White House Watch: Is Trump Preparing to Leave the Republican Party?

The latest sign is the president’s tiff with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. As my colleague Andrew Egger noted, on Monday McConnell said, during a speech in Kentucky, that Trump had “excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.” Those expectations, the Republican leader continued, made things more difficult for enacting the GOP’s legislative agenda, primarily repealing Obamacare.

“Part of the reason I think people feel we’re underperforming is because of too many artificial deadlines unrelated to the complexity of legislating,” McConnell said.

I asked someone familiar with McConnell’s thinking how to interpret the senator’s relatively blunt assessment of Trump and the White House’s mistakes on Obamacare repeal. What this is likely about, I’m told, is setting the stage for tax reform—on the Senate’s terms, processes, and guidelines, not the White House’s. After all, McConnell has a narrow majority to deal with. President Trump both failed to mount any kind of public campaign on behalf of Obamacare repeal and actively antagonized the on-the-margin senators McConnell needed to get on board. McConnell’s message to his president, knocked on his heels after a major legislative defeat, is “This time, we’ll do it my way.”

But Trump couldn’t care less about McConnell’s stand. That was apparent when White House social media director Dan Scavino tweeted from his private account Wednesday morning that McConnell was giving “more excuses” and that he “must have needed another 4 years—in addition to the 7 years—to repeal and replace Obamacare. . . .” Trump himself echoed Scavino with a Wednesday afternoon tweet. “Senator Mitch McConnell said I had “excessive expectations,” but I don’t think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?”

Trump has been building the case against his fellow Republicans for some time, but it came to a head late last month as Obamacare repeal began its path in the Senate. “Republicans in the Senate will NEVER win if they don’t go to a 51 vote majority NOW. They look like fools and are just wasting time,” he tweeted on July 29. “If the Senate Democrats ever got the chance, they would switch to a 51 majority vote in first minute. They are laughing at R’s. MAKE CHANGE!” Then, a few days later, he blamed the “all-time & very dangerous low” relations with Russia on Congress, “the same people that can’t even give us HCare!”

Trump’s short-term target was the filibuster and its most important defender, Mitch McConnell. But the beginnings of the broader argument against the GOP are all right there, in 140 characters at a time. Republicans are fools, they’re impotent, and everyone’s laughing at them.

There are outside voices already making Trump’s case. Sean Hannity called McConnell a “WEAK, SPINELESS leader who does not keep his word” and suggested the majority leader needs to retire. Lou Dobbs said McConnell “doesn’t give a damn about this president’s agenda” and called on Republicans to “ditch Mitch.”

Senate Republicans won’t “ditch Mitch” anytime soon, just as they won’t be bullied into supporting the agenda of a president with 30-something-percent approval ratings if it can’t find consensus. That’s because all of them had political careers long before Trump became a serious force within the party. They figure, with some reason, that they’ll have careers or legacies long after Trump has left the White House. But if Republicans have increasingly little incentive to tolerate Trump, he may make the same calculation about the GOP, the party’s conservative policy agenda, and the conservative movement as a whole.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the unelected party infrastructure is aligning itself more with Trump. The Republican National Committee chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, has taken to chastising elected Republicans critical of Trump, such as Jeff Flake, by pointing to those GOP candidates who lost in 2016 after publicly distancing themselves from the presidential nominee. “There is a cautionary tale there because voters want you to support the president in his agenda,” McDaniel said this week. And McDaniel’s latest hire, as national spokesperson for the RNC? Former CNN contributor and reliably pro-Trump talking head Kayleigh McEnany.

Speaking of the continued Trumpification of the GOP infrastructure, it’s worth noting that a PAC supporting Jeff Flake’s rival in next year’s Arizona Senate GOP primary just received a big donation from the conservative, and increasingly pro-Trump, donor Robert Mercer.

Trump Tweet of the Day

Friend of and frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD Adam White has a review in the Wall Street Journal of Josh Chafetz’s new book on Congress’s underappreciated powers under the U.S. Constitution.

“Perhaps the surest sign of Congress’s decline is that we now need a book-length explanation of what powers the House and Senate actually have,” White writes. “In Congress’s Constitution, Josh Chafetz provides a detailed, scholarly history of many of Congress’s powers, tracing the roots of Congress’s modern powers back to their English origins.”

Read the whole thing here.

Millennial Must-Read—“The Story of the DuckTales Theme, History’s Catchiest Single Minute of Music,” Vanity Fair, August 9, 2017.

2017 Watch—A new poll of this fall’s governor’s race in Virginia shows Democrat Ralph Northam with a small but significant 6-point lead over Republican Ed Gillespie. The poll from Quinnipiac University found Northam with 44 percent support to Gillespie’s 38 percent.

Libertarian party candidate Cliff Hydra has 4 percent support. Libertarian candidates tend to underperform in statewide races in Virginia, for what it’s worth.

All three candidates are running to succeed Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who is in his final year of his single-term-limited tenure as Virginia governor.

Song of the Day—“Way Down In the Hole” by the Blind Boys of Alabama.