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In an exclusive interview with The Hill’s Emily Brooks, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) pulled back the curtain on what the whip’s job is really like. In the sit-down interview, Whip Emmer emphasized how trust, communication, and respect are integral to achieving President Trump’s America First agenda amid historically slim margins.

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Emmer manages GOP emotions as whip amid speculation about leadership ambitions

The Hill

Emily Brooks

May 21, 2026

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) has a naturally blunt demeanor, but he says a softer touch is the key to wooing rambunctious members in the super-slim House Republican majority.

“Human beings are very emotional animals. If you don’t manage the emotions, then you got cleanup to do,” Emmer said.

That was the task ahead for Emmer when he spoke to The Hill in late April, at the start of a week jam-packed with so many major bills sure to cause friction and looming deadlines that one member dubbed it “hell week.”

A number of Republicans made demands, and Emmer didn’t discourage them from voicing their positions: “I pretty much tell the members, say whatever you want.”

“This is an emotional thing. You got to get it out. Eventually, we’re going to get you back,” Emmer said. By the end of the bumpy week, all the measures in question passed.

The No. 3 House Republican is tasked with being the chief vote-counter and vote-getter for the House GOP legislative agenda under President Trump. His two terms as whip — and before that, two winning cycles as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee — have allowed him to foster personal relationships across the ideological spectrum of the House Republican Conference, according to a dozen GOP lawmakers and aides who spoke to The Hill.

That has made him a top contender for a higher leadership position, should Republicans lose control of the House in November and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) leave leadership.

And if not after November, as plenty of members have started to speculate, there is potential for him to rise up further in the future.

Emmer brushed off that chatter.

“I’d like to be the whip. We’re going to succeed in November, and I would love the opportunity to come back and get even better at this job,” Emmer said, adding that he gets “irritated” by those in politics who are planning for what they’re going to do next. “I didn’t come here to be somebody. I came here to do something.” 

He pointed to a small sign on his desk in the style of one that once sat on former President Reagan’s: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

Calling on Trump

Over the past year and a half, “doing something” has often meant late-night negotiations with holdouts in the Speaker’s office or keeping open a vote for hours as leaders work to flip members on the House floor. And sometimes, as with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of Trump’s tax cut and spending priorities last year, it’s required bringing in the president himself as a closer.

That dynamic has earned Emmer some criticism. One Republican operative said Emmer was a “horrible whip.”

“Everything’s whipped by the White House or the Speaker,” the operative said.

White House Director of Legislative Affairs James Braid, though, had a different assessment. 

“Tom Emmer has played a critical role in advancing the administration’s priorities, including delivering the largest tax cut in American history. His leadership and partnership have been instrumental in delivering key votes for the President, and he remains a great ally to the administration,” Braid said in a statement.

Trump has publicly praised Emmer as a problem-solver.

“When I have a problem I call him up and he gets it done. He’s a tough cookie,” Trump said of Emmer at the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signing on Independence Day last year, suggesting Emmer should run for governor of Minnesota.

Emmer also dismissed the criticism.

“You’ll always be able to find someone who says, ‘Well, they shouldn’t whip that, or the whip’s office sucks at this,’” he said. “They’re going to say whatever they’re going to say, because this stupid place is built on this idea that we’re in competition.”

Emmer’s relationship with Trump has come leaps and bounds in the past few years — which would be crucial were he to mount a higher leadership bid.

When Emmer threw his hat in the ring to be Speaker after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted in 2023, Trump — despite having a good conversation with Emmer in the days before — blasted Emmer as a “Globalist RINO” who was “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters.” Emmer withdrew his nomination for Speaker hours later.

The two got to know each other better over the next year, and his standing in Trump World skyrocketed. By fall 2024, Emmer was prepping then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) for the vice presidential debate, playing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) in mock debates. And now, a “Letters to Trump” book of photos and messages to the president from world leaders and celebrities sits on a coffee table in Emmer’s office.

Staying cool in the chaos

Emmer was remarkably cool ahead of a week that included contentious votes on reauthorizing foreign spy powers; passing a bill to fund the bulk of the Department of Homeland Security and advancing a separate measure to fund immigration enforcement; and passing the farm bill despite member demands over amendments and niche issues.

“It’s kind of like the NHL playoffs, right?” said Emmer, a former hockey coach, in a late April interview. “Everybody’s complaining that … two of the top teams, Dallas and Minnesota, have to play each other in the first round. Well, guess what? You got to beat them all anyway if you’re going to get to where you’re going.”

The vote schedule, Emmer said, is the same thing. Weeks he thought in the past might be “easy” turned out to be drama-filled headaches, such as “crypto week” last year, when uproar over one provision led to the longest vote in House history — breaking the record that was set the week before.

That kind of floor drama was once a rarity and an indication of major disorder, but it has become commonplace in the two-vote majority where public rebellion has become part of the party’s culture. But Emmer said the carefully choreographed votes of the past, when leaders had greater room for error, came with their own downsides.

