Annie Greyer

My name is Annie Greyer.

I'm a senior reporter at CNN and I cover Congress.

Well, certainly Republicans know it's an election year.

The spotlight is on them.

And I think we're starting to see some openings for cracks.

But, you know, I put so many caveats there because whenever we think, you know, there could be an opening for a real Republican split, as we saw play out yesterday on the Hill with the War Powers vote.

Trump and his team are really good at keeping Republicans in line through a public and private pressure campaign and getting senators and lawmakers who may be wanting to split with him, getting them back in line.

But his ability to do that is going to get increasingly more difficult as he becomes, you know, what we expect to be a lame duck president as Republicans start campaigning and have to figure out how to run on

what Republicans in Congress have done so far defend their work.

But there are a lot of moderates who are looking at the calendar, looking at what's coming in 2026 and know that they have to carve out their own lane here.

Well, first, I just want to say in the vote last week, it was the day after the classified briefing.

So even though a lot of Republicans were publicly saying, I fully support how this operation went down and that this was this does not need an intervention of Congress.

Clearly, behind the scenes, there were five Republicans, senators who felt very strongly.

This is actually does require an act of Congress and congressional intervention.

But then between last week and last night, what we saw play out is Trump's true pressure campaign and what it means to be a Republican in Donald Trump's party.

Immediately after the vote, Trump took to Truth Social and name-checked all five of those Republicans, said they should not be elected to Congress again.

These are members of his own party.

Now, some of these Republican senators are sort of expected to... They often are in opposition to Trump, like Senators Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski, or Susan Collins.

But Senators Todd Young and Josh Hawley, that really took the president and his team by surprise.

So those were the two that they focused on in the next week to thinking that they were going to be the ones they could peel off.