Katie Rogers
Washington: On a tour through Asia last year, US President Donald Trump took a moment on the world stage to celebrate a legislative victory at home: after months of iron-fisted pressure, he had compelled Republicans to pass legislation that cut taxes and slashed into the country’s social safety net.
“I said, ‘Put it all into one bill, and if we get it done, we’re done for four years,’” Trump said during a Tokyo speech in October. “We don’t need anything more from Congress in terms of that.”
Ever since, Trump has been intent on testing that theory, daring lawmakers to defy him and doing his best to vanquish them from office if they do. But after a retributive romp through primary season, Trump’s style of governing – unilateral, and often impatient – has collided with restive Republicans who seem to be exacting some political vengeance of their own.
On Wednesday evening (Washington time), four House Republicans sided with Democrats to demand that Trump withdraw US forces from the conflict with Iran or win approval from Congress, rebuking a president who has repeatedly said he does not need congressional authorisation to continue the conflict.
That came on the heels of another high-profile setback: a Republican revolt against a $US1.8 billion ($2.5 billion) fund to reward Trump supporters who claim political persecution by Democrats. Many Republican senators had indicated they would not move forward with plans to fund Trump’s immigration agenda unless those plans were axed. This week, acting Attorney-General Todd Blanche said the administration would abandon the effort.
But on Wednesday, just as the Senate moved to debate an immigration bill that it had held up because of the fund, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he wasn’t quite sure if the fund was dead or on hold.
“I love it,” he told a reporter who asked about the pot of money, effectively jamming his foot in the way of a door lawmakers had hoped to close. “I think it’s so important.”
No wonder Republicans want to put something in writing.
Republican senator John Cornyn, whom Trump helped dispatch during the primaries, shared a Wall Street Journal editorial on social media earlier in the day, calling on Congress to pass legislation to kill the fund.
“The way to ensure the Trump retribution fund is more than mostly dead would be for Congress to put a stake through it,” Cornyn wrote, echoing the editorial.
(The senator, who has been posting up a storm about the concept of betrayal in recent days, added the word “retribution”, which did not appear in that sentence in the editorial. Last week, he shared a fable about a frog who was wronged by a scorpion.)
Republican senator Bill Cassidy, who voted in favour of impeaching Trump in 2021 and lost his primary, also supports legislation that would kill the fund.
“You want to make sure it’s really dead,” he told reporters.
On other matters of national security, several Republicans pushed back on Trump’s decision to appoint Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence. In his role as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte publicised the personal mortgage information of several prominent Trump critics and pushed for federal investigations into them.
Republican senator Thom Tillis said in a CNBC interview on Wednesday morning that he did not believe Pulte “has a prayer” of being confirmed by the Senate. (Tillis announced that he would not run for re-election last year, after coming under threat from Trump for opposing the sweeping tax bill the president crowed about in Japan.)
He said Trump’s decision to appoint Pulte had jeopardised congressional efforts to extend a high-profile warrantless surveillance law, which is scheduled for debate later this month: “I am tired of amateur hour,” Tillis said of the Trump administration.
Later, he told reporters that “I feel like there are people advising the president as if there is no election in November.”
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, defended Trump’s choice.
“The president chooses the best and most talented people to serve in his cabinet. That is why this administration has achieved record successes for the American people,” Ingle said in a statement. “Bill Pulte is a great selection, and he will do a great job on behalf of the American people.”
Ingle added that holding up a vote on the surveillance law “puts America’s national security at risk, and it is shameful that some Democrats are threatening to put partisan politics ahead of the safety of the American people”.
With five months until the midterm elections, Trump’s advisers are betting that voters will see all of this as classic Washington dysfunction born out of disloyalty to Trump. As evidence, those advisers have pointed to the trail of politicians who found themselves losing to Trump-backed challengers.
Outside the White House bubble, others warn that Trump’s primary-season strength, predicated on mobilising voters from the deepest-red depths of his base, may already be evaporating.
Republican representative Randy Feenstra, who received a late endorsement from Trump, lost his primary race to his challenger, Zach Lahn, a conservative political operative and farmer.
Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, saw Feenstra’s loss as a sign that the administration’s policies had hit agricultural communities, particularly the rounds of tariffs and rising oil prices from the US war in Iran. Murphy said those policies, compounded with Trump’s unpopularity, had weakened Republicans more than the White House had admitted.
“He’s a gorilla in the Republican primaries, but he is a wounded sparrow among the general electorate,” he said of Trump. He said this had resulted in Republican senators trying to move away from Trump’s more politically toxic efforts.
“The realpolitik of this is: ‘Get me some distance from Trump’,” he added.
Former Republican senator Lamar Alexander, who retired in 2021, said the president still had the opportunity to work with a chamber that “agrees with him 99 per cent of the time” to preserve his legacy.
“He needs to take advice from independent-minded people rather than just people who work for him and who he can fire,” he said in an interview. “Purging senators who support him is not a good path towards creating a legacy that he will be proud of when he leaves.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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