Trump comes out fighting United States
Battle lines drawn as President threatens Dems
Washington has plunged into political war following the split decision by US voters in the Midterm elections, with President Donald Trump yesterday ousting his Attorney General and threatening to retaliate against Democrats if they launch investigations into his personal conduct and possible corruption in the Administration.
The rapid shift to battle stations signalled the start of what is likely to be two years of unremitting political combat as Trump positions himself for re-election. For the first time, Trump will be forced to navigate divided government as Democrats, who on Wednesday won the House of Representatives, pledge to be a check on his power and face pressure from their liberal base to block him at every turn.
The acrimony was punctuated by Trump’s bombast as he refused to take responsibility for his party’s washout in many suburban areas where voters who previously backed Republicans rejected the President’s hardline politics.
Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who is poised to lead the new Democratic majority as speaker, said her caucus would use its subpoena authority to pursue sweeping oversight of the Trump Administration. “We will have a responsibility to honour our oversight responsibilities, and that’s the path that we will go down,” she told reporters. But, she added, Democrats would do so in the interest of “trying to unify our country”.
Following Wednesday’s Midterms, some allies said, Trump was both emboldened — because he believed he had helped expand the Republican majority in the Senate — and apprehensive, because he would no longer be able to bend all of Congress to his will. Trump said in a wideranging and often sharp-tongued news conference that any hope for bipartisan deals would evaporate if House Democrats use their new power to investigate him or his Administration. Such efforts, he said, would precipitate “a warlike posture”.
House Democrats have said they plan to begin a series of investigations of the President, including issuing a subpoena for his tax returns, which he has for years refused to release. Trump said he would respond by using the Republican-controlled Senate as a cudgel, instructing his allies there to investigate alleged misconduct by Democrats.
“They can play that game, but we can play it better, because we have a thing called the United States Senate,” Trump said. “They can look at us, then we can look at them and it’ll go back and forth. And it’ll probably be very good for me politically ... because I think I’m better at that game than they are, actually.”
Trump has told advisers that he intends to exploit divisions among House Democrats, according to a senior White House official. He believes he can pit Pelosi and others who are interested in making deals with him on policies like infrastructure spending against those who rose to office intent on blocking his agenda and, perhaps, beginning impeachment proceedings.
The President’s allies argued that Democrats were overestimating their mandate from Wednesday’s elections and would emerge as a useful political foil for Trump as he seeks re-election.
During his remarkably combative news conference in the East Room of the White House yesterday, Trump repeatedly lost his cool as he answered questions from journalists for 86 minutes. He called CNN’s Jim Acosta “a rude, terrible person”, snapped at Peter Alexander of NBC News and directed April Ryan of American Urban Radio to “sit down”. And when Yamiche Alcindor of
PBS NewsHour asked the President whether by identifying as a “nationalist” he also was embracing the label “white nationalist”, he told her repeatedly, “That’s such a racist question”. “To say what you just said is so insulting to me,” Trump responded to Alcindor, who is black.
The White House later suspended Acosta’s press pass, accusing him of “placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern”, calling it “absolutely unacceptable”.
The intern was trying to take a microphone from Acosta. CNN said in a statement that the White House revoked Acosta’s press pass out of “retaliation for his challenging questions” yesterday, and the network accused White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of lying about Acosta’s actions, saying she “provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened”.
Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Matthew Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor who served as Sessions’ chief of staff, was named acting Attorney General.