Energized Trump sees bipartisan path to achieve goals
Democrats hold blend of optimism, caution
WASHINGTON — By the time President Donald Trump woke up Thursday morning, he was feeling upbeat. And as he watched television news reports about his fiscal agreement with Democrats, he felt like telling someone.
He picked up the phone and called the two Democratic congressional leaders, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. “The press has been incredible,” he gushed to Pelosi, according to someone briefed on their call. He was equally effusive with Schumer, boasting that even Fox
News was positive. A few hours later, Trump went on TV himself, vowing to turn a one-time spending-and-debt deal brokered out of expediency into a more enduring bipartisan alliance that could transform his presidency. He signaled openness to a Democratic proposal to eliminate the perennial showdowns over the debt ceiling, and he repeated his desire to cut a deal to protect younger illegal immigrants from deportation.
Although Trump has at times preached bipartisanship, he has never made it a central part of his governing strategy. While he may have been feeling energized Thursday by the collaboration, he is a politician driven by the latest expression of approval, given to abrupt shifts in approach and tone. He is a man of the moment, and the moment often does not last.
There are also reasons to doubt whether Democrats would sustain a partnership with Trump beyond the deal they have cut to keep the government open for three months and paying its debts. The centrifugal forces of partisanship tug from the left as well as the right, and the liberal base has put pressure on Democratic lawmakers not to meet in the middle a president it loathes.
For one day, though, the two sides sought to put months of acrimony behind them.
“I think we will have a different relationship than we’ve been watching over the last number of years. I hope so,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I think that’s a great thing for our country. And I think that’s what the people of the United States want to see. They want to see some dialogue. They want to see coming together to an extent.”
Democrats expressed a blend of optimism and caution. “I think it would be much better for the country if he [Trump] was much more in the middle and bipartisan rather than siding with the hard right. I think he got a taste of it yesterday. We’ll see if it continues. I hope it does.” Schumer said.
One area of possible agreement could be a proposal advanced by Schumer to eliminate the requirement that Congress vote from time to time to raise the debt ceiling, a perennial point of division in Washington, and raise it automatically.
As Trump reached out to Democrats, he sought to keep the lines of communication open with Republican leaders. He called House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, and planned to host the House speaker for dinner on Thursday night.
But on Capitol Hill, Republicans were stirred up, convinced that Trump had effectively given Democrats the leverage to use the newly negotiated December deadline for government spending and the debt ceiling to win concessions. In the House, conservatives sounded more irritated with their own leadership than the president. At a breakfast for reporters Thursday hosted by Bloomberg News, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and the chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, implicitly criticized Ryan — though not by name — for failing to put forward “a conservative solution” to raising the debt limit, like linking it to spending cuts. “Everybody’s surprised,” Meadows said. “If there’s not a conservative solution out there for raising the debt ceiling, why should we be surprised?”