The Gop Senators Trump Disrespected Are Now Interrogating His Nominees

President Donald Trump’s decision this spring to oust longtime and well-liked senators of his own party is making life difficult for the Trump nominees who still need their votes.

Trump has relied on the near-unanimous support of Republican senators to get his nominees through since he returned to the White House last year. Two defeated senators, John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy, along with Thom Tillis, who’s retiring after policy disagreements with Trump, showed that their loyalty to the president isn’t what it used to be on Wednesday as they gave Trump nominees a grilling at Judiciary and Health Committee hearings.

Cornyn, who lost his primary after Trump backed his opponent, Ken Paxton, in Texas, is likely the deciding vote at Judiciary on whether Trump’s pick for attorney general, Todd Blanche, will advance to the Senate floor. Tillis’ vote is just as important given the GOP’s one-vote margin on the panel. Cassidy, the Health Committee chair who lost his Louisiana primary to Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow, controls the fate of Erica Schwartz, Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Whether Schwartz gets a committee vote is Cassidy’s decision.

Their willingness to go after nominees from a president of their own party shows how Trump’s lack of respect for Washington norms — he’s also repeatedly pressed senators to pass legislation to set new federal rules governing elections despite Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s pleading that it does not have the votes to pass — could make it difficult for Trump to fill critical roles in his administration.

“We need a CDC director that will actually stand up to crazy, stupid things,” Cassidy told Schwartz.

Cassidy, who worked as a doctor before getting into politics and is a strong proponent of vaccination, appeared to grow exasperated by Schwartz’s refusal to say explicitly she’d buck Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic.

Cassidy, who’d sought to curry favor with Trump until the president backed Letlow, voted to confirm Kennedy last year despite his concerns that Kennedy would seek to discourage vaccination. Cassidy pleaded with Schwartz to make a clean break. “We've got thousands of kids hospitalized because people have promoted that immunization is bad, and now kids have died because of it. It is evil to do that, and people persist. You are the bulwark.”

Cornyn went after Blanche over Blanche’s involvement as acting attorney general in settling a suit with Trump over the leak of Trump’s tax records to the press in 2020.

Neither Cornyn nor Cassidy said they were voting no, but their harsh questioning suggested they were not assuredly yeses either. Cornyn told POLITICO after the hearing he was undecided.

At the Health Committee hearing, Cassidy laid into another nominee, Trump’s pick to lead a Health Department division in charge of preparing for and responding to emergencies, for his past comments deriding vaccine safety and his comments at the hearing Cassidy took to be insufficiently supportive of vaccine research. Cassidy’s interrogation of Sean Kaufman was even tougher than what Schwartz faced.

Blanche sought to win over Cornyn by assuring him that a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund created in the Justice Department’s May settlement with Trump was now dead. Cornyn, who brought a poster highlighting the deal he fears will be used for political payoffs, said after the hearing he wasn’t convinced.

Cornyn has said he needs assurances from Blanche that there is no way the anti-weaponization fund could ever go into effect, and he appeared to indicate after the hearing that he didn’t receive satisfactory answers.

“Part of what I wanted to do is make sure that we understood what the lay of the land was with regard to the weaponization fund and it’s not dead,” he said. “It could be revived and I think he confirmed that.”

Tillis said he still wants to pass legislation that would avert the creation of the fund. “I want to stick a fork in this turkey of a 1776 fund,” he said.

Not all of Trump's nominees on the Hill faced tough scrutiny from Republicans on Wednesday. GOP senators were supportive of Jay Clayton, Trump's pick for director of national intelligence, despite Democratic jabs at his refusal to say Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and general critiques of the Trump administration's approach to intelligence. One reason: Many Republicans want to get Clayton confirmed quickly in order to unlock Democratic votes to reup intelligence authorities that expired in June.

The bad blood between Cassidy and Trump goes back to 2021 when the Louisianan voted to convict Trump at his impeachment trial for inciting the riot that January at the Capitol. Though seven Republicans voted to convict along with all the Democrats, the margin fell short of the two-thirds vote needed.

Last year, Cassidy sought to win Trump over, repeatedly praising him during committee hearings. At one point, he said he thought Trump deserved a Nobel prize for his role in developing Covid vaccines.

Trump nonetheless endorsed Letlow in January and bashed Cassidy as a “disloyal disaster” before the May vote. In between, Cassidy refused to call a vote on Trump’s pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, prompting her to withdraw. Cassidy has said he wasn’t the only Republican senator who opposed her nomination.

Since, Cassidy and Trump have exchanged words over Trump’s war in Iran with Cassidy loudly complaining during a closed-door meeting with Trump that the White House wasn’t briefing senators. Cassidy later received a briefing.

Tillis clashed with Trump last year over cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people, in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. After Tillis said he was opposed to the cuts and Trump criticized him publicly, Tillis said he would not seek re-election.

Tillis has been a thorn in Trump’s side this year. In addition to opposing the anti-weaponization fund, Tillis has criticized Trump’s priority legislation to overhaul election rules, a Trump-backed investigation of former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and the president’s peace deal with Iran.

Cornyn has become a leading opponent of the weaponization fund and has also criticized Trump in the press.

Sophie Gardner, Erica Orden, Carmen Paun and John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.