PHILADELPHIA — President Donald Trump’s first visit to Pennsylvania this year came in March at the invitation of Sen. Dave McCormick.

As the two sat mat-side at the Wells Fargo Center watching college wrestlers grapple, McCormick brought up an issue he was eager to discuss.

The Japanese company Nippon Steel wanted to acquire U.S. Steel, based outside Pittsburgh. Trump had publicly opposed the deal, but McCormick thought it had potential, especially if the terms could be renegotiated.

“I listened carefully and he got engaged, and eventually the deal evolved,” McCormick said in an interview earlier this month. “I wasn’t very public at the time in terms of where my position was, because I thought I could be a force for good by listening, hearing all the different parties, and then being a strong voice in the administration. And that’s what happened.”

The strategy illustrates how the freshman Republican has approached his first months in office — head down, learning the ropes — “a sponge,” as one ally put it, and a recurring presence behind the scenes, especially on issues relevant to Pennsylvania.

McCormick, 59, is a conservative lawmaker who campaigned with Trump and largely shared his platform. He has been a loyal ally in a moment when few Republicans are running afield of the president. That has angered Democratic constituents in the purple state, some of whom protest outside McCormick’s Philadelphia office, urging him to push back on policies they say adversely affect Pennsylvania like federal funding cuts, deportations of nonviolent immigrants, and a budget package that would reduce federal Medicaid spending.

But on the whole, McCormick has largely avoided criticism. He has stayed busy acclimating to D.C. and out of heated viral debates as his Democratic counterpart, Sen. John Fetterman, whom he has ardently defended, draws more scrutiny.

“I don’t think he’s swinging at every pitch or trying to inject himself in every story,” said Mike DeVanney, a GOP strategist who worked on McCormick’s Senate campaign and was among the first people to urge him to run.

“But he’s being thoughtful about it and weighing in on issues where he is an expert, or when it’s something that matters to the state.”

McCormick entered the Senate as a newcomer who beat a political titan in former Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat who had held the seat for 18 years.

“When you win a race like that in a battleground like Pennsylvania, there is a level of political gravitas,” said Matt Beynon, a GOP strategist in the state who worked on Trump’s national ad campaign. “He’s gonna be listened to in rooms. He’s not gonna be pushed aside as, ‘Oh, you’re a freshman.’”

Hitting the ground running

McCormick had just returned from the Senate floor around 5 p.m. on a recent Tuesday after voting to confirm a lower Cabinet member. There was a group of nurses to meet on the Capitol steps, and a woman in a RESIST T-shirt waiting in McCormick’s office lobby hoping to give him a piece of her mind. He had a tele-town hall to do that evening and a Zoom call with business owners to squeeze in before that.

“Can I get a coffee?” he asked a staffer as he walked into his high-ceilinged office, decorated with vintage flags and mementos from his Army officer days.

The former hedge fund CEO and George W. Bush administration official has had a busy first six months in the Senate. He quickly hired staff and, within 10 days of being sworn in, opened seven offices around Pennsylvania. He has kept a schedule packed with constituent meetings around the state — his team says he has held more than 45 across 14 counties.

“I thought there’d be a falloff from the campaign as to how much time he’d be in Pennsylvania,” said Andy Reilly, a Republican national committeeman from Delaware County. “But every weekend he’s here.”

McCormick also invites Pennsylvanians down to D.C. for weekly coffees. He has not held an in-person town hall, to the frustration of some constituents, opting instead for the more controlled telephone town halls.

There is no desk in his Washington office. The former CEO of Bridgewater, a firm known for a rigorous culture focused on radical transparency and honest discussion, favors a large conference room table for staff to gather around.

McCormick recruited his chief of staff, Mark Isakowitz, a Senate veteran who worked for former Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, during Trump’s first term. Isakowitz had been Google’s vice president of government affairs when McCormick poached him.

His state director, Ryan Aument, left midway through his state Senate term to join McCormick. Aument’s former Lancaster County seat ultimately flipped to Democratic in a special election.

McCormick’s wife, Dina Powell McCormick, a former deputy national security adviser for Trump and partner at Goldman Sachs, is also “a force behind the scenes,” said Matt Gruda, McCormick’s 2024 campaign manager.

McCormick said he is channeling his team toward the highly regarded model of constituent services set by the late Sen. Arlen Specter, who had nominated McCormick for West Point.

Scrawled on a white board in his office is a list of the 10 priorities he campaigned on, including: tackling the fentanyl crisis, economic advancement for the state, supporting the energy economy, and improving affordable housing. He said he has tried to tailor his legislation toward those initiatives.

Later this summer, McCormick will convene an Energy Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh with representatives from Microsoft and Apple. Trump is headlining it.

“We should be the place that people are investing in AI,” McCormick said. “Hopefully we use it as a catalyst to announce some deals.”

In his first few weeks, McCormick visited all 17 House members from Pennsylvania, including the state’s seven Democrats.

“I won a very close election in a purple state, and half of the people didn’t vote for me,” he said. “So my view has always been, I’ve got to work with others to get things done.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., described a close working relationship with McCormick. The two were among a small group of six members of Congress who met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the U.S. Steel deal.

“He is focused on bringing jobs to Pennsylvania and has been a great ally in the Senate,” Kelly said.

Since joining the chamber in January, McCormick has introduced seven bills and cosponsored 40 — falling in the middle of the pack among the nine freshman senators.

Many of those bills have bipartisan sponsorship, including a bill with Fetterman to improve federal coordination in tackling the fentanyl crisis and a bill to encourage more financing for nuclear energy projects with Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a close friend of McCormick’s former opponent, Casey.

