Thread: Trump Becomes Ensnared in Fiery G.O.P. Civil War

Trump Becomes Ensnared in Fiery G.O.P. Civil War

By GLENN THRUSH and MAGGIE HABERMAN
MARCH 25, 2017

WASHINGTON — President Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him.

A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washington’s usual rules and consequences of politics do not apply to him, Mr. Trump now finds himself shackled by them.

In stopping the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party’s professed priority for the last seven years, the rebellious far right wing of his party out-rebelled Mr. Trump, and won a major victory on Friday over the party establishment that he now leads.

Like every other Republican leader who has tried to rule a fissured and fractious party, Mr. Trump faces a wrenching choice: retrenchment or realignment. Does he cede power to the anti-establishment wing of his party? Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats he has improbably blamed for his party’s shortcomings?

“It’s really a problem in our own party, and that’s something he’ll need to deal with moving forward,” said Representative Tom Cole, a moderate Republican from Oklahoma who is part of the center-right Tuesday Group, which stuck with Mr. Trump in the health care fight and earned the president’s praise in the hours after the bill’s defeat.

“I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations — but in the end there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say ‘yes,’” Mr. Cole said. “At some point I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.”

Mr. Trump is not there yet. So far he is operating from the standard-issue Republican playbook. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican support to pass spending bills, an as-yet unformed tax overhaul and a $1 trillion infrastructure package.

On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White House residence to grieve and assign blame. He asked his advisers repeatedly: Whose fault was this?

Increasingly, that blame has fallen on Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, who coordinated the initial legislative strategy on the health care repeal with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, his close friend and a fellow Wisconsin native, according to three people briefed on Mr. Trump’s recent discussions.

Mr. Trump, an image-obsessed developer with a lifelong indifference toward the mechanics of governance, made a game effort of negotiating with members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, even if it seemed to some members of that group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, that he did not have the greatest grasp of health care policy or legislative procedure.

He told one adviser late Friday that his loss — a legislative debacle foreshadowed by the intraparty fight that led to the 2013 government shutdown — was a minor bump in the road and that the White House would recover.

But his advisers were more realistic. Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions, described what happened as a flat-out failure that could inflict serious damage on this presidency — even if Mr. Bannon believes Congress, and not Mr. Trump, deserves much of the blame.

Mr. Bannon and the president’s more soft-spoken legislative affairs director, Marc Short, pushed Mr. Trump hard to insist on a public vote, as a way to identify, shame and pressure “no” voters who were killing their last, best chance to unravel the health care law.

One Hill Republican aide who was involved in the last-minute negotiations said that Mr. Bannon and Mr. Short were seeking to compile an enemies list. But Mr. Ryan repeatedly counseled the president to avoid seeking vengeance — at least until he has passed spending bills and a debt-ceiling increase needed to keep the government running.

Mr. Trump, bowing to the same power-sharing realities that the besieged Mr. Ryan must cope with in leading the fractured Republican majority in the House, decided to back down. But the president’s advisers worry about the hard reality going forward — the developer with the tough-guy veneer was steamrollered by various factions in the Republican Congress.

The president and his team lamented outsourcing so much of the early bill drafting to Mr. Ryan, and one aide compared their predicament to a developer who has staked everything on obtaining a property without conducting a thorough inspection.

Despite the president’s public displays of unity with the speaker, Mr. Trump’s team was privately stunned by Mr. Ryan’s inability to master the politics of his own conference, according to two West Wing aides. The president, they said, is still sizing up Mr. Ryan’s abilities, despite Mr. Trump’s public statements of support.

As the dust settled on the health care debacle, it was clear that Mr. Trump’s lieutenants in the Republican civil war had been divided on how they thought the health care fight should have been handled, which does not augur well for the political battles to come.

Mutual disgust with the Freedom Caucus seems to be pulling Mr. Trump and Mr. Ryan together, at least for now — just as it briefly united President Barack Obama and John A. Boehner, Mr. Ryan’s long-suffering predecessor, during their doomed effort to reach a “grand bargain” on a tax overhaul in 2012, which was also sabotaged by unruly conservatives.

In a meeting before the Republican House conference convened on Thursday night, Mr. Trump’s team met for two hours of negotiations with Freedom Caucus members, leaving them sour and frustrated at the ever-changing list of demands emerging from the group’s leader, Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

Many on Mr. Trump’s team disengaged from the process even as Mr. Trump dug in.

