Can the Senate Survive Donald Trump?

Opinion|Can the Senate Survive Donald Trump?

This article has been updated to reflect news events.

When I covered Congress for The Times a quarter century ago, there was a sense that the House and the Senate weren’t just at opposite ends of the Capitol. They were at opposite ends of the earth.

The House was where tempers were supposed to flare, where decorum reliably disintegrated, less a preciously regal sanctum than a proudly ragtag mosh pit. Small wonder that Matt Gaetz found his political home there. While the House has certainly known its share of statesmen and stateswomen, it has long put out a welcome mat for cads.

But the Senate? It prized, or at least preached, dignity. Its members considered themselves a more even-keeled, erudite sort. And most (though not all) were. While a randomly interviewed House member was as likely to spew inanity as insight, most senators had something substantive to say. That was essential to their ethos and integral to their airs.

Not anymore. For decades now, the Senate has been losing its august way, and a second Trump administration will reveal just how shamefully far from its onetime description as “the world’s greatest deliberative body” it has strayed.

Yes, its Republican members owe a degree of deference and robust measure of cooperation to Donald Trump, whom a plurality of American voters just elected. But they didn’t owe him Gaetz as attorney general. They don’t owe him Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services or Mehmet Oz as the overseer of Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare.

They’re under no obligation to turn the upper echelons of the federal government into the green room of “Fox & Friends.” Doing so isn’t allowing Trump the tools he needs to effect change. It’s allowing him the fools he needs to turn governing into some obnoxious amalgam of end-zone touchdown jig, “Candid Camera” knockoff and Devil’s Night toilet-papering of the neighbors’ houses.