President Donald Trump on Wednesday demanded that Senate Republicans fire Elizabeth MacDonough, the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian, after she blocked an attempt to tuck White House ballroom-related funding into a Republican immigration enforcement bill.
Trump accused MacDonough of thwarting his agenda and told Republicans to “get smart and tough.” In a Truth Social post, he wrote that Republicans had kept the position of parliamentarian in MacDonough’s hands, calling her a figure appointed long ago by Barack Hussein Obama and Senator Harry Reid and saying she had been brutal to Republicans but not to Democrats.
The attack came after MacDonough ruled this weekend that Republicans could not include funding tied to the White House ballroom project in the bill, a setback for GOP leaders who had hoped to move the money through a simple majority vote as part of a broader immigration and border security package. Her ruling means the provision would need 60 votes in the Senate.
John Thune, the Senate majority leader, said on Wednesday that Trump’s demand was not new and suggested the real obstacle was political math, not the parliamentarian alone. “There may be some issues related to the parliamentarian, but most of the issues we have here are votes,” Thune said, adding that trying to remove her would create “even more vote issues.”
Thune also sought to tamp down concern about MacDonough’s safety after Trump’s criticism. “So we'll make sure that everybody has got security around here,” he said.
The dispute sits inside a larger fight over Senate reconciliation rules, which let some budget-related measures pass with a simple majority. Republicans had hoped to use that process to advance roughly $1 billion in White House and Secret Service security funding tied to Trump’s ballroom project, including hardened infrastructure, drone detection systems and Secret Service facilities. Trump and his allies have said the ballroom itself would be financed through private donations.
The issue burst into public view on Monday, when Semafor reported that Trump had called Thune and urged him to fire MacDonough. Trump then defended the project on Tuesday during a tour of the construction site, calling it “a gift to the United States of America” and saying donors, not taxpayers, were paying for the ballroom itself.
That defense did little to quiet criticism from Democrats or skepticism from some Republicans, who questioned why federal money was being sought for security upgrades around a project Trump had initially described as privately financed. MacDonough’s ruling sharpened that argument by forcing the administration and its allies to either find 60 Senate votes or drop the funding from the package altogether.
Obama did not have a say in MacDonough’s appointment in 2012, a detail that undercuts Trump’s claim about how she got the job. But the larger point remains unchanged: Trump wants her removed because her ruling stalled a piece of his plan, and Senate leaders are signaling they intend to work around the rules rather than pick a fight they may not win.
