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Last week, when I sat down with Rep. Richard Hudson, the North Carolina lawmaker made a stunning admission. As chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Hudson’s job is to defend the G.O.P.’s narrow House majority. But when we discussed midterm messaging, he was insistent that the party had already fulfilled President Trump’s campaign promises. “We delivered almost the entire agenda already—all the promises he made, we’ve delivered,” he said. When I asked whether “we’ve done everything” was really the best campaign slogan, Hudson paused. “That’s a good question,” he said candidly. Republicans will come up with something, he added. “I promise you, we’ll have a campaign plan. We’ll give it some cool name, and we’ll take it to the voters.”

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To be fair, Trump hasn’t given them much of an agenda to work with. On the contrary, since the July passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, which extended tax cuts and flooded Homeland Security and the Pentagon with cash, the president has mostly disengaged from Congress. (Obviously he wasn’t that involved before, either.) “We got everything done,” Trump said in October. “We’re done for four years. We don’t need anything more from Congress.”

Of course, few G.O.P. lawmakers will publicly blame Trump for undermining their position. Most Republicans I spoke to said they hadn’t heard his October remarks, and Speaker Mike Johnson downplayed them, arguing that much of what Trump says gets taken out of context. He assured me that Trump, his staff, and Johnson’s own staff all “work around the clock.” Ever the optimistic soldier, Johnson also said he “can get broad consensus” in the early months of next year on some sort of healthcare plan, either through reconciliation or good old-fashioned regular order legislation (which will need 60 votes to pass the Senate).

But the upshot is that Republicans don’t have a forward-looking agenda to run on in 2026. It also hasn’t helped that Trump has repeatedly dismissed the term “affordability” as a “hoax” and a “Democrat scam.” Earlier this week, the president delivered a perplexing 20-minute live address to the nation from the Oval Office during which he declared that he had “brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history,” and that any weakness in the economy is the fault of the previous administration.

And yet, in a campaign year looking downright challenging for Republicans, a strategy built on touting alleged accomplishments could be lethal. “People vote much more based on what they’re being promised than who has had a track record of delivering for them,” Republican strategist Liz Mair said.

There’s no denying that Trump is determined to keep the House. He has promised to devote some of his post-election war chest to this effort (although he hasn’t said how much or how he’ll spend it), and he launched a bloody mid-decade redistricting effort to shore up seats. But more than anything, these measures are motivated by self-preservation rather than grand legislative ambitions. His aides and people close to the administration have repeatedly told me that Trump doesn’t want to spend his lame duck years fending off investigations or even impeachment—even if the latter often feels like a Democratic fever dream.

But Trump can’t seem to stop himself from relegating Congress to the proverbial dustbin. Last month, speaking to reporters at the White House, he repeated that he has no further demands of the legislative branch, saying, “We don’t need it because we got everything.” Rep. Dusty Johnson, who is leaving Congress to run for governor of South Dakota, told me that House Republicans have discussed another big, partisan bill, and chalked the president’s comments up to “managing expectations” given the difficulty of finding consensus.

But one Republican House member who has grown aggravated with the administration warned that Trump’s refusal to work with Congress will result in his having “temporary presidency.” That is, Trump is governing largely by executive order—221 of them so far—which can easily be reversed on day one of a Democratic presidency. (The House has voted to codify more than 50 of them, but fewer have been signed into law.) “If they want to take that approach, I think it’s only to the detriment of themselves,” the lawmaker said.

Indeed, despite the administration’s continued zeal to bypass Congress and govern by executive order, lawmakers might have little choice but to take up major issues soon. If Trump goes to war against Venezuela, Congress is supposed to have a say. If the Supreme Court overturns Trump’s tariffs, Congress might need to intervene. Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, Mair told me, Republicans might need to roll back some of Trump’s tariffs to lower prices for voters ahead of a challenging midterm year. Rep. Hudson, who’s worried about winning the House, told me the administration needs to score trade deals and settle retaliatory tariffs in the next six months in order to stabilize the economy. But regardless, finding a legislative solution won’t be easy given the largely Trump-compliant conference. “They need to figure out how much they care about keeping their jobs,” she added.

Of course, compliance has been a running theme in this Congress, which has done little to demand its own relevance in the second Trump administration—and the president has been perfectly happy to fill the vacuum. During his address to the nation last week, Trump said he’s going to unveil “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history,” suggesting he’s planning to bypass Congress on this issue as well.

Speaker Johnson has largely abetted this state of affairs. He kept the House out of session for seven weeks during the government shutdown, and since then, he’s struggled to keep members in line as polling has soured for Republicans on healthcare. Republicans have joined three discharge petitions—tools that are designed to circumvent leadership—including the one by Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to extend A.C.A. subsidies for another three years. I was told that several Republicans were racing to be the fourth and final signatory, and that more Republicans are expected to vote for it when it comes up in January. “Doing nothing is not an answer,” Rep. Mike Lawler said. “I didn’t come here to be a potted plant. I came here to actually do stuff to help my constituents.”

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