Trump Will Be Best Remembered As The Albatross Who Wrecked The GOP

Last week the malefactors who prop up the Koch network met in Manhattan for two days. They've gotten wind of the gigantic anti-Trump/anti-Ryan tsunami forming up in the hinterland and heading towards DC. And they are shitting a collective brick. Friday the Washington Post reported they "spoke in cataclysmic terms about the price they expect to pay in the midterm elections if their tax reform effort does not win passage. They voiced concerns a demoralized Republican base would stay home, financiers would stop writing campaign donation checks to incumbents and the congressional majorities the party has built in the House and Senate could evaporate overnight." Neo-fascist Texas Senator Ted Cruz was there warning about a 2018 "Watergate-level blowout." Some realized that the Republican Party civil war that has now blown completely out of control is adding gasoline to the fire of GOP inability to get anything done in Washington.

A good example was the Wall Street Journal reporting that Señor Trumpanzee urging "voters to oust lawmakers who don’t support his tax overhaul plan this year; he phoned his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to offer encouragement after Mr. Bannon appeared on Fox News on Monday vowing to unseat sitting Republicans who don’t actively support the president’s agenda." Even an imbecile like Kushner-in-law phoned Bannon to encourage him after an appearance with Hannity that could have easily have beens scripted by Chuck Schumer. One of Bannon's lines was "There's a coalition coming together that is going to challenge every Republican incumbent except for Ted Cruz."

Mainstream conservatives are increasingly worried and now wondering not if a wave is coming, but how high it will be and how deep and long-lasting the damage the Trump Circus will cause. Friday the Nevada Independent, for example, reported how popular Republican Governor Brian Sandoval reacted to Trump's latest stumble with healthcare. Sandoval: "It’s going to hurt people. It’s going to hurt kids. It’s going to hurt families. It’s going to hurt individuals. It’s going to hurt people with mental health issues. It’s going to hurt veterans. It’s going to hurt everybody... [T]this is going to make it much more difficult for those people out in the rural counties and in the urban areas to be able to obtain affordable insurance. So this is something I don’t support, I think that this has been very good for Nevada, and I think the administration should keep providing those subsidies."

Last week New Yorker reporter Susan Glasser interviewed long-time swamp resident and GOP establishment figure, lobbyist Ed Rogers. "There’s fires all around" was how he greeted her before her first question, before she had even taken a seat. "It’s surreal... Why does it have to be this way?" She observed, aloud, that Republicans seem to be finding life under Trump a lot harder than Democrats; he agreed. "You want to be loyal," he said. "You want to be a good member of the team."

Rogers cited his partner Barbour’s dictum for surviving Washington under this volatile new President-- sometimes Trump’s gonna help, sometimes he’s gonna hurt-- before asking, “When is he going to help? Life is all about the net, not the gross. Where’s the help?” The confirmation of the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, last spring, often cited as one of Trump’s major accomplishments, “seems like a long time ago,” Rogers said. “And is the totality of Trump still a net plus? Is it going to be a net plus?”

The weekend war of words between Corker and Trump had left Rogers, like many lobbyists in town, thinking not so much of the actual world war that Corker warned about (though he’s worried about that, too) but about the fate of Trump’s proposed tax-reform plan. Given Corker’s public skepticism about the proposal, Rogers and others now suspect that it may run into the same problems that blocked the repeal of Obamacare. “Is this what legislative momentum looks like?” he asked, before joking that perhaps “the flames and all are just a façade” and that, “behind it, Gary Cohn”-- the President’s chief economic adviser-- “is really doing magic and something big is coming together that is going to have fifty votes.”

...When I cited Corker’s comments that most Republicans at least privately shared the belief that the White House had been turned into an “adult day care” center for its capricious seventy-one-year-old chief resident, Rogers offered his own criticism of the White House.

A sampling:

“They’re grasping at straws.”

“There is a permanent hunkered-down quality.”

“It’s shocking, it’s embarrassing.”

“They’re just making it up every day as they go along.”

And yet, he hesitated when I asked whether Republicans agreed with Corker that Trump was dangerous. “I think the word ‘dangerous’ is still a rare word,” Rogers corrected me, saying that the words “reckless” and “destructive” were far more common. He went on, “Saying the D-word is different than believing there are now stewards of normalcy in [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, in Tillerson, in Kelly, and others that, I think everybody acknowledges, are protecting institutions from Trump, and protecting Trump from Trump, for that matter.”

“The only thing that is reliable and dependable about Trump is that he’s unreliable and not dependable,” he added.

...Back in January, the conventional wisdom had been that Trump, a Washington novice with a clear disregard for the details, would leave the governing to Congress, making Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell perhaps the capital’s most important player. Now, Trump and McConnell are barely on speaking terms, and tensions within the Party are proliferating. “Of course it’s personal,” Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who organized his national-security colleagues to sign open letters against Trump during the primaries, said. “These are the kind of rifts that don’t heal.”

For Washington Republicans, Corker’s public chastising of Trump has only increased the pressure: Are you speaking out? And if not, why not? “I don’t think it’s responsible to hold back,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of both Bush Administrations, told me. “I don’t believe this is a time to hold back. A lot of people have gone along or stood there quiet when they disagreed. But not to weigh in when you actually do disagree seems to me wrong.”

