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.
