First, before Elon Musk came for everyone, Donald Trump came for the US Senate. When he returned to office, the House of Representatives was already under his heel. Many of the House Republican leaders had been his sidekicks during January 6, and one, Mike Johnson, had since become the speaker. The Senate, however, still retained, for the most part, its club-like atmosphere where the members considered themselves powers unto themselves. Senators with a toga complex have always looked down on House members as rabble. Trump viewed the independent character of the upper body as a thorn in his side. The subservience of the House of Representatives was the model that Trump envisioned for the Senate. It could no longer pretend to be the greatest deliberative body of legislators in the world, but a vassal fiefdom subject to his whims.
Trump’s opportunity to crush the Senate appeared at once. As soon as he made his nominations for his cabinet, the Senate would hold confirmation hearings. His misfit nominees gave him his chance. In any previous time, just a tincture of the alcoholism, serial sexual abuse, playing footsie with a Russian-backed despot, hawking of snake oil, doodling enemies lists and bilking non-profit organizations, quite apart from plain incompetence, would have been enough to knock them out before they ever approached a seat in a hearing room.
The senator John Tower, of Texas, very much a member of the club of his day, but a drunken sexual harasser of the old school, groping in elevators, was exposed when George HW Bush nominated him as secretary of defense, and dropped out. But shame in the Trump orbit is as antiquated a notion as virtue.
The patent unfitness of Trump’s nominees put the senators on the spot. It was the senators, not the obviously disqualified nominees, who had to pass the test. They were not the ones sitting in judgment; they were in Trump’s dock. If Trump could break the lords of the Senate over his cabinet of curiosities, he could reduce them to being his serfs. By transforming their duty to advise and consent into shut up and obey, Trump would trample more than unstated norms. He would be obliterating a constitutional responsibility of the Senate and removing a further check and balance on his power.
Subverting the institution was not an abstract exercise. If individual senators looked like they might stand in the way, it was not enough that they be defeated on a roll-call vote. They had to be personally violated. The part of themselves that they held to be at their core both as public officials and private persons had to be soiled. They had to be made examples before the others. Their humiliation had to be performed as a public demonstration. By voting in favor of nominees they knew in their bones should never be approved, whose disqualifications crossed the senators’ deepest principles, their intimidation made them Trump’s subjects. Once the method of defilement was established, it would be applied again and again. It would loom as an ever-present threat over any others’ wavering. Trump’s degradation would be sufficient to cow the rest. But he would not stop. After the first victim, then there was the next, and the next, one after another, until Trump was the master of the Senate. Trump began with one senator whose vulnerability he could twist to make her writhe.
That senator was Joni Ernst, of Iowa.
After attending Iowa State University, where she joined ROTC, Ernst enlisted in the army, served during the Iraq war in Kuwait in charge of a transport unit, and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. Running for the US Senate in 2014, she said she had been sexually harassed in the military and pledged that, if elected, she would make independent investigation and prosecution of sexual crimes her signature issue.
Once she entered the Senate, Ernst was for the most part a down-the-line conservative Republican, yet was also among the few Republicans who consistently sponsored and voted for bills to protect victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, especially focusing on women in the military.
When Ernst divorced in 2019, her painful story of emotional and physical abuse became public – her husband’s dalliance with a babysitter, his long-term affair with a mistress and, after she confronted him, how he suddenly “grabbed me by the throat with his hands and threw me on the landing floor. And then he pounded my head.” Her husband responded by accusing her of having an affair herself, which she said was a “lie”. She also revealed at that time that she had been raped as a college student, reported it to the counseling service, but chose not to go to the police, and had kept it a secret. “I couldn’t stomach the idea that my rape would become public knowledge,” she wrote in a memoir published in 2020. “I was sure my boyfriend would find a way to blame me.”
Ernst’s divorce complaint disclosed for the first time that she had turned down candidate Donald Trump’s offer to be his vice-presidential running mate in the 2016 campaign. She attributed her refusal as vaguely not being “the right thing for me or my family”. It is uncertain whether Trump ever made the actual offer. He took Mike Pence, who was pressed on him by his campaign manager Paul Manafort to represent the evangelical right.
When Trump nominated Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense, stories instantly surfaced that the Fox News weekend host had been accused of rape, paid hush money, had a history of sexual abuse in two of his marriages, impregnated a girlfriend and was a raging alcoholic who drank on the job. He also opposed women serving in combat roles in the military, as Ernst had.
“I am a survivor of sexual assault,” Ernst said in her initial response to Hegseth’s nomination. She insisted that she wanted “to make sure that any allegations have been cleared, and that’s why we have to have a very thorough vetting process”.
But the “vetting process” was warped. Witnesses were hesitant to come forward, afraid they would be subject to the reign of terror that Christine Blasey Ford endured when she publicly testified in Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing to be on the supreme court he had sexually assaulted her. But the woman who claimed that Hegseth had raped her was willing to speak privately with Ernst. So were two other witnesses, both female soldiers who would also talk to her in private about his drunkenness and sexual harassment.
Ernst was then subjected to waves of “Maga” attacks. Facing re-election in 2026, she was threatened with a primary challenge from a local rightwing talkshow host, Steve Dease, who posted: “Joni Ernst sucked as a Senator long before this … I am willing to primary her for the good of the cause.” Elon Musk forked over a half-million dollars to blast ads that wallpapered Iowa TV, hailing Hegseth as a “patriot” and “warrior”, and warning that the “deep state” (ie Ernst) opposed him. Donald Trump Jr unleashed a storm on social media against Ernst, saying that if any senator criticized Hegseth, “maybe you’re in the wrong political party!” An online squadron of winged monkeys swarmed her. The phrase “She’s a Democrat” trended.
