GOP leadership in quandary over Trump
President’s bond with voters allows him to flout orthodoxy
WASHINGTON—In the year since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, party leaders have been reluctant to challenge a man who has formed a tight bond with conservative voters, even when he upset party orthodoxies and norms of presidential behavior.
But that reluctance is breaking down. A convergence of contentious issues, embarrassing infighting and shake-ups at the White House have a number of Republicans in open resistance to Trump on a number of fronts.
The most dramatic moment came in the early morning hours Friday, when Sen. John McCain joined two other GOP dissidents, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, to cast the deciding vote to kill a scaled-back plan to dismantle tenets of the Affordable Care Act — and with it, perhaps, Trump’s promise to repeal the health care law.
But the signs of resistance went further.
Nearly every Republican in Congress voted with Democrats this past week to approve legislation tying the president’s hands on a major foreign policy issue, making it harder for him to ease sanctions against Russia amid lawmakers’ concerns about Trump’s friendly posture toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Friday, the White House put said Trump would sign the legislation; a veto would have been easily overridden.
Since Wednesday, some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have pushed back at Trump’s surprise announcement on Twitter of a ban on transgender people in the military. The critics, including McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and some conservative senators, objected both to the substance of the ban — which threatened the status of thousands of active-duty service members — and to how it was announced.
Perhaps the most broad opposition came in response to Trump’s continued public humiliation of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Conservatives from Congress who served with Sessions when he was in the Senate, delivered clear messages to Trump in Sessions’ defense in the media and throughout the country.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Trump would have “holy hell to pay” if he fired Sessions, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would refuse to hold hearings this year to confirm a new attorney general.
Graham went further, saying that should Trump try to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice, it could spell “the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.”
Many conservatives had been willing to put up with Trump’s erratic governance, hoping he could at least deliver on longsstanding conservative priorities. But Friday’s defeat on the health care measure, after Republicans’ seven years of promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, left many despairing that other promises, especially on a tax overhaul, could be imperiled.
Trump, as he often does, blamed Democrats. But he also upbraided Republicans on Friday, both on Twitter and during a Long Island speech that was supposed to be about cracking down on criminal gangs.
“They should have approved health care last night, but you can’t have everything,” Trump said in New York. “They’ve been working on that for seven years. Can you believe that? But we’ll get it done. I said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode and then do it.”
Individual Republican lawmakers have walked a careful line with Trump throughout his first six months — siding with him on many issues and withholding criticism on others, while disagreeing at times to show their independence, especially in opposition to Trump’s proposed deep cuts in domestic and international aid programs.
But the health care bill was more complicated to navigate. Polls showed that Republican efforts at repeal were widely unpopular, including among some conservatives, and prominent Republican governors were strongly opposed. Yet the party has promised “repeal and replace” since 2010.
Still, Trump has hardly lost his ability to work with his party. Many in Congress continue to fear his ability to stir their most passionate partisans — who continue to back him strongly — and to encourage primary challenges for their seats.
Also, Trump’s allies in outside groups have already shown a willingness to spend money on political advertising against wayward Republicans.
Trump’s hold on the Republican base could protect him against threats posed by the Russia investigations by Mueller and Congress. But Trump is seeing that it would not be easy to thwart Mueller’s investigation by firing Sessions and getting his replacement to dismiss Mueller.