Trump prepares for worst
United States President Donald Trump is strategically separating himself from Republicans in Congress, an extraordinary move to deflect personal blame if the GOP agenda continues to flounder.
Trump deepened the fissures in the party yesterday when he charged the top two leaders on Capitol Hill with mismanaging a looming showdown over the nation’s borrowing authority. Republican lawmakers and aides responded to Trump’s hostility with broadsides and warnings of their own.
Frustrated by months of relative inaction across Pennsylvania Avenue, and emboldened by his urge to disrupt the status quo, Trump is testing whether his own political following will prove more potent and loyal than that of his party and its leaders in both houses of Congress.
The growing divide comes at an inopportune moment for Washington, however. In addition to having to raise the government’s debt ceiling to avoid a fiscal crisis, Republicans face September deadlines to pass a spending bill to avert a government shutdown, as well as pressure to fulfil a key campaign promise by rewriting the nation’s tax laws.
Behind the scenes at the staff level, some Republicans described a more functional relationship between aides and lawmakers on Capitol Hill and White House officials. But in public, Trump is waging war against lawmakers.
With a pair of morning tweets, Trump said he had asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, of Kentucky, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, to include a debt ceiling increase in a recent veterans bill.
‘‘I requested that Mitch M & Paul R tie the Debt Ceiling legislation into the popular V.A. Bill (which just passed) for easy approval,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They . . . didn’t do it so now we have a big deal with Dems holding them up (as usual) on Debt Ceiling approval. Could have been so easy - now a mess!’’
In a later tweet, the president slammed Mcconnell for failing to pass a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. ‘‘That should NEVER have happened!’’ he wrote.
Trump is railing against Republicans because he thinks it will help him politically down the road, for instance during a 2020 reelection bid, according to one outside adviser to the White House.
If Republicans lost control of the House, as several White House advisers had warned the president, Trump could say, ‘‘See, I told you these guys wouldn’t get anything done. I’ve been saying this for months. They’re not following my agenda,’’ said the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Roger Stone, an ally and former political adviser to Trump, put it this way: ‘‘The Trump brand and the Republican brand are two different things. What happened the last time the establishment tried to face him down? They got crushed.’’
If Republicans lose the House, however, Trump could face greater peril than a difficult 2020 election: a Democratic majority eager to pursue impeachment, and with subpoena power to conduct investigations.
For many GOP lawmakers, the justification for not fully breaking from Trump has been the promise of trying to salvage key parts of the party’s agenda. But now, they are increasingly resigning themselves to the reality that they will be largely on their own. One Senate GOP aide likened it to ‘‘being handed the keys to the car’’.
As a result, they have grown increasingly hostile towards the president.
‘‘It doesn’t help at this point, with a September coming up that is very consequential, to be throwing rocks at one another,’’ said Tom Cole, of Oklahoma. ’’You don’t, I think, do a lot of good by torching your teammates, particularly by name, individually.’’
‘‘The sense you get is ‘We’re going to have to figure this out’,’’ said the Senate GOP aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. ‘‘We’re just going to assume we’re not going to get any help from the White House.’’
Some White House aides have shown little sympathy to Republican lawmakers’ harsh words about Trump. Asked yesterday to respond to Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker’s recent comments doubting the president’s competence and stability to lead, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded: ’’I think that’s a ridiculous and outrageous claim and doesn’t dignify a response from this podium.’’
The relationship between Trump and Mcconnell, meanwhile, has become increasingly acerbic in recent weeks, in private and public. But as details have surfaced in news reports, Mcconnell has laboured to project an image of unity.
Mcconnell yesterday praised the president and his administration for making strides this year on regulatory reform, the Supreme Court and looking out for rural Americans. But he acknowledged differences on trade, saying he was a ‘‘a little concerned’’ about some of Trump’s protectionist rhetoric.
Mcconnell sees a 2018 Senate map ripe with opportunities to expand his narrow majority. For this reason, Republicans in his orbit have been particularly pained by Trump’s attacks against Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, a critic of the president who is up for reelection. They see the leader of their party potentially a ruining a chance to make it easier to pass the very bills he has complained about stalling.
The Trump administration has warned that Congress must raise the debt limit before the end of September to avert a fiscal crisis.
Ryan said yesterday he was confident that Congress would act to raise the debt limit before a federal default. ‘‘We pay our debts in this country, and we’ll continue to do so,’’ he said.
Ryan acknowledged the discussions about attaching the debt issue to the veterans bill, but added that the move ultimately ‘‘wasn’t available to us’’.
Several House aides expressed exasperation yesterday about Trump’s claim about that proposal. They called it a misrepresentation of what had actually happened.
They said White House and congressional aides had informally discussed the possibility that the Senate could attach a debt ceiling extension to a veterans bill passed by the House of Representatives in late July, but it was never clear whether the Senate would act before the House was scheduled to break for the summer - and many conservative House Republicans had warned party leaders against pursuing the manoeuvre.
Trump’s threat this week to shut down the government if a spending bill to keep it running past the end of next month does not include funding to construct a wall at the border with Mexico has compounded worries about the September to-do list.
Congressional Democrats are expected to stand firmly in opposition to Trump’s attempt to secure more federal funding for more border wall construction, as they did during similar spending talks earlier this year.
Some congressional aides are anticipating that Trump will host a White House meeting with top House and Senate leaders shortly after lawmakers return from the their recess. If so, it would be the first face-to-face exchange between Trump and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer since late January.
Some Republicans are hopeful that private negotiations on tax reform, the debt ceiling and keeping the government running won’t be weighed down by ugly public feuds. A second Republican, who has spoken with the president, said yesterday that Trump was open to hearing out options about how to proceed legislatively. The Republican spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Still, the long-term political upside many in Trump’s inner circle see in going after congressional Republicans and the hardline stances Trump is fond of taking are expected to complicate the delicate talks. They also raise the possibility that Trump will never ease up in his attacks.
– Washington Post