After having ignored the issue for much of the year, Donald Trump has become fixated on ending legislative filibusters in the Senate. It’s not immediately obvious, however, why this has become such an obsession for the president.
After all, the Republican can already advance his top congressional priorities — specifically, tax cuts for the wealthy and far-right judges — through the Senate with majority rule, and there’s little the Democratic minority can do to stop them.
What’s more, the president has repeatedly and publicly said that he doesn’t really have much of a legislative agenda anymore, since so many of the White House’s goals were already included in the domestic policy megabill that GOP lawmakers approved over the summer (the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill). Trump made this point explicitly last week, declaring: “We don’t need anything more from Congress.”
So why bother with scrapping the filibuster? Why is this suddenly at the top of his priority list?
As it turns out, Trump has hinted at his motivation.
The morning after a dominant Democratic performance in the 2025 elections, the president told Senate Republicans that if they agreed to put an end to legislative filibusters, the change would make it “impossible to beat” Republicans in upcoming elections. “If we do what I’m saying,” he added, Democrats will “most likely never obtain power.”
He made a related pitch hours later on Fox News, telling Bret Baier that getting rid of the filibuster would allow Republicans to approve unnamed “good things” that would make it difficult to beat the GOP in the near future.
Trump: "I think if we got rid of the filibuster, we would approve so many good things — common sense things, wonderful things — that it would be hard to beat us."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-11-05T23:29:43.393Z
To date, the president hasn’t offered any details about what those “good things” might be, but on election night, as Democrats racked up victories, he published an item to his social media platform that read, “REPUBLICANS, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER! GET BACK TO PASSING LEGISLATION AND VOTER REFORM!”
Minutes later, he wrote a follow-up post, adding that GOP policymakers could “pass voter reform,” impose voter ID requirements and ban mail-in balloting if only Senate Republicans agreed to “terminate” the filibuster.
In other words, confronted with Democratic victories, Trump’s thoughts turned to something specific: imposing new restrictions on Americans, and limiting their access to their own democracy. “Voter reform” is itself a phrase that’s ridiculous and terrifying in equal measure. There are plenty of things in need of reform in the U.S., but there’s no need to add voters to the list. Indeed, consider the related data points from recent weeks: It’s against this backdrop that Trump also wants Senate Republicans to kill the chamber’s filibuster rule, clearing the way for something he called “voter reform” — and a political dynamic in which Democrats will “most likely never obtain power.” In isolation, each of these stories matters, but taken together, we’re talking about what appears to be a multifaceted campaign against elections, launched by a president whose contempt for the democratic process is unsubtle. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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