There’s a growing civil war being waged between President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the GOP forces determined to erase the two-term president’s accomplishments from the history books.
Several former presidential candidates are leading a full-scale rebellion against President Trump in what looks like a long-term plan to win the Republican presidential nomination and the White House in 2028.
The most effective partner in the movement is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has been using a slick tactic to turn Congress against President Trump: He’s humiliating them.
DeSantis’ social media account highlighted a depressing story highlighting the party’s failures and subtly pointing the finger at President Trump.
The embarrassing story is this: Congress got just 38 bills enacted into law this year—the lowest number of successful bills that made their way into the legal code during a president’s first year in office in modern history, according to Purdue University. That’s less than a third of the 113 bills Barack Obama signed into law in 2009.
Sure, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act combined several bills that topped the president’s legislative agenda into one new law… but since then, congressional Republicans have sputtered to a stop.
DeSantis wanted to rub congressional leaders’ nose in their failure. He started off by quoting James Madison, who said congressional power “necessarily predominates” over the power of the president. “But,” DeSantis wrote, “that presumed that each branch would zealously guard its authority against encroachments by the other two. The modern Congress has failed to guard against encroachments, but it has also intentionally subcontracted out its core functions to the bureaucracy.”
“Congress is content to be a mere observer of the constitutional system rather than a player inside of it,” he concluded.
Someone outside the Beltway might miss what’s going on—but anyone can understand it if you pair his statement with eerily similar comments made recently by another prominent Trump foe.
Legislative productivity should not simply be a measure of the number of bills passed, as Congress is apt to create more problems through legislation than It solves.
That said, the paltry production by the current Congress is noteworthy because so much meat is still left on the… https://t.co/ZeiV3VVl4e
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) December 29, 2025
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose retirement goes into effect on January 5, took the exact same line of attack, belittling Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. The speaker “is literally 100 percent under direct orders from the White House. And many, many Republicans are so furious about that, but they’re cowards,” Greene told The New York Times.
In fact, she’s been on this kick for some time. “There’s a lot of weak Republican men and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women,” Green told The Washington Post in October. “They always try to marginalize the strong Republican women that actually want to do something and actually want to achieve.”
Former Rep. Elise Stefanik also got in on the act. She mysteriously dropped out of the race for New York governor shortly after she accused Johnson of spreading “more lies.”
Coincidentally, that’s the same charge the Fake News media has made since the minute President Trump took office…in 2017.
Just more lies from the Speaker.
And in true to form, the Speaker texted me yesterday claiming he “knew nothing about it.” Yeah right. This is his preferred tactic to tell Members when he gets caught torpedoing the Republican agenda.
It wasn’t on your radar? This is the ONLY… https://t.co/AKxC6CU8ma
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) December 2, 2025
Desantis, Greene, and Stefanik’s bullying of Congress is just another twist on the Fake News media’s question, “Where are the Republicans with enough guts to stand up to Trump?”—a statement the media made again and again and again during the first Trump administration.
It’s only gotten worse since the 45th president became the 47th.
Last April, PBS wrote a long complaint explaining “Why Republicans in Congress won’t stand up to Trump.”
Last month, the liberal website The Daily Beast praised “The Brave Republicans Who Could Save America From Trump.”
“Republicans Are Increasingly Standing Up to Trump,” salivated Newsweek at about the same time.
DeSantis’ angle is clear: He wants to be president in four years. He’s already picked fights with President Trump over the president’s support for H-1B visas and over a recent executive order overriding state legislation controlling the excesses of artificial intelligence.
So far, polls show him losing to Vice President J.D. Vance…in Florida.
But they also show DeSantis may be a tiny bit more “electable” than Vance. “Republicans viewed DeSantis (79%) and Vance (75%) as the most electable against a hypothetical Democrat in a General Election, followed by Rubio (71%) and Donald Trump Jr. (67%),” found the Yale Youth Poll last month.
But an assault on a president needs more than a few bitter Republicans to stir things up from outside politics. It also needs writers, thinkers, and organizers to anger the kind of “conservative” who trusts think tanks.
The anti-MAGA rebellion is already staffing up. In the last few weeks, more than a dozen employees of the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation jumped ship to Advancing American Freedom, a think tank founded by former vice president turned NeverTrump Republican Mike Pence.
And “additional staff announcements will be coming soon,” AAF bragged on December 22.
Pence is so passé that, when he ended his hopeless 2024 presidential campaign, ABC News said “it doesn’t matter that Mike Pence dropped out of the GOP primary.”
Of course, Greene has reason to be upset with President Trump: His refusal to back her in the Georgia governor’s race ended her political career, and his public threats may have sparked death threats. “After President Trump called me a traitor, I got a pipe bomb threat on my house. And then I got several direct death threats on my son,” Greene told Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes.
Greene is not ready to give up on her political career. In her retirement message late last November, she promised, “When the common American people finally realize” that they “possess the real power over Washington, then I’ll be here by their side to rebuild it.”
Is this a coordinated effort to make congressional Republicans feel like wimps for supporting their president, as part of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s plan to claw her way back to the top?
🚨Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene MTG, has just announced that she will be resigning from Congress in January, effective January 5th. pic.twitter.com/KHHPpAqV5L
— AJ Huber (@Huberton) November 22, 2025
The Georgia congresswoman cut a deal to support Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House in exchange for a rise up the House Republican ranks. She managed to wrangle an agreement restoring her to her two committee assignments and eventually becoming chair of the newly-formed DOGE Subcommittee.
Did she cut another deal to vouch for Ron DeSantis with the MAGA base in 2028 the way she did for McCarthy?
Will she be DeSantis’ vice presidential running mate? Will she get a plum assignment as his secretary of state or another top Cabinet position?
Or did she just decide, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
Either way, she, DeSantis, Stefanik, Pence, and the Fake News media have agreed their best bet is paralyzing President Trump by calling Republican congressmen names until they turn against the incumbent with three years left in office.
…And the record shows, right now at least, it’s working.