By XAMXAM

WASHINGTON — At moments of maximum pressure, presidents often look for an exit. Donald Trump has chosen the opposite strategy.

Despite repeated Senate votes rebuking his conduct, curbing his authority or explicitly declaring him unfit for office, Mr. Trump has remained adamant: resignation is not an option. The refusal has become a defining feature of his political posture — and a revealing measure of how precarious his support in Washington has become.

The numbers, taken together, tell a story more complex than the former president’s claims of total vindication. In his first impeachment trial in 2020, 48 senators voted to remove him on one article and 47 on another. In his second impeachment trial, following the January 6 attack on the Capitol, 57 senators — including seven Republicans — voted to convict him of inciting an insurrection. Never before in American history had so many senators voted to remove a sitting president.

Mr. Trump survived both trials because conviction requires a two-thirds majority. But survival, in this case, came without consensus. A majority of the Senate declared him unfit, even if not enough were willing to cross the constitutional threshold to force him from office.

Rather than acknowledge the warning embedded in those votes, Mr. Trump declared victory. He framed acquittal as exoneration, dismissed defectors as traitors and insisted that the outcome proved his dominance over Washington. Yet the Senate record points to something closer to a presidency balanced on a narrow ledge.

The impeachment votes were not an anomaly. Throughout his second term, Senate opposition has surfaced repeatedly on matters of policy as well as personal conduct. In October 2025, a bipartisan majority of 51 senators voted to condemn his sweeping global tariffs, striking at the core of his economic agenda. In early 2026, lawmakers moved to limit his authority to escalate military action in Venezuela, reasserting Congress’s constitutional role in war-making. Even on issues touching scandal and transparency, such as a failed effort to compel the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the margins were razor-thin.

Each vote followed a similar pattern: Democrats unified against Mr. Trump, joined by a small but consequential group of Republicans. Each time, the former president responded with defiance — attacking senators by name, threatening primary challenges and insisting that loyalty, not deliberation, was the proper measure of party discipline.

What makes the pattern striking is not that Mr. Trump faces opposition — all presidents do — but how consistently that opposition has approached or crossed the halfway mark of the Senate. On impeachment, tariffs, war powers and oversight, roughly half of the chamber has been willing to rebuke him publicly. On several occasions, more than half has done so.

That reality places Mr. Trump in a category apart from most modern presidents. Bill Clinton was impeached, but never faced a Senate majority willing to convict. Richard Nixon resigned before his trial, once it became clear that conviction was inevitable. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has faced majority opposition in the Senate and chosen to stay.

His refusal to resign reflects both temperament and calculation. Advisers describe a president who views resignation as humiliation and removal as an affront to personal legitimacy. Politically, he has gambled that Republican senators will always stop short of the 67 votes required to convict, deterred by his base and the risks of internal revolt.

So far, that bet has paid off. But the margins have narrowed enough to expose the fragility of his position.

Consider the second impeachment trial. The 57 senators who voted to convict included not only Democrats but also Republicans with long records of party loyalty. Their votes signaled a limit — not just to Mr. Trump’s behavior, but to what they believed the Senate could tolerate without undermining its own institutional credibility.

The former president’s response was to harden, not soften, his stance. He portrayed the vote as proof of conspiracy rather than conscience. He intensified pressure on dissenters and framed future Senate resistance as betrayal.

That strategy has produced a paradox. By punishing defections, Mr. Trump has made them more visible. Each vote against him normalizes the idea that Republican senators can break ranks and survive. Each public rebuke lowers the psychological barrier for the next one.

Several Republicans who have crossed him represent states where Mr. Trump is politically weak, insulating them from backlash. Others have reached the end of their careers and no longer fear his influence. Still others have calculated that distancing themselves from Mr. Trump may ultimately protect the party from electoral damage.

Together, they form a loose but consequential bloc — not large enough to remove him, but large enough to deny him unquestioned authority.

This dynamic has consequences beyond impeachment. A president whose agenda can be halted by 50 or 51 senators governs with diminished leverage. Internationally, allies and adversaries take note when Congress signals that the president does not speak for the full American system. Domestically, bureaucracies and courts read Senate resistance as a cue to scrutinize executive action more closely.

The Constitution was designed for such moments. The Senate is not meant to be a ceremonial body, but a check on executive excess. What distinguishes the current era is the frequency with which that check has been exercised against one president — and the degree to which he has refused to adapt.

Most presidents, when confronted with sustained legislative resistance, seek compromise. Mr. Trump has chosen confrontation. He has demanded loyalty where negotiation might have produced results, and he has treated dissent as disloyalty rather than deliberation.

That choice may energize his core supporters, but it narrows his governing coalition. Each attack on a dissenting senator deepens resentment. Each threat accelerates the quiet calculation taking place within his party: at what point does loyalty to Mr. Trump become a liability rather than an asset?

The question of resignation hangs over this calculus. Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he will never resign, regardless of pressure. The statement is more than bravado. It sets the stage for a constitutional test unlike any the country has faced. No president has ever been forcibly removed by the Senate after refusing to step aside.

For now, that scenario remains hypothetical. Ten additional senators would have to vote to convict — a steep climb, absent a crisis of extraordinary magnitude. But history suggests that political norms erode gradually, then suddenly. What once seemed unthinkable becomes plausible as precedent accumulates.

In that sense, the most consequential aspect of the Senate votes may not be how close they came to removing Mr. Trump, but how openly they revealed the erosion of his support. Forty-seven votes. Fifty-one votes. Fifty-seven votes. Each number stands as a marker — not of defeat, but of vulnerability.

Mr. Trump’s refusal to resign has kept him in office. It has not restored consensus. Instead, it has left him governing in a state of permanent brinkmanship, one Senate vote away from paralysis, and a handful of defections away from history.

The Senate has not yet reached the number required to remove him. But it has already reached something else: a collective willingness to say, again and again, that his power has limits — even if he refuses to recognize them.