Gary D. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser, had originally been tasked with playing a large role in shepherding the legislation from the White House side. But Mr. Cohn had grown leery of the bill, and the White House recognized that Mr. Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs and a liberal Democrat, was not a good messenger to deal with recalcitrant conservatives.

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who returned on Friday from a family skiing trip to Aspen, Colo., had said for weeks that he thought supporting the bill was a mistake, according to two people who spoke with him. The president, according to two Republicans close to the White House, expressed annoyance that Mr. Kushner, who has described himself as a first-among-equals adviser, was not on site during the consequential week of wrangling. Tom Price, who left Congress to become Mr. Trump’s health and human services secretary, was singled out for blame.

Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, took on a bigger role pushing the bill, telling his former colleagues that the president wanted an up-or-down vote on Friday.

Mr. Trump had told allies on Wednesday night that if he did not push for the bill himself, it would not pass. Several, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed astonishment that the president had not come to that realization much earlier.

Until the final week, Mr. Trump’s team was deeply divided over whether he should fully commit to a hard sell on a bill they viewed as fundamentally flawed, with Vice President Mike Pence pointedly advising the president to label the effort “Ryancare,” not “Trumpcare,” according to aides.

Mr. Trump brushed aside those concerns in the last few days, and embraced the conventional role as leader of his party. He has one speed when he decides to shift to sales mode, aides said, and he had trouble modulating his tone, issuing cringe-inducing superlatives like “wonderful” to describe an ungainly bill his aides described as anything but.

After it was all over, the president dutifully blamed the Democrats, a party out of power and largely leaderless, after turning his back on their offers to negotiate on a bipartisan package that would have addressed shortcomings in the Affordable Care Act while preserving its core protections for poor and working class patients.

Several aides advised him the argument was nonsensical, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.

For Mr. Trump’s Republican opponents, here was poetic revenge served cold. As a candidate in 2016, he initially scoffed at signing a Republican loyalty pledge, at times behaving more like an independent invading the Republican host organism than a normal presidential candidate.

As president, Mr. Trump has left dozens of critical administration jobs unfilled, rejecting stalwart Republican applicants deemed insufficiently loyal to him — and now he is decrying the disloyalty of the 20 to 30 conservative members who outmaneuvered and overpowered him on health care.

“We all learned a lot — we learned a lot about loyalty,” a solemn Mr. Trump told reporters late Friday.

The dynamic that led to his defeat is bigger than Mr. Trump, despite his tendency to personalize every win or loss. Republicans who gained power by savaging Washington are in full control and cannot agree on a path forward.

“We were a 10-year opposition party,” Mr. Ryan said late Friday. “Being against things was easy to do.”

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, said on Friday, with a chuckle, that he was “getting some déjà vu right now.”

“Do you think Donald J. Trump goes home tonight, shrugs and says, ‘This is what winning looks like’?” Mr. Gingrich added. “No! But this is where the Republican Party is right now, and it’s been this way for years.”

But Mr. Trump put on his best face on Saturday morning. “ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE,” he said on Twitter. “Do not worry!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/u...-war.html?_r=0

“We all learned a lot — we learned a lot about loyalty,” a solemn Mr. Trump told reporters late Friday.

The Congress is the SWAMP, you can't make a deal with it, you have to drain it. You have to suck the oxygen right out of it. You have to find 1 person in Congress who wants to both a) repeal the mandates and taxes of Obamacare and b) wants to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act and make the insurance industry subject to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, draft the bill tonight, introduce it Monday or earlier if they work on weekends, and GO NUCLEAR promoting this bill as what it is, the fundamentals of a free society that protects its citizens and consumers.

How can the FREEDOM CAUCUS vote against restoring liberty and freedom for our citizens by repealing federal mandates to purchase insurance and federal taxes to punish them if they don't or can't? How can any CAUCUS vote against the consumer protections provided by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act?

First thing, this President and all of us, must admit - there is no two party system. The Republicans are just as greedy and out of touch with reality as are any Democrats.

They are there to line their pockets by protecting their employers and we are not their employers. We simply furnish the monies they use to make their employers wealthier.
We are their minions.

This elections has - or should have - dropped the scales from our eyes on many things. One that is most apparent is the fallacy of a two party system, and that being called a Republicans make one any more honorable, or honorable at all.

They keep forgetting. Trump's presidency is a result of a civil war in the Republican Party. Remember? We almost got Ted Cruz as a candidate, a man who could not run because he was not born in this country. A loser who claimed dual citizenship with Canada until he decided to run for president. The people who backed Cruz are still holding office. Remember also that Trump nearly ran as an independent.

