Ahead of the opening day of the new Congress, Representative Chip Roy, who was refusing to commit to voting for Speaker Mike Johnson’s re-election, took an intense phone call from President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Trump was blunt with Mr. Roy, the ultraconservative Texas Republican who had recently defied him and voted against his desired spending and debt deal: He would pull back on the abuse he had unspooled online, including a threat to recruit a primary opponent to unseat him, if Mr. Roy would fall in line behind Mr. Johnson — and generally get on board with the Trump agenda.
“I will if you’re good to me,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Roy, according to two people familiar with their conversation. “But you’re not being very good to me.”
Mr. Roy ultimately voted for Mr. Johnson, sparing the party a bloody leadership fight just before Mr. Trump took office. And these days, Mr. Roy has been supporting Mr. Trump’s agenda. In return, the president has, as promised, stopped savaging him in public.
It was Mr. Roy who helped convene a group of fiscal conservatives to meet with Mr. Trump last week at the White House to discuss the temporary spending bill that the president needs them to support to avoid a government shutdown after midnight on Friday. And it was Mr. Roy who made the most aggressive case in the meeting that members of the group, many of whom are uniformly opposed to such stopgap funding measures, should back the plan.
Mr. Roy’s shift offers a glimpse into how Mr. Trump is using his influence with Republican lawmakers to keep an iron grip on Congress at the beginning of his second term, when party divisions and tiny majorities threaten his agenda. It is a good-cop, bad-cop routine performed by a singular political figure who is acting as a generous patron, magnanimous host and his own legislative affairs director all rolled into one.
“His mastery of the party is now not total but close,” said former Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina. “He no longer has to speak the political part now. They understand.”
The result has accelerated and intensified a transformation of Congress in the weeks since Mr. Trump took office, from a potent coequal branch of government that carefully guards its prerogatives to a compliant body that is exceedingly deferential to the executive, pre-emptively ceding its power in ways large and small.
This account of how Mr. Trump is using his influence with Republicans on Capitol Hill is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the interactions, most of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. They described an approach in which Mr. Trump, who has spent years showing Republicans that he can either be their greatest champion or their worst political enemy, focuses intently on wooing and socializing with G.O.P. lawmakers, relying on the implicit but rarely stated threat of ruining them to get his way when they stray from his demands.
And they said Mr. Trump’s tactics were more carrot than stick. He relies on the trappings of the presidency — rides on Air Force One; visits with their spouses to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.; White House tchotchkes; and seemingly endless Sharpie signatures on Trump-branded merchandise — to make Republicans members of Congress feel special and indebted to him.
“Do you know who sits in that seat?” Mr. Trump has told multiple lawmakers who have flown with him on Marine One, the presidential helicopter. “That’s Melania’s seat. She’s the only one who sits in that seat. Do you know how special you are to be in that seat?”
The soft touch has paid off for Mr. Trump when he has a specific ask for Republicans.
That was the case in January, when Mr. Johnson was struggling to round up the votes he needed to win re-election and Mr. Trump received a call from Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican who had been with the president-elect before she was against him and was now firmly back on his team.
Ms. Mace told Mr. Trump, who had endorsed Mr. Johnson, that he needed to speak to the holdouts. In a small hideaway off the House floor, she put Mr. Trump on speakerphone with two of them: Representatives Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas.
It didn’t take much more than hearing his voice to flip the wayward Republicans. He understood their concerns, but he had just scored a landslide victory, winning all the swing states and the popular vote, Mr. Trump barked through a cellphone on the coffee table in front of them. “Democrats always stick together,” and the two of them were messing it up, he added, using a vulgar expletive to emphasize the point.
After they hung up, both men voted for Mr. Johnson, allowing him to prevail.
Mr. Trump picked up the phone again late last month when some Republicans were threatening to vote against the budget resolution. Again, it did not take much more than a nudge from him to get them to back down.
That morning, Representative Tim Burchett, a hard-right Republican from Tennessee, had declared that he was against the budget plan, flatly asserting that it was “not going to happen.” By evening, after his call with the president, Mr. Burchett was a “yes.”
“He’s never cussed me,” Mr. Burchett, said, describing the call as cordial. “He’s never raised his voice to me. He’s been very kind — he calls me Tim.” The president said he understood and shared his concerns, but he needed a starting point for getting his agenda through Congress, Mr. Burchett said.
Now, Mr. Burchett, who has never voted for a spending bill and even voted to oust the former Republican speaker for pushing through a stopgap funding measure, is considering supporting the one that Mr. Trump has called for to avert a shutdown this weekend.
“He knows my district is very conservative, and he shares my passion for fiscal sanity, and I kind of dig that,” Mr. Burchett said of Mr. Trump. “It’s cool that the president knows my first name. I dig that.”
It’s a common sentiment on Capitol Hill. Mr. Trump has an official legislative liaison, James Braid, who is a former Senate aide and well-versed in the ways of Capitol Hill, but the president himself is often the one reaching out to Republican members of Congress, giving them freewheeling access and an open channel of communication to call or text him any time with problems or concerns.
“I have his cellphone number!” Representative John McGuire, a first-term Republican from Virginia, said excitedly on the campaign trail last summer, expressing shock that Mr. Trump would just call him directly on the phone.
The president regularly texts lawmakers directly to praise them if he sees them on television.
While he has weighed in at key moments with pointed telephone calls to lawmakers, Mr. Trump mostly outsources the bullying of recalcitrant Republican to aides, advisers and influencers.
Republicans no longer need to be told that if they defy the president, they will soon have a social media army after them, led by enforcers like Donald Trump, Jr., Stephen K. Bannon and Charlie Kirk. Elon Musk, the billionaire ally who is leading Mr. Trump’s effort to overhaul the government bureaucracy, routinely uses his platform X to threaten and insult defectors, as he did to Senator Todd Young when the Indiana Republican was holding out against voting to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
Mr. Trump will occasionally threaten to unseat uncooperative G.O.P. lawmakers, as he did when Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina was contemplating a vote against Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as defense secretary; but once they fall in line, he welcomes them right back into the fold. Mr. Tillis was the president’s guest on Air Force One not long after he flipped to support Mr. Hegseth.
Many Republicans in Congress relate to Mr. Trump more as starry-eyed fans than as governing partners. They often show up to meetings with him armed with stacks of merchandise for him to sign for their friends and constituents. When he invites them to Mar-a-Lago, they bring along their spouses — Mr. Trump encourages it — and they post photographs of their visits with him, another sign of status in their home districts or states.
When lawmakers come to the White House for negotiations, they rarely leave without an official photo with Mr. Trump, as well as some tchotchkes, often a presidential coin. In his first term, he designed an oversized “key to the White House” that he presented to special guests in a wooden box with a presidential seal. “They’re worth 20 grand,” he would tell lawmakers who received one. “Don’t go sell it!” (One is currently available for sale on eBay for $7,950.)
For Mr. Johnson, who has made himself more a member of Mr. Trump’s entourage than a power broker in his own right, the president’s direct bond with members is a major advantage in keeping his fractious rank-and-file in line. Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, knows full well that members might be perfectly willing to disappoint him, but they are terrified of letting down Mr. Trump.
In recent weeks, he has taken to telling Republican holdouts that if they are going to go against Mr. Trump, they will need to tell the president himself. That was the tactic that Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, used with Mr. Tillis in advance of the Hegseth vote.
Mr. Johnson called on it to get the budget through late last month, making it clear that any Republican who opposed the resolution would be risking the wrath of Mr. Trump.
“Everybody wants to be on this train,” he said of the fiscal plan, “and not in front of it.”
