Lankford: Can still work with Trump

Admits he and president have ‘a different style’

Alexia Aston

The Oklahoman USA TODAY NETWORK

Oklahoma’s senior U.S. senator says he’s able to work with President Donald Trump on Republican priorities, though he acknowledged their political strategies sometimes clash.

Republican Sen. James Lankford, who’s been in the Senate for 10 years, has been known as a lawmaker willing to work across the aisle, famously on immigration policy under the Biden administration. Despite blowback from his party, he reiterated he’ll continue bipartisan work.

Trump has set and pushed party platforms by testing the bounds of executive powers, facing legal pushback for attempts to freeze federal grants and loans, upend birthright citizenship and revoke student visas.

“[Trump] and I have a different style,” Lankford told The Oklahoman. “I mean, there’s no question about that. He has a different style than I have, but we’re able to work together on policy issues to be able to get stuff done.”

The Republican senator’s comments came after an downtown Oklahoma City event featuring some of Oklahoma’s philanthropic leaders. The Aug. 28 event, hosted by the Inasmuch Foundation, marked one of Lankford’s final public appearances during the U.S. Senate’s August recess.

Lankford has faced pushback from staunch Trump supporters in his home state, where every county voted for Trump the last three election cycles. In 2024, Lankford received criticism for negotiating with Democrats on a potential budget deal. The senator was even censured by the Oklahoma Republican Party.

But he said during the event that he views working across the aisle as a way to get things done. He told The Oklahoman that while Americans have a right to their own beliefs, they’ll eventually have to sit and discuss their differences to make decisions.

“I haven’t changed what I believe,” Lankford said. “I’m very conservative in what I believe and what I practice, but I have to sit down with my liberal colleagues and say, ‘Where do we find common ground?’ because we can’t just do nothing.”

Here’s what Lankford said about research grants

While Lankford stopped short of saying he pushed back against Trump’s agenda, he pointed to a time when he asked Trump to reconsider.

When the president took office on Jan. 20, he signed executive orders meant to stop federal spending on diversity, equity and inclusion, which has impacted academic research. In January, the Trump administration also briefly froze all federal loans and grants.

“President Trump decided to freeze everything all at once,” Lankford explained. “There wasn’t even staff to be able to do it. So a lot of the challenge was he throws every single program and said, ‘Staff, look at it. And they all looked around like yeah no one’s confirmed yet. No one can even look at this.”

The moves created widespread uncertainty and raised lasting questions about research grants.

Lankford said he went to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and said medical research could not afford to pause or they will “lose everything that’s been done for decades.”

“There were several others that went to [Trump] and said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve got to unfreeze these. I understand you’ve froze it for three months. Now it’s six months. Now it’s seven. We can’t do this,’” Lankford said.

Lankford addresses the Big Beautiful Bill: Medicaid cuts, tax policy, rural hospitals

Lankford also said he met with Trump over tax priorities in the so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”

The Trump-sponsored bill was signed into law July 4. The senator called out several components of the Big Beautiful Bill, including:

● $12.5 billion to fund upgrades to the nation’s air traffic control system.

● The expansion of Pell Grants to be made available to students enrolled in short-term programs between eight and 15 weeks long in fields like cosmetology and wielding.

● Tax provisions expanding Trump’s 2017 tax reductions and adding new cuts. Lankford told The Oklahoman he was able to sit with Trump to discuss why he thought those cuts were important along with other components of the newlysigned law.

Still, the bill has faced criticism, particularly over an estimated $911 billion in reductions to federal Medicaid spending over 10 years. Rural areas will see $137 billion of those cuts, according to KFF.

Lankford defended the bill and said it establishes a $50 billion rural health fund, meaning rural hospitals will receive $10 billion a year for the next five years. The bill’s Medicaid provisions also include work requirements for nondisabled Medicaid recipients.

“The incentive is to be able to move them off the Medicaid rolls and to be able to move them into employer provided health care,” Lankford said.

Lankford calls nonprofits and churches a safety net in the U.S.

Lankford said he believes the U.S. has three safety nets: the family, churches and nonprofits and government.

“Sometimes when we talk about safety nets, everyone immediately looks at the government,” Lankford said. “I say, ‘No.’ That’s the last resort. If we don’t have strong families and we don’t have strong nonprofits, the government will never keep up.”

He said he sometimes hears concern from conservatives about left-leaning nonprofits to which he responds, “So? This is America. There’s a great variety of opinions. People should be able to give and engage in the areas of their community where they want to be able to give and engage.”

Over the past decade, Lankford said been working legislation that would allow people to deduct donations to nonprofits and churches from their federal taxes at a higher level than the previous $300 deduction. The Charitable Act was authored alongside Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware.

“He and I have worked on this for years to be able to get this done because this shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” Lankford said. “This is a cultural issue.”

Lankford talks about pro-Palestine protests at universities

Bob Ross, the Inasmuch Foundation’s chairman and chief executive officer, moderated the event and asked Lankford about the ongoing protests in support of Palestine at universities across the country. The death toll in Gaza recently climed past the 60,000 threshold in Hamas’ conflict with Israel.

Lankford began answering the question by motioning to University of Oklahoma President Joseph Harroz Jr., and said, “Joe, aren’t you glad you’re not the president of Harvard.” He added that Trump became angry about how some of the Ivy League universities “handled antisemitism.”

In April, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University after the school rejected the Trump administration’s demands to implement a mask ban and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Since then, Harvard and the Trump administration have been in ongoing negotiations to regain access to federal funding and end investigations into campus antisemitism.

“The president is who the president is,” Lankford said. “Americans knew who they were electing when they elected him. He is who he is. That is his personality.”