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If you want to understand Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s first year in the job, consider three items that required his attention—or more precisely, in the case of two, his indifference—on just one day last month.

First, as always, there was a recent Trump social media post. With the ghastly death of director Rob Reiner driving news coverage and President Donald Trump all but celebrating the grisly demise of the liberal activist, Thune did a typical sidestep. “It’s a tragedy. My sympathies and prayers go out to the Reiner family,” Thune said when asked about Trump’s rants on Dec. 15. He stoically did not elaborate.

Meanwhile, Trump was lobbying the Senate to change its rules to green-light all his nominees for judges and prosecutors, even those being blocked by home-state members. Thune paid it no mind, and the rest of the Senate followed suit.

Behind the scenes, Thune was working that day to avoid a logistical mess over a provision in a national defense bill that would require military helicopters to transmit their locations, a response to January’s crash between a regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport in which 67 people died. The must-pass defense bill stood to get mucked-up by an amendment backed by the Commerce Committee’s two chieftains—Sens. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Maria Cantwell, a Washington state Democrat. Thune’s concern wasn’t necessarily the policy, but the clock ticking down fast on work this year. So he found a way to address concerns with the provision without killing the larger bill’s momentum: the Cruz-Cantwell tweak would stand as a separate, fast-tracked bill.

Thus has been Thune’s reality of late. As so much of D.C. was getting rattled at how Trump was far afield from acceptable rhetoric or policy, Thune kept things steady. He wanted to get his members out of Washington without too many bruises as the year wound down. Now that they're back, Thune will face one of his trickiest weeks yet, as he will be tasked with keeping his GOP lawmakers on task, while Democrats—plus Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky—plan votes to limit Trump from taking any further actions that might turn Venezuela into an occupied state. The rancor in the group chats has been growing, not necessarily over the policy of regime change but by the fact that no one from the White House bothered to notify anyone in Congress that it was happening. That frustration is why a privileged war powers act, which would only require a majority to pass, looms so large as this week begins.

Thune is perpetually vexed by Trump but he has not drawn the President’s ire the way others, like now-former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have for perceived disloyalty. It’s been a tough balancing act, but a challenge that Thune understood from the start. He had long ago internalized the lessons from his time as a stand-out basketball star in his youth: always take the extra pass before you shoot.

Thune's first year in the gig was made trickier by it coinciding with the return to Washington of Trump, who was never much of a fan of the low-key South Dakotan known more for his collaboration than his cold-blooded calculations. And Thune understood that he needed to stay on Trump’s good side if there were any hopes to accomplish much more than renaming post offices and highway ramps.

So Thune came to a very practical conclusion: rather than capitulate and allow Trump to control the Senate the way he had quickly co-opted the House, Thune kept hold of his own agenda. It gave him a measure of independence and spared his members walking the plank for a guy who would be gone from the White House in four years.

When some of Trump’s nominees looked to be heading into trouble, Thune did not knock heads to get marginal contenders across the finish line, but he did not hide the problems from the White House, either. Thune did not much care that Cruz made his case directly to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on the Blackhawk bill; he just wanted to get something to the President’s desk and move it off his. 

Nor did he—or Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee—heed the White House’s repeated lobbying to strip Senators of so-called blue slips**,** an effective veto of judicial and prosecutorial nominees in their state. “They should get rid of blue slips,” Trump said on Dec. 15, the same day he ranted about Reiner. “If you have one Democrat in a state, it is not possible to appoint because of blue slips.” He said the tradition “should not be relevant anymore.”

It fits a broader pattern. When Trump demanded his Cabinet be filled in short order, Thune missed his brother’s graveside services to get votes clear, but he also would not stack the Cabinet with people who refused to finish their paperwork. When Trump demanded his entire agenda be packed into One Big Beautiful Bill, Thune went along with it but told the White House it was on them to sell it. And he kept blue slips in the mix, even as just two of Trump’s 18 new U.S. Attorneys have been confirmed in jurisdictions that have a Democratic Senator. He might not have loved the theatrics but Thune understood his own political fortune needed to coexist with 1600.

Thune was a party to Trump’s takeover of the GOP but he never fully submitted. Thirty-nine of Trump’s nominees for Senate-confirmed gigs withdrew before a vote—many because they knew the Senate was going to “Bork” them. And while most lawmakers mutter private complaints about how Trump and Co. are taking a wrecking ball through the government, they still manage to keep some semblance of the machinery working.

Taken together, it’s a fuzzy portrait of Thune as an institutional loyalist who still clings to the belief that the Republican Party might yet steer out of this skid. It’s like the folks who sat through Richard Nixon’s conventions and believed Ike might still return. But ignoring Trump's latest social media post is one thing; pleading ignorance about a brazen military raid that hauled the leader of another nation from his bedroom to the United States in the middle of the night is quite another.

To be fair, no one could have stepped into the role of Senate Majority Leader and matched the predecessor. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky ruled the GOP conference for a record 16 years, guiding with an iron fist wrapped in barbed wire. McConnell was a master of Senate rules and norms in an era when Trump sought to destroy both. He rebuffed Trump’s first-term efforts to change how the Senate operates and still held tight to the idea that there were things that were not fungible. 

But Thune inherited a tougher baseline. A brutal 76% of Americans disapproved of Congress when he took office, according to Gallup. The number got to 79% in October in the same survey. It’s harder to lead when you are so thoroughly hated.

Still, Republicans are raking in the cash. A majority has its advantages, after all. And even if the GOP gets spanked in the midterms, Trump is still in the White House until Jan. 20, 2029.

All the while, Thune has been careful to handle his fragile majority. When Sens. Susan Collins of Maine or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska want to flex their independence, they are granted a little freedom. The same is true for Paul of Kentucky, who is poised to join Democrats in a resolution limiting Trump's further handiwork in Venezuela. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday, if the House and Senate move on Paul's privileged resolution "then the President can’t do another thing in Venezuela without the OK of Congress."

Running the Senate remains a vexing job for Thune, who a little more than a decade ago was in a strong position to consider chasing the White House himself. He had already proved himself a kingslayer, having taken out Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in 2004 by a scant 4,508 votes—or 1% of the vote. Heading into 2012, Thune was a favorite of the Republican National Committee members who harbored doubts that Mitt Romney had what it takes to make Barack Obama a one-term President. He was good on TV, better with donors, excellent with conservatives who organize the pews, and able with the Chamber of Commerce types who stroke the checks. Ultimately, he made a bet that he could run the Senate more easily than he could claim the White House.

But all of those calculations came before Trump’s return. Thune will lead the Senate for at least one more year as its Majority Leader, and perhaps for the rest of the Trump era as the GOP Leader if Democrats reclaim the majority. All of which leaves Thune doing more of the same in 2026: making peace with Trumpism just enough to keep it from crashing through the Senate like it has the House.

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