By Jonathan S. Tobin
Thursday, August 24, 2017
If you believe the New
York Times, President Donald Trump hasn’t spoken to Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell in weeks, and their last phone call was an angry exchange that
“quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.” While neither man commented
on the record for the article, the information clearly came from sources close
to McConnell, who conveyed the senator’s view that that president is unable to
learn “the basics of governing,” as well as his worries that Trump is leading
the Republican party to disaster.
After several months of off-and-on attempts to work with
McConnell, it appears Trump is raising the stakes in their confrontation, with
the state of Arizona being the site of what appears to be a looming proxy war.
Trump’s endorsement last week of a gadfly activist’s primary challenge to
incumbent senator Jeff Flake may have been the last straw for McConnell, as
their simmering feud is now being fought in the open.
Tuesday night in Phoenix, Trump made clear his low
opinion of the Senate and its leader. Though McConnell was mentioned directly
only once — when Trump demanded that the Senate abolish the filibuster — there
was little doubt that the rally’s enthusiastic chants of “drain the swamp” were
directed at Republican rather than Democratic swamp-dwellers. The appearance
was not so much an off-year election rally for Trump as it was the continuation
of last year’s campaign against the leadership of the party that nominated him.
With the crowd roaring approval for his challenge,
there’s little doubt Trump thinks he’s holding all the cards in his battle with
McConnell, an aloof Washington insider who has never been popular with the
grassroots of the party. While McConnell and the rest of the political world
think the administration’s troubles are the result of an undisciplined
president who can’t be bothered to learn how to work the system or to stay on
message, Trump blames congressional Republicans who won’t do his bidding. So he
is stepping up his war on McConnell and company on Twitter and using them as piñatas
at appearances where he can count on the applause of his adoring fans.
But McConnell is showing no signs that he’s intimidated
by any of this. Indeed, the very same day Trump showed up in Arizona, a super
PAC aligned with the majority leader released an ad targeting Kelli Ward, the
candidate Trump has been encouraging to run against Flake. McConnell will also
be hosting a fundraising dinner this week for the embattled senator. Meanwhile,
other Senate Republicans — including some who have supported Trump in the past,
albeit tamely, such as Tennessee’s Bob Corker — are, in the wake of the fallout
from Charlottesville, newly willing to say in public that they have had enough
of the president.
To Trump’s supporters this is just a sign of the D.C.
establishment closing ranks. Many think, as Roger Stone confidently told the Times, that the GOP will fall in line
once Trump has “taken a scalp” and starts “bumping off Republican members of
Congress in primaries.” But contrary to Stone, McConnell is not “wetting his
pants” about the prospect. Instead, the senator and his colleagues are sending
Trump a message that they will not be steamrolled and have no intention of
losing their majority thanks to candidates such as Ward who would loose
winnable seats, like the Tea Party’s Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donnell in
2010.
It remains to be seen whether a grassroots effort for an
outlier such as Ward, or even a more respectable challenger to Flake, will
catch fire. But what Trump is forgetting is that as much as he still holds the
affection of much of the GOP base, he needs McConnell if he’s going to get done
any of the things he wants done. This includes U.S. taxpayer funding for the
border wall that he repeatedly claimed Mexico would pay for.
The point here is not just that Trump’s threats of
inciting a government shutdown over wall funding would be a political disaster
for all Republicans. It’s that Trump is forgetting that insurgent tactics,
though they won him the nomination, can’t get results on Capitol Hill against a
determined and experienced foe who knows how to work the system. While most
Senate Republicans would prefer not to be the president’s targets — a status
that Flake invited with a pretentious book in which he posed as a defender of
conservative principles — they are also not sufficiently scared of the White
House that they would turn on McConnell or, at the president’s behest, fail to
pass popular legislation such as sanctions on Russia (the passage of which
ignited the angriest response from Trump).
A president who understood how Congress worked and was
sufficiently immersed in the details to be able to make deals with senators
might be able to hold his own against McConnell. But, as we saw with his
incoherent efforts on Obamacare repeal and replace, Trump lacks both the
knowledge and the focus to compete on this ground. Nor, as was evident when he
folded on Russia sanctions, can Trump stand up to a Republican Senate that is
mobilized against him.
It ought to be painfully obvious to the White House that
a battle with McConnell is not one either side can win. By stoking internecine
warfare, Trump is heading down a path that ends in legislative stalemates that
hurt him. Ultimately, it could also mean smaller GOP majorities if not his
ultimate nightmare: a Democratic House, which would almost certainly move to
impeach him.
Someone with the president’s ear should remind him that,
notwithstanding his mendacious boasts of having done more than any other
president in his first months, his only tangible achievement — the confirmation
of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court — was due to McConnell’s efforts and not
the White House’s. Trump’s fans clearly hate McConnell and his colleagues as
much as, if not more than, they hate the Democrats. But if Trump still has
hopes of governing rather than merely using the White House as a platform for
his public vendettas against the media and recalcitrant Republicans, he’s going
to need to cope with his rage and make peace with the majority leader.
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