when you have a large majority. This will be the most evenly divided Congress since the Great Depression. How will that affect Republicans’ ability to pass anything major?

FOX: We saw a really big indicator of how aware Republicans are of that reality earlier this week, when you had (incoming Senate Majority Leader) John Thune making clear to Republican senators that the most likely scenario is that they punt tax reform to later in the year, and they do a smaller piece of legislation that deals with defense, energy and immigration in the first 100 days.

To me, and I think to Republican senators who I’ve spoken to, that signaled that they know they need some practice making sure they can move through this complicated budget process known as reconciliation. They need to make sure they can do it before they try to do it on tax, because tax is just a beast.

They did it in 2017. They’ve obviously shown they can pass tax reform, but it is not easy to do, and there’s going to be a lot of disagreements between Senate Republicans and House Republicans. You’re dealing with a very narrow majority in the House and you’re dealing with a not-so-big majority in the Senate.

When I saw that announcement from Thune, that he had told Republicans in their conference meeting that they were starting with another package, instead of tax reform, that was my indication that they are very aware of how slim the margins are.

What will be the signature legislative achievement of Trump 2.0?

WOLF: The recent history is that presidents get two years of unified government, and as a result, get one big, signature piece of legislation. Barack Obama got Obamacare; Trump got tax cuts in his first term. Joe Biden got the big-spending Inflation Reduction Act. What will the one big thing be for Trump 2.0?

FOX: If they stick with the current order that they’re talking about – which is by the way, not a sure thing – but let’s say that they try to tackle immigration first, the budget process in the Senate that allows you to pass a bill with 51 votes, known as reconciliation, has a lot of limited parameters around what you can actually do.

So Republicans can’t do wide, sweeping immigration policy changes through that first bill.

But what they could do is invest a lot of money in border security. They could basically plus up how much they’re spending on those priorities, and they could move some money around. That could still be really significant for the Trump administration, because Trump talked about the border so much and because Republicans campaigned on that issue.

I could very well see that being a major signature piece of legislation for Trump that would fit with his brand.

On the other hand, you have a series of tax breaks that are going to expire at the end of the year in 2025, and I do think Republicans are cognizant of that and don’t want a situation where Americans blame them for taxes going up or businesses blame them for taxes going up.

So I think it’s possible that they could do both, but I do think that if immigration comes first, that’s probably the more likely victory.

Do Trump’s many tax promises stand any chance of passing?

WOLF: Trump made a lot of promises about tax cuts during the campaign – ending taxes on tips, ending taxes on Social Security benefits and more. There was talk by the incoming vice president, JD Vance, of expanding the child tax credit. Is there any indication that any of that will actually happen in such a closely divided Congress, when Democrats are probably going to oppose some of it? Maybe not the child tax credit, but some of that other stuff?

FOX: I don’t think Republicans are counting on Democrats for their tax bill. Even if there are provisions that Democrats might agree with, it’s going to be a big lift for them to get any Democratic votes, which is why they’re going to do this through reconciliation.

Republican lawmakers are entertaining some of the ideas that Trump suggested on the campaign trail. There’s a reality, though, which is that some of those ideas cost a lot of money. Not taxing Social Security benefits – that costs a lot of money.

And these things are going to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office, and Republicans are going to have to publicly defend why they’re adding to the deficit at a time when they’re saying the government waste, fraud and abuse needs to end.

There are Republicans in both the House and the Senate, on the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, who have been working for a year now trying to brainstorm ideas of what they might want to include in another tax bill. And part of that has been getting a sense of how much some of these provisions cost.

It’s really sort of a game of trying to match what you want to do with how much you want to spend. And that’s the really complicated part of this process.

Will Democrats help keep the government running?

WOLF: The last couple of years, Johnson has had to get help from Democrats in order to pass spending bills. Is that likely to continue after Trump becomes president? In other words, will there be hard-line Republicans that oppose spending bills just because they oppose spending, or will it just be a party-line situation on these things?

FOX: It’s going to have to be bipartisan in both the House and the Senate. And the reason is you cannot pass spending bills through reconciliation, which means you need 60 votes in the Senate.

So my guess is, if you get Democrats in the Senate, you’re going to lose Republicans in the House and need Democrats in the House. So I think that that’s a trend that we’re just going to see continue.

Will Trump resort to shutdown threats?

WOLF: Will that set up a dynamic that is a repeat of the first Trump administration, when Trump caused a government shutdown even though Republicans controlled the House and the Senate? Do you think that they will be shyer about shutdown threats in this term, or is that a tool Trump will go back to?

FOX: It’s hard to predict the dynamics that could cause a shutdown. For example, if we’re talking about March, which is potentially when we would have the next spending deadline, do you really want to have a shutdown in your first 100 days? I think that that’s the kind of political calculation you have to make, and so it’s hard to know, right?

I would be very surprised if Republicans want to go down that road in Trump’s first 100 days. Does that dynamic change in September? Does that dynamic change at another point? It’s possible.

It also is possible that Democrats dig in a little more, because they know that it would be cataclysmic to have a shutdown in Republicans’ first 100 days of trying to legislate.

How will Democrats stay relevant?

WOLF: We’re all focusing on Republicans because Democrats won’t control anything starting in January. How are they going to stay relevant? How are they going to stay visible?

FOX: A couple of ways. Democrats are still going to be needed to do the basic functions of governing.

When we are talking about the debt ceiling, when we’re talking about spending, it’s more likely than not that you are going to see Democrats helping. Because more likely than not, you’re going to see the middle – more swing-district Democrats, swing-district Republicans – working together to pass those bills.

The other place that you’re going to see Democrats a lot is in these confirmation hearings. They may not be using the same sort of hard-charging tactics we saw in the first Trump administration, when they would deny Republicans quorums for votes in committee or those kinds of things, but what we will see is they’re going to ask hard questions and make made-for-TV moments.

The sense I’ve gotten, and I’ve reported on this pretty extensively, is that Democrats are really trying to figure out what happened in November, and they are being cautious about when they decide to dig in against Trump and when maybe that wouldn’t be beneficial.

As Democrats have said to me, if you say everything’s a five-alarm fire, then nothing’s a five-alarm fire, right? They’re going to be cautious about where they pick their moments.

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