‘Get back to work,’ Trump exhorts McConnell, GOP

President tweets from vacation on tax policy and more

President Trump wants Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP-majority Congress to “get back to work” on passing his agenda, an edict he issued amid his 17-day vacation at his golf club in New Jersey.

Trump’s tweet is the third directed at McConnell in two days and follows one from his aide Dan Scavino Jr. accusing the Kentucky Republican of “more excuses” as to why the GOP-controlled Senate was not able to pass a repeal of Obamacare.

“I say very simply, where is repeal and replace? Now I want tax reform and tax cuts … and I want a very big infrastructure bill,” Trump said Thursday afternoon in New Jersey. “I said, Mitch, get to work, and let’s get it done.”

Trump was asked whether McConnell should consider stepping down.

“If he doesn’t get repeal and replace done and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done — infrastructure,” Trump said. “If he doesn’t get them done, then you can ask me that question.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a member of Senate leadership, defended McConnell as “the best leader we’ve had in my time in the Senate.”

Hatch was first elected to the Senate in 1976.

This week, McConnell blamed Trump’s “excessive expectations” as the reason the GOP agenda was in limbo, an accusation that the president denied.

“Part of the reason I think is that the story line is that we haven’t done much is because, in part, the president and others

“I think (Trump) had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point,” McConnell said in Florence, Ky., on Tuesday. “Our new president has of course not been in this line of work before and I think had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed a New York Times report that Trump and McConnell spoke by phone this week. “Health care was certainly discussed,” she said.

The Senate broke for their month-long recess after Republicans narrowly failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act late last month. Following the vote, McConnell said it was “time to move on” from their party-line repeal effort and look instead toward a tax overhaul and other priorities.

The Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee announced it would be taking a bipartisan approach to try to stabilize markets in the short term to try to keep premiums from skyrocketing.

Still, Trump and some conservatives are not ready to give up on repealing Obamacare, though it is unclear what the president has in mind for reviving the legislation.

Details on how Congress plans to tackle tax policy remain vague, yet a group of top GOP congressional leaders and administration officials released a joint statement late last month outlining their intent to move forward, which included a few key principles.