It is now taken as axiomatic that the Washington wing of the G.O.P. loathes and fears Trump, but still, there are genuine differences of opinion about how to deal with him. As a Republican veteran of Capitol Hill explained to me, “The taxonomy of Washington Republicans is not a bright line of Never Trump versus pro-Trump.” There is, instead, “a continuum of people who are to varying degrees either outright supportive of the President or comfortable with the fact that getting things done requires working with the Administration to outright disgust and opposition.” As I have found, and with the exception of a small handful of officials who came to town with Trump, the private comments of even the most publicly pro-Trump Republicans often differ little from their more outspoken colleagues.

Elected Republican officials like Corker are in a somewhat different situation, given Trump’s continued popularity with the core G.O.P. electorate, and their need to face those voters back home. In terms of the ease with which Republicans in Congress can oppose Trump, “there is a hierarchy, in ascending order,” the Hill veteran said, with House “members and senators in cycle next year” at the bottom, followed by “senators who intend to run for reëlection but are not in cycle next year,” then “senators who will probably retire but have not yet announced,” and finally, at the top, “senators who have announced they will retire.” When Corker decided not to run for reëlection, last month, he likely did not change his mind about the President but simply “transitioned from category two to category five.”

...Trump, of course, ran against Washington, promising to “drain the Swamp,” so if the swamp decides to fight back, that’s not necessarily such a terrible thing for Trump. This may be why Steve Bannon is not pretending that Trump commands the respect and allegiance of Republicans inside the Beltway. “This is what they think about President Trump behind closed doors,” Bannon said on Fox News on Monday night, when asked about the Corker comments. Bannon is already turning the topic into a TV talking point, a rallying cry to the Trump base: See how horrible those swamp creatures are, how much they oppose Trump? By Wednesday, the intramural fight among Republicans was playing so well that Bannon was on television promising to mount primary challenges for every single Senate Republican incumbent (except Trump’s G.O.P. Presidential rival turned more or less faithful defender, Ted Cruz).

For lifers like Rogers, who’ve figured out how to survive and prosper no matter which party is in power, Washington means having a healthy appreciation for the fact that your team doesn’t always win. But now that it’s clearer that getting along in the traditional Washington sense is not part of Trump’s plan, Rogers said he has changed his view of what is possible in this Presidency. “Republican loyalists have gone from ‘gigantic things are going to happen; the world really is going to change; there’s going to be a fundamental shift in what the government does,’ . . . to, ‘Can we keep the lights on around here?’ ” He added, “The possibilities are getting narrower. Consequences are piling up.”

Most Beltway pundits and prognosticators aren't ready to take this to the next step yet-- a 2018 blowout. But CNBC's John Harwood is starting to get it. He wrote that while Señor Trumpanzee "takes a baseball bat to Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal, odds are rising that he could break the Republican majority in Congress, too. Midterm elections remain just more than a year away. But a leading nonpartisan analyst now sees a slightly better than even chance that Democrats win back the House in November 2018, which would halt Trump's current legislative agenda and even jeopardize his ability to complete his term."



A friend who works at the DCCC smuggled me copy of one of the PPP memos for the DCCC's associated House Majority PAC poll, this one about 3 GOP held open seats. Enjoy:

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is deeply unpopular, and Congressional seats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Washington are looking to be quite competitive. Despite the fact that they are not running for re-election, the current Members of Congress should be open to persuasion on the Republican tax reform plan, especially if they are listening to their constituents who are not in favor of this plan and its provisions.

PA-15

In Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District, Congress has a 9% approval and 84% disapproval rating, and Speaker Paul Ryan has a 25% approval and 61% disapproval rating. President Trump is just as popular as he is unpopular (47/47), but a majority (53%) of his supporters oppose the provision in the tax plan that would give wealthy Americans a tax cut. The hypothetical election matchup between a Democratic candidate (44%) and a Republican candidate (43%) is quite close and indicates that this will be a very competitive race. Candidates should be aware that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is very unpopular in this district. Incumbent Republican Congressman Charlie Dent should also note that his constituents strongly oppose this plan and key components in it.

MI-11

In Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, President Trump, Congress, and Speaker Paul Ryan are all quite unpopular. Trump has a 44% approval rating and 50% say they disapprove of the job he is doing, while 10% of voters say they approve of the job Congress is doing and 80% say they disapprove. 22% approve of the job Speaker Ryan is doing and 65% disapprove. The hypothetical election matchup between a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate is currently tied (42/42). Candidates should be aware that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is very unpopular in this district. Incumbent Republican Congressman David Trott should also note that his constituents strongly oppose this plan and key components in it.

WA-08

In Washington’s 8th Congressional District, President Trump, Congress, and Speaker Paul Ryan are all unpopular. Trump has a 40% approval rating and 55% say they disapprove of the job he is doing, while 12% of voters say they approve of the job Congress is doing and 79% say they disapprove. 20% approve of the job Speaker Ryan is doing and 67% disapprove. The hypothetical election matchup between Dino Rossi (42%) and a “Democratic candidate” (43%) is very close. Candidates should be aware that the tax plan proposed by Congressional Republicans is very unpopular in this district. Incumbent Republican Congressman Dave Reichert should also note that his constituents strongly oppose this plan and key components in it.

Back to the lunatic on the fascist right for a moment. Yesterday Bannon, a master manipulator for the severely simpleminded, spoke to neo-Nazis and imbeciles gathered for their annual convention at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC. McConnel was a speaker at the shindig as well, but he wasn't in the room when a deranged Bannon addressed him: "Yeah, Mitch, the donors are not happy. They’ve all left you. We’ve cut your oxygen off, Mitch." He was particularly venomous towards John Barrasso (R-WY), Bob Corker (R-TN), Dean Heller (R-NV) and Deb Fischer (R-NE). Give him a listen; he's dangerous.