Trump Sabotaging His Own Party
There must be a pony here somewhere.
POLITICO (“It could have been a peace summit. Instead, Trump clashed with senators inside ‘intense’ meeting.“):
Senate Republicans hoped to use a closed-door lunch to clear the air with President Donald Trump. Instead, the president vented his frustrations with the senators for more than an hour, leaving them no closer to detente.
The meeting came at an explosive moment, with GOP lawmakers increasingly frustrated by Trump’s mercurial treatment of congressional Republican priorities. Just hours before arriving on Capitol Hill, Trump delivered his latest rug-pull — announcing he would refuse to sign a major housing bill that leaders were already touting after big bipartisan majorities passed it this week.
But senators said Trump arrived determined to prosecute his internal grudges against the Republican lawmakers who have opposed him at times — particularly those who have expressed misgivings about the Iran war and who are refusing to comply with the president’s demands for swift passage of a controversial elections bill.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) described Trump as “mad as a murder hornet” about the Iran vote, while Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) described the scene as “very much like a hospital board meeting, when a bunch of doctors are yelling at each other.”
Another GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called the lunch “very intense.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), deploying some go-to congressional lingo for heated encounters, called it “spirited,” “frank” and “candid.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters Trump ended on a unifying note but only after spending an hour “talking about things which were not exactly unifying.”
POLITICO (“The White House choreographed a victory lap. Trump veered off script.“):
President Donald Trump was supposed to go to Capitol Hill on Wednesday and spike the football. Instead, he fumbled.
The president abruptly scuttled plans to sign a bipartisan housing bill that would have been a boon to Republicans desperate for campaign trail affordability wins. Trump’s announcement that he wouldn’t sign it until the Senate passes voting overhauls that he’s championed came after his own staff spent the morning taking a very public victory lap ahead of the housing bill’s expected signing.
It’s the latest example of a president seemingly indifferent to the political realities of the Senate and unable to stay on message ahead of an expectedly close midterm contest in which voters list cost-of-living as a top concern.
“This is a bipartisan bill that would’ve given the White House a nice victory,” said David Urban, a Republican strategist who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign. “And listen, it’s still going to become law. It’s not like the president is going to veto it. But it would have been a great story today.”
The housing bill — which passed with 358 votes in the House and 85 in the Senate — included a proposal intended to lower the cost of housing by banning institutional investors from purchasing single family homes, which Trump touted in his State of the Union. White House legislative affairs director James Braid worked for weeks to iron out differences between the House and Senate version. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt and former deputy chief of staff James Blair heralded the signing on Wednesday.
But Trump’s fixation on the SAVE America Act, which he believes is key to protecting election integrity, upended the stagecraft. Instead of spending the day celebrating, aides and lobbyists were left scrambling to pick up the pieces, trying to divine why Trump had changed course and what it all meant for the future of the housing bill.
[…]
“The president took what should have been a political lay-up — not to mention a substantively good policy move — and turned it into yet another boneheaded own goal,” said a third person close to the White House. “Even if it does become law, he’s now taken a lot of the steam out of an effort that could have shown the GOP is taking the cost of living crunch seriously. Now, it’s tarnished.”
There’s more to both stories, but you get the gist. It’s just part of a theme that’s been repeated quite a bit in recent months: President Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, simply does not care about the fate of the party.
Using a meeting with dissident Republican Senators, including one whose career he torpedoed out of spite, to rail against them rather than find a way to work together is hardly surprising. He expects slavish loyalty regardless of his own behavior.
Blowing up the signing ceremony for a popular bill that he would have gotten credit for, though, is harder to understand. While he’s not going to stand for election again, he enjoys applause and bumps in his poll numbers.
Making it all more confusing is that, while he seems not to care at all that his policies are making it harder for Republicans to win in November, he’s obsessed with changing the rules of the game to make it harder for Democrats to win. He’s spent a considerable amount of the party’s money working to defeat local Republican politicians who refused to go along with his gerrymandering efforts. And he’s blown up the housing bill and the reauthorization of FISA on the so-called SAVE Act, even though it has no chance of being passed.
Clearly, this is some sort of 4D chess beyond my ken.
From the political gossip newsletter Punchbowl News (no link unfortunately):
LOL.
It’s important to keep in mind that the pundit class has been talking about how bad his electoral strategy is going all the way back to 2016, and in spite of that, he has managed to win two elections. Of course his party got trounced in 2018 and he himself did in 2020, even though he will never admit it out loud. This gets to the question of how much he actually believes of his own lies. I think he knows he lost in 2020. But I think he’s surrounded himself so much by yes-men and yes-women that he has genuinely bought into the most favorable hype about him, including the idea that the way he talks and acts is always effective, not just at winning elections but at bending others to his will, which is not completely off-base. That’s why he’s so intent on passing the SAVE Act, but he doesn’t seem to realize that even passing it wouldn’t guarantee victory for the GOP this year, but discarding or at least significantly weakening the filibuster–which passing the SAVE act absolutely depends on, would hand the Dems more power when and if they do capture the Senate. Trump lies all the time, but I think his simplistic black-and-white view of things that’s seen in this article is a real reflection of the way he sees the world.