The war is with the Two Party System, the fake political apparatus shored up by government kept records of voter party affiliation. Trump hasn't the political DNA to be a Two Party System president.

To the extent that he tries to fit in, he will lose and his presidency be a failure. To the extent he resists, his presidency will be a victory.

It's hard to tell, but we are only into his third month as president. He made a big deal about Obamacare on the campaign trail, but his most impassioned supporters don't really care about that. I know I don't. I still don't understand the whole mess. At this point I suspect there is something deeper going on with the medical establishment than meets the eye at the government level. It has nothing to do with either Obama or Trump.

Originally Posted by pkskyali

They keep forgetting. Trump's presidency is a result of a civil war in the Republican Party. Remember? We almost got Ted Cruz as a candidate, a man who could not run because he was not born in this country. A loser who claimed dual citizenship with Canada until he decided to run for president. The people who backed Cruz are still holding office. Remember also that Trump nearly ran as an independent.

The war is with the Two Party System, the fake political apparatus shored up by government kept records of voter party affiliation. Trump hasn't the political DNA to be a Two Party System president.

To the extent that he tries to fit in, he will lose and his presidency be a failure. To the extent he resists, his presidency will be a victory.

It's hard to tell, but we are only into his third month as president. He made a big deal about Obamacare on the campaign trail, but his most impassioned supporters don't really care about that. I know I don't. I still don't understand the whole mess. At this point I suspect there is something deeper going on with the medical establishment than meets the eye at the government level. It has nothing to do with either Obama or Trump.

I think you are right in that he has to realize he is never going to have the politicians on his side - almost none of them. Their interests and ours (and I hope his) are very different.

What could be the agenda of the medical establisment? Other than greed - which of course we see.

[QUOTE]“I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations — but in the end there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say ‘yes,’” Mr. Cole said.

“At some point I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.”

Oh Lord, I just had a flashback to the Reagan illegal alien amnesty!

pkyskyali wrote (excerpt):

They keep forgetting. Trump's presidency is a result of a civil war in the Republican Party. Remember? We almost got Ted Cruz as a candidate, a man who could not run because he was not born in this country. A loser who claimed dual citizenship with Canada until he decided to run for president. The people who backed Cruz are still holding office. Remember also that Trump nearly ran as an independent.

Ted Cruz was a natural born citizen by virtue of his mother's citizenship. Same thing happened with John McCain who was born in Panama. Of course we've beat that horse to-death and I'm not interested in getting back in to a discussion that is absolutely irrelevant. However, I would like to know who all the Cruz supporters you're referring to were. Everyone in the U.S. Senate hated him. Just call me Mr. curious.

As for running as an Independent, that was not going to happen. He threatened it, but it wasn't a possibility because he and everyone in the free world knew that would cement a Hillary win.

I don't know about Ted Cruz's citizenship - but I do believe he was one of the 'chosen' that were pushed forward to take over. That made me doubt him.

As for John McCain, would his father have been in the military at the time he was born in Panama? I don't know just asking.

That certainly is not to say I have any use for John McCain. I think he is a very dangerous man who is working against this country.

Originally Posted by nntrixie

I don't know about Ted Cruz's citizenship - but I do believe he was one of the 'chosen' that were pushed forward to take over. That made me doubt him.

As for John McCain, would his father have been in the military at the time he was born in Panama? I don't know just asking.

That certainly is not to say I have any use for John McCain. I think he is a very dangerous man who is working against this country.

Well I certainly don't know who you think chose him (Cruz) or was pushing him forward. He had the support of a lot of Americans, but the corporate world, illegal immigrant advocates, and most congresspersons didn't care for him.

I share your concerns about John McCain. He's definitely on my most hated list.

Yes, McCain's father was stationed in Panama and the American citizen mother of Cruz was temporarily working in Canada.

Both McCain's parents were US citizens. Only one of Cruz's parents was a US citizen. Unless you respect the absurd and idiotic idea of "dual citizenship", then Cruz was not a US citizen.

If Cruz was born in Canada and his mother being a US citizen made him a US citizen, then would somebody born in the US of a Canadian parent be a Canadian citizen instead of a US citizen?

If you accept the idiotic premise of dual citizenship, then what about the offspring of parents who are dual citizens of four different countries, countries A and B for one parent and C and D of two countries? And say the product of this union is born in a fifth country E. What is the citizenship of that offspring?