Trump is growing tired of hearing ‘no’ from Thune. GOP senators are lining up behind the majority leader

By Lauren Fox, Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump may be the head of the Republican Party, but when it comes to the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune is still in charge.

Trump, who will attend lunch with Senate Republicans at the US Capitol on Wednesday, is growing tired of hearing “no” from the Senate leader as he pushes certain controversial priorities, according to people familiar with his thinking. But Thune is sitting on as much support as any leader could with less than five months until the midterms, and is surrounded by some emboldened colleagues who are more willing than they have been in years to take on the Republican administration.

In more than a dozen interviews with Senate staff and members, Thune’s GOP colleagues contend it’s been a precarious stretch for the majority leader as he has been forced to disarm one Trump-devised political grenade after another. But if Trump is frustrated that Thune doesn’t follow orders, many of the South Dakota lawmaker’s colleagues are grateful the majority leader is willing to risk his own political future with the president to ensure the party has a fighting chance at holding its majority.

For the next several months, Thune must continue walking that tightrope between loyalty to a president who demands it and protection of an institution and colleagues who are facing their own political headwinds.

“The president is creating terms that will never ever be satisfied, so why are we walking into a boxed canyon? That’s what John is confronted with,” retiring Sen. Thom Tillis said. “John Thune is an extraordinary leader. He has the patience of Job.”

The North Carolina Republican added, “I could not do his job.”

Trump has fumed for months over Thune’s refusal to jam through a sweeping federal elections overhaul bill ahead of November’s midterms — a measure the president has argued is critical enough to warrant eliminating the filibuster if necessary. In private conversations with allies, Trump has vented that Thune is not fighting hard enough for his priorities, people familiar with the discussions say, and complained that he’s tired of hearing the majority leader give him reasons why the narrowly divided Senate can’t carry out his demands.

Thune has made clear publicly and privately that the votes are not there to pass the president’s voting bill, even as he agreed to bring it up repeatedly, most recently as part of the Senate’s marathon voting session this month to pass an immigration enforcement funding package. Thune has declined Trump’s calls to fire the parliamentarian — the Senate’s nonpartisan rules referee — or to kill the filibuster to jam it through.

“It’s not good. I mean, the president depends on the majority leader to get his agenda passed,” Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who recently lost a primary to a Trump-backed challenger, told reporters about the state of Trump and Thune’s relationship. “As far as I can tell, John Thune is guilty of nothing except telling the president the truth, which is there are not the votes.”

The rift between Trump and Thune reflects a broader divide over how the GOP should spend the crucial months ahead of midterm elections that could cost the party its congressional majority and bring the White House’s agenda to a halt.

The lunch on Wednesday, Sen. Tommy Tuberville said, is a chance for a “day of reckoning” to iron out some of those differences.

“We gotta stay together as a team. Right now, we’re kind of a split group,” the Alabama Republican said.

Trump, driven by personal conviction and encouraged by a handful of vocal lawmakers, has pressed Republicans to pursue his most ambitious demands with abandon, insisting that his political instincts will guide the GOP to victory — if only they’d just listen to him.

Thune, meanwhile, presides over a Senate Republican conference that has largely grown dismayed by the president’s priorities — and increasingly convinced that preserving the party’s majority in November may require bucking Trump on some of his most controversial demands.

That divide has deepened in recent weeks amid standoffs between the White House and Senate Republicans over Trump’s new acting intelligence chief, Bill Pulte, and the president’s aborted attempt to create a $1.8 billion fund that critics say would have largely benefited political supporters and allies. And one day before Trump’s visit to the Hill, the Senate voted to rein in the president on Iran.

Navigating those perilous moments has invariably fallen to Thune. He carefully managed GOP senators’ discomfort with Pulte and worked with Democrats to try to swiftly confirm nominee Jay Clayton to take the role, only to have the president derail the process by canceling the confirmation hearing.

When the Department of Justice “anti-weaponization” fund imperiled support for a massive homeland security funding bill, Thune spent hours working to convince Sen. Bill Cassidy to vote against a Democratic amendment that would have torpedoed the bill. That allowed three Republican senators facing reelection to vote with Democrats in a stand against the unpopular fund.

And when senators were tap dancing around the idea of having to vote for millions of dollars in funding toward Trump’s White House ballroom project as gas prices skyrocketed, Thune gave his members space to stake out their own positions.