So Republicans are learning the lesson Dems learned during Trump 1.0 – you can’t reason with an unreasonable person. Dr. Mary Trump has been telling us for years now that Donald’s narcissism is both malignant and worsening, and now it’s harder for Republicans to pretend that Trump is anything other than dangerously delusional. If this was Joe Biden acting this way Jake Tapper’s head would explode.
It should be noted that the felon’s subversion of the party is being assisted by House leadership. Once legislation is submitted to the WH, a president has 10 days to sign it or veto it. If neither action takes place the legislation becomes law, provided congress remains in session for that 10 day period. Speaker Johnson has not officially submitted the legislation to the WH.
So yeah, the felon doesn’t give a hoot about the party, but the party is complicit.
@Kylopod:
Of course, he lost the popular vote in 2016 and, as many continue to note (myself included) he won a narrow win in 2024 in an anti-incumbent year and likely underperformed what a more “normal” candidate would have done.
This is to say, I am not sure the issue is one of electoral strategy, per se.
@Kylopod:
Sorry, posted too soon. I think you are correct about bending people to his will. While I continue to be unconvinced about a lot of dementia remote diagnoses, I have always thought he almost certainly has a diagnosable narcissistic disorder of some kind (among other things).
I also think he is a simplistic thinker. You know, tariffs! Bomb Iran! Kidnap Maduro, and it fixed Venezuela! Build a wall! Paint the reflecting pool blue!
The SAVE Act fits that simplistic approach to the world, IMHO.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I was talking about his perception, not mine. I have long believed that, contrary to the overwhelming conventional wisdom (and I think you agree with me on this, you can correct me if you don’t), Trump was a historically weak candidate in all three elections where he was the GOP nominee, and performed worse than a Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley would have under the same circumstances. The standard view of American presidential elections has long focused way too much on candidates’ personalities while partially or completely ignoring factors such as the economy (or at least voters’ perception of the economy) and the popularity of the incumbent president. The fact that Trump exceeded expectations is itself a reflection of why the personality-based assessments of elections is wrong, but instead of reexamining that entire approach to elections, what most pundits did following Trump’s 2016 victory was conclude that his personality is effective at winning elections in a way that that of tapioca-bland politicians like Romney and Haley isn’t. This also in my experience is what most Dems believe, because it fits with their view that Repubs are more aggressive and ruthless than Dems (a position I think there’s some merit to) and that Trump is exactly the candidate Republicans were waiting for all their lives (a position that overlooks the fact that he won the lowest percentage of the national vote ever for a winning Republican in the 2016 primaries).
This is yet another example where people just assume something must be true if both parties seem to agree on it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Just a reminder that although Trump’s EO would do away with vote by mail, the SAVE Act doesn’t. I’m currently working as an election judge for the Colorado primaries. Colorado is a vote by mail state. There is simply no way that the state could conduct a sane in-person election in November if VBM were banned today.
As I regularly say, it’s a regional thing. In the 13-state West, >90% of all votes cast in November will be on ballots distributed by mail. Seven of the 13 send ballots to all registered voters, three more send ballots to all registered voters who have signed onto a permanent mail ballot list (large majorities of registered voters), and the other three have no-excuse mail ballots requiring annual sign-up that is used by ~30% of registered voters.
@Michael Cain:
As is Utah.
While I can believe that Republicans would go along with a blatantly unconstitutional voter-suppression scheme in a blue state, it’s hard to believe they would do so in a red state.
Perhaps more broadly, it would disenfranchise a ton of Republican voters in rural areas. But then, Jim Crow laws were okay with disenfranchising poor whites as collateral damage from their true goal.
I recall Gavin Newsom saying “You can’t work with President Trump. You can only work for President Trump.”
POLITICO could explain context on the SAVE Act. But at a minimum all they really had to do was say “says” instead of “believes”. Instead they sanewash by pretending to read his mind. This behavior by our supposedly liberal MSM is why we can’t have nice things.
But Trump’s fixation on the SAVE America Act, which he believes is key to protecting election integrity, upended the stagecraft.
Does he though?
@Jay L. Gischer: Pretty much.
It’s perhaps very simple. Dictators have never had much use for senates, houses of representatives and such. Trump is a man who doesn’t care for this form of government and believes he can destroy it, so he dares the GOP to oppose him by deliberately doing things he knows will piss them off. They responded with an act of appeasement by reversing the Iran war vote, so I’m not optimistic.
Expect the beatings to continue until moral improves.