“The idea that, ‘Oh, it was so peaceful back then’ — no. It was worse,” Emmer said.

He recalled being in a monthly meeting for first-term members in 2015, when then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sat up front smoking a cigarette and drinking Diet Coke. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) spoke up to say he could not vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Boehner responded: “You’ll be voting to raise the debt ceiling.”

That kind of strong-arming doesn’t work anymore.

“It’s not our job to tell them what to do. It’s our job to figure out what they can and can’t do, and then advise Steve [Scalise] and Mike [Johnson] ahead of time, ‘This is what you’re going to be encountering,’” Emmer said. “Sometimes they take that, sometimes they don’t.”

The leadership teams are far more collegial and collaborative than in years past, aides said. 

Emmer said he has only been truly caught off guard by a vote loss on the floor once: In January, a handful of moderate Republicans voted with Democrats to kill a series of GOP labor bills.

That agony of defeat is what drives Emmer more than the thrill of winning. “The feeling of failing is the worst feeling you will ever have. You learn more from it, but it’s the worst feeling.”

April’s foreign spy powers reauthorization vote was a prime example of members’ emotions complicating key votes. Several members demanding changes had rocky personal histories with intelligence agencies, including Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), whose personal cellphone was seized by the FBI in 2022 as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into Jan. 6, 2021, and efforts to reverse the 2020 election.

Perry downplayed the significance of Emmer’s emotional-management role even as he praised the whip.

“I don’t need a counselor. I can read,” Perry said. “We just need to do the right thing around here, and we’re not just going to be rolled by anybody.”

Emmer said that his communication has gotten better over his time in Congress. He thought he already had that skill given his track record trying cases as an attorney — but he said in the congressional venue, he was “a terrible communicator.”

“Here, you’re not the lawyer, you’re the witness. And it took me years to figure out how to be the witness,” Emmer said.

Carter, for his part, agreed that current leadership is more engaged with members individually — and while they might not tell members how to vote, they “have their own way of changing your mind.”

These days, one of the hardest parts of the whip job is members’ absences. 

“People have lives. They get health issues, they have family issues, they’ve got different things going on, and they can’t make it all work all the time,” Emmer said.

Emmer’s record

The sense that Emmer was too moderate thwarted his short-lived Speaker bid in 2023 — when members dinged Emmer for his 2022 vote in favor of a bill to codify same-sex marriage — and bubbled up at the end of last year, when right-wing social media influencers brought up his comments from 2015 saying Somali immigrants were some of the “fastest-assimilating populations.”

Emmer said his vote for the Respect for Marriage Act was a “tough decision,” but a technical one, due to its provisions protecting religious liberty for those who did not want to facilitate same-sex marriage. Emmer feared that if Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) went after the Catholic school his kids went to for “not teaching all forms of marriage,” any legal arguments he made pointing to the religious liberty provisions in the law would be undermined if he voted against the bill.

“I disagreed with my church, too. Which, I think I’m right still,” Emmer said of the vote.

As for the posts about his Somali comments, Emmer said those come from those who “must view me as a rival, as a danger, so they try to seed the clouds with partial information.” Emmer teamed up with Ellison, then a member of the House, to start the House Somalia Caucus in 2015 — which he said Ellison pitched to him as a way to help the Somali youth assimilate.

“I was very worried about the radicalization of especially young males, because we aren’t bringing them into our community,” Emmer said. But he said it was clear that within months that Ellison was “using it for something else,” and Emmer “immediately went the opposite direction” — co-sponsoring a bill to give Congress more oversight of the refugee program and voting against funding for refugee resettlement.

Emmer in December called for denaturalization and deportation of Somalis who were convicted in a fraud scheme, and in January became a member of the Sharia Free America Caucus.

Fierce loyalty and trust

Emmer places a premium on trust — and knows his members do, too.

“I don’t trust people right away,” Emmer said. “Once they prove it, though, we are teammates. You’re going to do what you do, and I will back you up.”

Often, Emmer said, his team will not share the details of some members’ personal situations even with Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), who might find out about the situations later, if at all.

“We respect the privacy of the members, and I think they trust us because of it,” Emmer said.

That fierce loyalty translates to his staff, too. When McCarthy led the House GOP, a misunderstanding between staff became a disagreement between the leaders: McCarthy did not want a certain Emmer staffer in the room for a high-level regular meeting. Emmer, in turn, told McCarthy that he would not come to another one of those meetings until the staffer was allowed. McCarthy and Emmer became close.

“The most important thing I can say about Tom is you can trust him,” Perry said. “He might not agree with you, but he’ll be straight with you, and that’s really all you can ask for.”

Rep. Mike Alford (R-Mo.), whose office is next door to Emmer’s in the Cannon House Office Building, said he often has Emmer and other Republican neighbors from the floor in his office to enjoy cigars and bourbon — and enjoy transparent conversation.

“It beats being here than over at the bar at Capitol Hill Club,” Alford said. “A lot of people are out every night of the week.”

Emmer summed up his approach as whip: “Communication and respect. That’s all this is.”