“I am not sure anybody else could do it as well as John Thune has done it,” said GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota. “He delivers on the president’s agenda quite nicely but never completely caves into the president. Not because he wouldn’t on certain things, but he understands his constituency, which, ya know, is 52 other Republican senators.”

Thune is now also leading a conference that has become slightly more emboldened to publicly register discontent with the president. Two GOP senators — Cornyn and Cassidy — both lost primaries to Trump-backed candidates this spring, and they, along with the retiring Tillis, are now free from the shackles of reelection.

The lesson of watching the president endorse Cornyn’s opponent — especially when many viewed the Texas senator as largely loyal to the president — has also reverberated within the conference, several members and aides told CNN.

“Republicans have been deferential to the president to a point that doesn’t seem to have done any good,” Cornyn said. “We’ve learned some lessons. If you support the president, it doesn’t mean he’s going to support you. Part of the problem is people who are up in 2028 are thinking, ‘Holy crap, could this happen to me?’”

Thune allies argue the tension with the president may merely be a blip. The leader, with his affable Midwestern style, has maintained a strong working relationship with Trump for years, delivering the president his signature tax cut bill, finding a path forward on major housing reform, confirming Trump’s Cabinet at a historic clip, and candidly laying out his assessment on what is possible with a narrowly divided Senate in regular phone calls.

“I think Trump genuinely likes and respects him. Compare that to some other people, that isn’t the dynamic that exists,” one GOP senator said.

Trump has often complimented Thune, calling him a “good man” earlier this month. And Thune has sought to develop a close alliance with Trump, even as he’s made clear that some of the president’s desires simply don’t have votes to make them worth pursuing.

In a sign that Trump to some degree recognizes the limits of Thune’s powers — and the enormous support he maintains within the GOP conference — he has refused to entertain calls by some MAGA allies to try to depose the majority leader.

“The White House and President Trump have enjoyed working closely with Leader Thune and Seante Republicans to deliver on many important promises to the American people,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement downplaying the difference between Trump and Thune. “We look forward to continuing these close relationships and fulfilling President Trump’s priorities that Americans elected him to enact.”

Yet in recent weeks, those close to the situation acknowledged the relationship has frayed.

“I don’t think he has the best relationship in the world right now with John Thune,” said one Trump adviser, who described the president as particularly frustrated with Thune’s insistence on preserving long-held Senate customs. “The problem is Trump looks at John Thune as [Mitch] McConnell 2.0, and that’s not a good thing.”

In some parts of the White House, Thune’s standing has eroded amid unfavorable comparisons with House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has impressed Trump and his senior aides by advancing major parts of the administration’s agenda with only one- or two-vote margins.

Johnson, advisers and allies said, has also put in extraordinary time and effort to win Trump’s trust compared with Thune — frequently traveling to the White House and Mar-a-Lago and demonstrating a willingness to find creative ways to advance Trump’s demands regardless of the blowback within his conference.

“He’s a fighter and he understands the ‘America First’ base, and I’m not sure if Thune does,” the Trump adviser said.

Thune’s defenders counter that the House and Senate are vastly different institutions, and that Thune can’t rely on the same mechanisms to show Trump how he’s working to get his agenda passed.

“If you’re the speaker and you have 218 [votes], you have everything. But if you’re the Senate majority leader, you’re always going to have three or four people who for various reasons on any given day need something or feel strongly about something,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who remains close to the White House.

But, he added: “I think Trump is not particularly interested in constitutional process, and he’s not particularly interested in Thune’s problems.”

Ahead of Wednesday’s high-stakes lunch, Thune has said he hopes his colleagues make it clear to the president that the majority leader isn’t alone standing in the way of Trump’s agenda, but that he is only the messenger for the GOP conference.

“I am not saying anything that isn’t a view that wouldn’t be shared or articulated by a lot of my colleagues for sure,” Thune said. “It’s always helpful if others would speak up and it’s not just me.”

Trump’s irritation with Thune is also coming at a time when other senators are looking at the president’s approval ratings and creating some distance. Recent CNN polling shows roughly two-thirds of voters believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the US.

Thune is also attracting ire from an animated base and conservatives in his ranks like Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, who has made clear he believes the majority leader could fight harder for the president’s priorities.

“The only thing standing between us and victory is hard work,” Lee wrote on X this week.

“It’s his prerogative to communicate how he wants to communicate. But at the end of the day, I have to deal with reality. And sometimes the alternative universe that is X doesn’t reflect the facts on the ground,” Thune told reporters in response to Lee’s intensive push online.

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CNN’s Ted Barrett, Morgan Rimmer and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.