When Trump lays out his agenda tonight, expect nearly every Republican in the House chamber to give him a standing ovation. The heyday of anti-Trump Republicans is over, because most of Trump’s intraparty critics from his first term are no longer in Congress.

Of the 293 Republican members of the House and Senate on Jan. 20, 2017, only 121 (or 41%) are still in Congress. Some of those who left did so for normal reasons, like losing reelection or retiring due to old age. But many of them retired because they did not like the direction the party was heading in under Trump. And others, such as those who voted to impeach Trump, lost in primaries because Trump endorsed one of their challengers.

This amount of turnover was unprecedented. According to data collected by Ballotpedia and 538, more members of the president’s party left the House during 2017-2020 than during any president’s first term over the last 60 years.

And the Republicans who have left Congress during the Trump era were more moderate than their replacements. DW-NOMINATE is a metric that quantifies the ideology of members of Congress using their voting records, placing them on a scale from 1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal). The average DW-NOMINATE score of the 172 departed members was 0.480, but the average score of the 118 Republicans who were elected to Congress from 2017 to 2023 is 0.544.

In other words, Trump has succeeded at transforming congressional Republicans into a more conservative unit that is less likely to stand in his way.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538