How Trump Got GOP Senators To Get to ‘Yes’ on His Cabinet

BY JOSH DAWSEY AND LINDSAY WISE

WASHINGTON—Inside a large room at the Republican National Committee’s Capitol Hill headquarters, senators, longtime Trump operatives and business executives spent hours preparing an unconventional set of cabinet choices for grueling confirmation hearings.

Meanwhile, Republican activists and donors were making thousands of calls to senators’ offices, pressuring them to cast yes votes. And Trump’s nominees themselves were striking unusual deals with vacillating senators, leading to dramatic encounters, sometimes minutes before key votes.

Trump has assembled one of the most unorthodox cabinets ever, including two former Democrats and several ex-talkshow hosts. His team has pushed almost all of them through the Senate—often on tight, party-line votes—using a mix of wooing and pressuring lawmakers, striking backroom deals and enlisting Republican senators to ensure that previously inexperienced nominees were prepared for public hearings, according to more than a dozen people involved in the process.

Defense pick Pete Hegseth faced allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he denied; Trump’s selection for the top health post, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long questioned vaccines; his choice to lead the intelligence community, Tulsi Gabbard, had appeared to embrace Washington’s adversaries and celebrated past intelligence leaks. His nominee to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, had previously advocated investigations into people Trump considered his enemies.

The selections rattled a number of Republican senators, and some inside his administration feared another stalled nomination could become an embarrassing setback after former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, stymied by widespread GOP Senate opposition, withdrew from consideration as Trump’s first attorney general pick.

But after Gaetz’s withdrawal in November, Trump dug in. He wanted the rest of his nominees to fight for their posts, and that’s what they did, said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.). “He wanted the tenacity, and that’s exactly what he got,” Mullin said.

Both Kennedy and Gabbard won confirmation this past week, in part through reaching side deals with lawmakers in which they promised to accept longstanding U.S. policy. For Kennedy, that entailed agreeing to keep vaccine recommendations in place, in a deal he reached nine minutes after his committee vote was scheduled to begin. For Gabbard, it meant reassurances that she wouldn’t condone intelligence leaks. Patel cleared a committee vote on Thursday and is on track to be confirmed for the job.

“The American people gave [Trump] a historic mandate to Make America Great Again and he is doing just that,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung said.

Marc Short, Trump’s first director of legislative affairs, said the president was daring the Senate to oppose him by making picks such as Kennedy. Short spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign against Kennedy focusing on his previous support of abortion rights. In the end, only one Republican senator, former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor, voted against him, citing Kennedy’s vaccine views.

Short said other senators told him that they appreciated the campaign but didn’t want to vote against Trump.

Spoken out loud

The political consequences didn’t need to be spoken out loud, but sometimes they were. The day that Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina was considering casting the decisive vote against Hegseth, for example, the president asked the state’s congressional delegation if one of them would consider running against Tillis in 2026. “Maybe one of his challengers is right here,” Trump said to the lawmakers in his conference room aboard Air Force One, as they prepared to tour flood-ravaged Asheville together, according to a person with direct knowledge of his comments.

(Tillis, who wasn’t on the plane, became the pivotal 50th vote to confirm Hegseth hours later. He told The Wall Street Journal Thursday that no one had threatened him with a primary or twisted his arm.)

“He is testing his power,” Short said of Trump. “He has effectively neutered the Senate.”

Important to securing the nominations was convincing senators that they could pay a political price if they voted “no.” A Republican group with ties to Elon Musk, Building America’s Future, funded ads in Iowa to pressure Sen. Joni Ernst, a former Army National Guard commanding officer who had expressed reservations about Hegseth, to vote for him. Trump supporters targeted senators on social media who were waffling on other picks, such as Gabbard and Kennedy.

‘Attitude adjustment’

Mike Davis, a Trump ally, said he orchestrated more than 200,000 calls and emails to Republican lawmakers, largely focusing on Kennedy, Patel, Hegseth and Gabbard in a bid to give the Senate what he deemed an “attitude adjustment.”

Trump’s confirmation team also asked deep-pocketed conservative leaders and donors to tell Republican senators they were behind all of the nominees, particularly those that seemed outside the party mainstream, according to people familiar with the outreach. “We can’t let the Democrats get a scalp here,” said Ralph Reed, who lobbied a number of senators and leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Some senators needed more convincing. But by December, many had told Trump they would vote for the entire slate, advisers said.

“Have you killed anyone?” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked one Justice Department nominee, as the nominee met with a group of senators at the Capitol. The nominee laughed and said no.

“Do you have a meth lab in your backyard?” Graham asked. The president’s nominee again said no.

“That’s good enough for me,” Graham said, laughing.

The Republican Senate has long been one of the last bastions of the party with skepticism of Trump. But after Trump won the 2024 popular vote and much of corporate America seemed willing to back him, senators offered to help his most controversial nominees.

Mock hearings

Mullin, the Oklahoma senator, helped organize mock hearings that included other current and former senators and Trump advisers. Drew Maloney, an executive of an association representing the private-equity industry who worked in Trump’s first administration, and Joyce Meyer, a Trump alumna who now works for a life-insurance trade group, ran much of the process. The hearings were meant to sometimes enrage the nominees before their Senate appearances.

“We do not pull punches at all,” said Mullin, a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter.

Scott Bessent, now the Treasury secretary, grew irritated at first when he was interrupted, and seemed to struggle to sometimes find his thoughts during his first mock hearing, but performed better in the second session, participants said. Davis, the Trump ally, questioned Patel about whether he would make an enemies list at the FBI. He also played the role of an adversarial senator in the mock hearing for Russ Vought, who was later confirmed as budget director. Gabbard got asked about her meeting with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and her defense of Edward Snowden.

Davis said he was so aggressive at one nominee’s mock hearing that he wasn’t asked to return for a second.

Gabbard stumbled in her first private meeting with Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, seemingly confusing a key U.S. national-security surveillance power. After a second meeting— and some friendly advice from the Republican senator— Rounds said Gabbard showed improvement. “We can say, maybe you need to go back and revisit that,” Rounds said on Thursday, after Gabbard’s confirmation.

Trump himself was unsure that some of the nominees could easily be confirmed. Before Patel’s selection, Trump, then president-elect, said he was concerned that Patel wouldn’t be able to get sufficient votes, Trump advisers said. Patel himself reached out to Republican allies, asking them to assuage Trump’s concerns. Trump received a flood of calls, and eventually agreed to the selection, the advisers said.

Tillis, who had wavered on Hegseth, volunteered in early December to personally guide Patel through the Judiciary Committee. The panel voted 12-10 to advance Patel’s nomination on Thursday. “He did everything I asked him to,” Tillis said.