Ernst succumbed to the smear campaign. She refused to meet with the alleged rape victim, according to a report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. She also would not see the other women with first-hand accounts. Ernst hid. The witnesses, however, told their stories to Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat of Illinois and a combat veteran who lost both of her legs. From her isolation, Ernst finally released an announcement that she would support Hegseth. Duckworth said that Ernst and other Republican senators had refused to put “the national security of America over their own political survival”.
Then came the turn of Thom Tillis, the senator of North Carolina. He, too, was wary of Hegseth. He heard first-hand from a witness about his drunken behavior. Tillis told Hegseth’s former sister-in-law that if she provided an affidavit about Hegseth’s abuse, he would vote against him. So, she came forward despite the slings and arrows of the Trump mob. The evening before the vote, Tillis quietly told the Republican leader John Thune he would oppose Hegseth. Tillis spoke with both JD Vance and Trump. Unlike Ernst, none of his drama was conducted in public. When the time came to vote, Tillis, who faces a tough re-election in 2026, voted “yes”. Tillis turned on a dime.
Then they came for Bill Cassidy, the senator of Louisiana. Cassidy is a physician who has devoted much of his career to public health and educating people about the importance of vaccinations. He was the decisive vote on the Senate finance committee on the nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr to become secretary of health and human services, the leading vaccine skeptic who has made millions off his crank conspiracy theories and whose cousin, Caroline Kennedy, called him “a predator”.
Cassidy attempted to coax Kennedy into committing to the scientific truth that vaccines work.
“I’m a doc, trying to understand,” Cassidy said. “Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn the old information so that there’s never a conclusion.” No matter how many times he tried, Kennedy would not give him a straight answer.
Cassidy was already vulnerable. He had voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. A far-right primary opponent, the representative Clay Higgins, was preparing to run against him. After Cassidy’s questioning of Kennedy, the winged monkeys descended on him. And Higgins posted on X: “So, vote your conscience Senator, or don’t. Either way, We’re watching.” Cassidy replied with a biblical quotation: “Joshua said to them: ‘Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the LORD will do to all the enemies you are going to fight.” But when the vote came, Cassidy crumpled.
They came for Todd Young, the senator of Indiana. He is something of Hoosier Republican royalty, married to the niece of former vice-president Dan Quayle. Young was poised as the decisive vote on the Senate intelligence committee on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. In addition to “parroting false Russian propaganda”, as the former senator Mitt Romney put it, and visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, whom she declared was not a “torturer” and “murderer”, she had urged a pardon for “brave” Edward Snowden, who stole massive amounts of data from the National Security Agency and absconded to Russia. When Young asked her whether Snowden had “betrayed the American people”, she acknowledged he had broken the law, but would not go beyond that formulation. Young appeared edgy about her nomination.
“Todd Young is a deep state puppet,” posted Elon Musk. His ears had pricked up when he had learned that Young was on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, created by Ronald Reagan and funded through USAid to promote the rule of law and democracy around the world. Musk tweeted that the NED was “an evil organization [that] needs to be dissolved”. The Trump X mob swarmed. Besieged, Young spoke with JD Vance. The US vice-president arranged a call with Musk. Young announced he would back Gabbard. The noise disappeared.
The novel Advise and Consent, by a Washington reporter, Allen Drury, published in 1959 and produced as a movie in 1962, described a cold war melodrama in the Senate over the confirmation of a nominee to become secretary of state who had a left-wing background in his youth. One senator, with a secret gay past, caught up in the fight, fearing exposure, commits suicide. (The scene depicting a gay bar was a movie first.) But the suicide was not over any great principle. The victim was collateral damage. And the president in Advise and Consent was not attempting to use the process to coerce the Senate into vassalage.
Hegseth, Kennedy and Gabbard are now all confirmed. The advise and consent responsibility of the Senate was twisted. The senators came to kneel before Trump – and Musk. Musk praised Young, the former “puppet”, as “a great ally”. Cassidy posted: “After collaborative conversations with RFK and the White House, I voted yes to confirm him.” Tillis gave a floor speech extolling Musk and Doge: “Innovation requires pushing the envelope and taking calculated risks.” Ernst wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled USAid Is a Rogue Agency.
Meanwhile, the $2bn in USAid purchases of agricultural products for humanitarian aid were suspended. The Iowa Soybean Association, dependent on a $95m grant supporting more than 1,000 farms that was now not being paid, protested. Ernst, a member of the Senate agriculture committee, was silent.
“I was embarrassed,” Ernst told the Des Moines Register about speaking about being raped. “I didn’t know how to explain it. I was so humiliated. And I’m a private person, when it comes to those things.” After that incident, she found herself in an abusive relationship and the victim of domestic violence. As a senator, she used her position to break with her past of victimhood and established herself as a champion of those who had been victimized as she had been. But then she found herself in another abusive relationship, with Donald Trump. She was threatened with being completely stripped of everything she had striven for and her status as a senator destroyed. She had a choice to stand up against her transgressor or to subject herself to him. She decided to submit to the humiliation. And afterward she became the enabler of the abuser.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
