Trump becomes ensnared in a fiery GOP civil war
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him.
A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washington’s usual rules and consequences of politics do not apply to him, Trump now finds himself shackled by them.
In stopping the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party’s professed priority for the last seven years, the rebellious far right wing of his party out-rebelled Trump, and won a major victory Friday over the party establishment he now leads.
Like every other Republican leader who has tried to rule a fissured and fractious party, Trump faces a wrenching choice: retrenchment or realignment. Does he cede power to the anti-establishment wing of his party? Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats he has improbably blamed for his party’s shortcomings?
“It’s really a problem in our own party, and that’s something he’ll need to deal with moving forward,” said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is an ally of the center-right Tuesday Group, which stuck with Trump in the health care fight and earned the president’s praise in the hours after the bill’s defeat.
“I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations — but in the end there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say ‘yes,’” Cole said. “At some point I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal-maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.”
Trump is not there yet. So far he is operating from the standard-issue Republican playbook. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican support to pass spending bills, an as-yet unformed tax overhaul and a $1 trillion infrastructure package.
On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White House residence to grieve and assign blame. He asked his advisers repeatedly: Whose fault was this?
Increasingly, that blame has fallen on Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, who coordinated the initial legislative strategy on the health care repeal with Speaker Paul Ryan, his close friend and a fellow Wisconsin native, according to three people briefed on Trump’s recent discussions.
Trump, an image-obsessed developer with a lifelong indifference toward the mechanics of governance, made a game effort of negotiating with members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, even if it seemed to some members of that group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, that he did not have the greatest grasp of health care policy or legislative procedure.
He told one adviser late Friday that his loss — a legislative debacle foreshadowed by the intraparty fight that led to the 2013 government shutdown — was a minor bump in the road and that the White House would recover.
In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Trump insisted the administration was “rocking.” The problem, he suggested, was divisions among Republicans.
There are “a lot of players, a lot of players with a very different mindset,” Trump said. “You have liberals, even within the Republican Party. You have the conservative players.”
But his advisers were more realistic. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions, described what happened as a flat-out failure that could inflict serious damage on this presidency — even if Bannon believes Congress, not Trump, deserves much of the blame.
Bannon and the president’s more soft-spoken legislative affairs director, Marc Short, pushed Trump hard to insist on a public vote, as a way to identify, shame and pressure “no” voters who were killing their last, best chance to unravel the health care law.
One Hill Republican aide who was involved in the last-minute negotiations said Bannon and Short were seeking to compile an enemies list. But Ryan repeatedly counseled the president to avoid seeking vengeance — at least until he has passed spending bills and a debt-ceiling increase needed to keep the government running.
Trump, bowing to the same power-sharing realities the besieged Ryan must cope with in leading the fractured Republican majority in the House, decided to back down. But the president’s advisers worry about the hard reality going forward — the developer with the tough-guy veneer was steamrollered by various factions in the Republican Congress.
“I think [Trump] did a lot ... but in the end there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say ‘yes.’” – REP. TOM COLE, R.-OKLAHOMA