“Of the new Republican senators, he is one of the easier to work with,” Coons said. “He is a Republican senator during a time when the Republican Senate caucus is almost unanimously supporting every single nominee and every single policy of the Trump administration, but he is also someone I’m privately able to work with on bipartisan legislation.”

Fetterman’s foil and his biggest defender

One of McCormick’s closest mentors in the Senate is Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. He has also worked closely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, including to bring Pennsylvania teacher Mark Fogel home from a Russian prison on March 18, which McCormick calls his “single best day in the Senate.”

No relationship has gotten more attention, though, than McCormick’s bipartisan alliance with Fetterman.

As former staffers expressed concerns about Fetterman’s fitness for office in April, McCormick sent Fetterman a text message.

Would it be OK if he publicly defended Fetterman, or would a Republican standing up for him make the situation worse?

“‘He said, ‘No, nobody’s supporting me. If you’re willing to do that, please do,’” McCormick said.

McCormick called the media reports “totally unfair” and concerns about Fetterman’s mental health incongruous with what McCormick saw working with him.

“The Fetterman I know was measured and thoughtful and funny and totally with it,” he said.

The two align on stricter immigration enforcement, both supporting the Laken Riley Act, and an ardent defense of Israel in the war in Gaza. In a recent debate on Fox News, McCormick and Fetterman agreed on most topics.

McCormick doesn’t know if Fetterman would ever join the GOP, a move Fetterman has said won’t happen.

“You know, I don’t know. I don’t want to speak for him,” McCormick said, noting that the former Braddock mayor has voted with the Democratic caucus on most key legislation thus far.

“He’s willing to be an independent voice, which I can admire. Whatever he is, he’s gonna be someone that I think I can work with.”

A politically divided Senate delegation has become more and more of a rarity. There are only three other split states besides Pennsylvania: Maine, Wisconsin and Vermont, which is represented by Sen. Peter Welch, a Democrat, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats.

And while Casey and former Republican Sen. Pat Toomey had a cordial working relationship, McCormick said he and Fetterman have developed a friendship.

McCormick said the relationship started after the two went to dinner, with their wives, at a Brazilian steakhouse in Pittsburgh. People kept coming up to meet Fetterman until the Democrat told one of the eager selfie-takers, “You know, he’s a senator, too,” pointing at McCormick.

McCormick has made appearances with other Democratic leaders in the state, recently touring an addiction recovery house with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker in Philadelphia and appearing at an announcement for a new Amazon warehouse in northeastern Pennsylvania with Gov. Josh Shapiro.

But while he has been friendly with Democrats, McCormick will be a key campaign surrogate as Republicans look to maintain their majority in Washington and field a candidate to take on Shapiro next year.

He has taken an active role in the state party, hosting fundraisers and helping elect State Sen. Greg Rothman as its new chair.

“Dave recognizes that from the big three, governor and the two senators, he is the only Republican,“ Gruda, his former campaign manager, said. ”He has a role to play to make the state party better, better-financed, and better at winning elections.”

Supporting the Trump agenda

Last Wednesday, a group of protesters lay down in the middle of Market Street outside McCormick’s Center City office beside several small wooden coffins, meant to represent the toll they said Medicaid cuts could have on Pennsylvanians if the GOP-authored budget bill passes.

Charles Patton Jr., a 41-year-old member of Unite Here who works as a restaurant cook at the airport, said he is afraid his mother, who is disabled and receives home care services, could be affected.

“He needs to really listen to us and what we need in this city,” Patton said. “These cuts are not going to systematically pick only the people who don’t need it. With my mother, who definitely needs these services, there’s a worry she won’t be able to get what she needs to continue to live in her own home.”

Shapiro has also warned that the Medicaid cuts Congress is considering would mean billions of dollars in lost federal aid to Pennsylvania, hundreds of thousands of people losing access to the health insurance program, and more struggling rural hospitals shutting their doors.

McCormick pushed back on these arguments in the interview, saying he believes the changes to Medicaid can be “surgical” and stressing the need to slow the program’s growth.

“It’s the fastest-growing entitlement program, and it’s on the verge of being more expensive than the defense budget,” he said. “This is an area that’s spiraling out of control.”

McCormick also defended the administration’s efforts to crack down on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions — even if it means places he represents, like his hometown, Pittsburgh, lose funding.

“I don’t think the right way to think about it is, am I comfortable taking the money away from them?” McCormick said. “I’m comfortable with the federal government enforcing the law. And so the choice is very much in the hands of the leadership of those counties and cities.”

Trump’s orders that local jurisdictions cooperate with ICE detainers have been challenged on their legal merits before, including in Philadelphia.

During his tele-town hall, McCormick defended Trump’s tariff strategy, which has rocked markets as the administration repeatedly announces and then delays tariffs against major trade partners.

“It’s like a marriage. Sometimes a marriage gets unbalanced and one person says to another, we need to get things back on track, make some changes. That doesn’t mean you get divorced. It just means you make some adjustments.”

One area where McCormick has pushed back on the Trump administration is cuts to the National Institutes of Health.

After the administration announced funding cuts for some grants — a plan that has not been imposed and is part of an ongoing court case — McCormick met with leaders of universities across the state.

Reilly, the national committeeman, attended a meeting between McCormick and Villanova University’s president, the Rev. Peter Donohue. He commended McCormick’s strategy — even as the issue remains unresolved and universities in limbo report cutting millions in research funding.

“Where he believes the president’s not on the right path with respect to Pennsylvania, I think he takes a different tact,” Reilly said.

“He’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna call a press conference and beat his chest. He states his opposition honestly and with credibility but doesn’t sever ties.”

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