Around this time last year, as Donald Trump was preparing to return to the White House, a great many congressional Republicans made pre-inaugural declarations: They were prepared to serve as the incoming president’s employees.
Republican Sen. Michael Crapo of Idaho, who was preparing to take control of the Senate Finance Committee, said he intended to serve as a rubber-stamp for White House nominees, despite the senator’s oversight responsibilities. “My position is what President Trump decides to do is what I will support,” Crapo said.
Around the same time, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said it wasn’t up to senators to “determine” whether Trump’s Cabinet nominees had merit, despite the basics of congressional power.
Republican Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas went so far as to say it was incumbent on GOP lawmakers to embrace “every single word” of the incoming president’s wishes. “If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’” the congressman added, “we all jump three feet high and scratch your heads. That’s it.”
A year later, those kinds of assumptions linger in the minds of too many Republican lawmakers.
“President Trump’s our champion, but we’re the players,” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told Fox News over the weekend. “He’s the coach, and we’re the players.”
This is a terrible metaphor.
In sports, coaches prepare and direct players, who are responsible for carrying out the instructions they’ve been given. By contrast, in the federal government, Congress is a separate and coequal branch of government.
Players don’t have oversight responsibilities over their coaches. They can’t subpoena or defund their coaching staffs. They can’t demand information from their coaches or his/her aides. They lack the authority to impeach coaches who are guilty of wrongdoing.
In Washington, D.C., Mullin and his colleagues across Capitol Hill can do all of these things.
In sports, players who refuse a coach’s orders can expect to ride the bench, get cut or find themselves traded to some other team. In the federal government, members of Congress who reject a president’s orders can expect White House pushback, but lawmakers work for their constituents, not their party’s president.
As the year nears its end, there’s been considerable coverage over the course of 2025 about Congress having taken on a subservient role — in defiance of historical norms and our Madisonian model of government — as Trump acquires power and looks at lawmakers as employees whom he can ignore or boss around at his discretion.
The more senators see themselves as players who follow the directives of a presidential “coach” who treats the legislative branch like a doormat, the worse this dynamic will become.
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