President Trump has increasingly moved the national conversation toward immigration by working to send National Guard troops to border states, setting up a conundrum for congressional Republicans who were hoping to run on the tax cuts they successfully passed this year.
Trump’s renewed immigration push could move vulnerable GOP lawmakers off the script that Republican groups have already spent millions of dollars writing through ad campaigns touting the benefits of tax reform. And it could put centrist Republicans in a difficult position if Trump demands his party revisit controversial restrictions on legal immigration while its members are trying to hold onto suburban districts that contain energized Democratic constituents.
“This presents challenges for congressional Republicans. They don’t defy political gravity on immigration the same way Trump does,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to Mitt Romney. “In these suburban swing districts that make or break majorities in the House, you’d much rather be fighting on economic turf than immigration.”
Many of Trump’s senior aides and allies have spent months touting tax reform as the foundation of the GOP’s midterm strategy. Republicans balked last month when Trump began to threaten various countries with tariffs on a wide variety of imports due to the risk those measures posed to the economic gains the tax bill has notched since its passage late last year.
“I will never let anything overshadow tax cuts,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, told reporters at the White House on Friday. “With respect to the Trump administration, its political success will rise and fall with the economy.”
But the president has spent the past week announcing plans to send National Guard troops to the border and teasing a legislative package his aides say will take aim at “loopholes” in the immigration system.
Senior administration officials promised the contentious issue — which has already stalled once in Congress this year — would be front and center on Capitol Hill by the time midterm season begins in earnest.
“In the spring, summer, the issue of border security is probably going to be one of the biggest issues on Congress’s plate,” one official said on Wednesday. “That level of attention is going to make it very possible to pass border security legislation.”
Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist, said Trump’s push to place troops along the southern border and his attention to the problems posed by illegal immigration could offer Republican voters the kind of rallying cry that the antiseptic issue of tax reform can’t provide.
“GOP voters are complacent, and there is a feeling that the tax bill won’t help us hold the House,” O’Connell said. “You need more than the bill to hold the House.”
Besides giving voters a visual representation of Trump’s commitment to border security, the deployment of troops to the border could have the added benefit of “drawing a contrast” between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of immigration, O’Connell argued.
Trump should “remind [voters] how radically liberal the Democratic Party is” when it comes to immigration, he added.
Other Republicans have worried a heavy focus on immigration this year could imperil Republicans who are already struggling to distance themselves from Trump’s most incendiary comments about immigrants.
Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former senior adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., suggested endangered GOP candidates may not feel comfortable framing their races on Trump’s terms.
“Republicans in tough swing districts want to talk about the economy and make the election about tax cuts,” Conant said. “Trump would rather feed red meat to his base.”
Trump literally threw his prepared remarks on tax reform into the air Thursday after spending an event the White House had billed as a tax-themed roundtable talking about nearly everything but taxes. His diatribes on illegal immigration, the border wall, and voter fraud conspiracies included an airing of his frustration with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., for resisting the Trump agenda despite facing a difficult re-election fight in the fall.
The White House said this week that administration officials hope to see Congress make progress on a stand-alone bill that addresses immigration issues like asylum and catch and release, despite lawmakers’ failure to advance similar measures even when they were attached to a popular President Barack Obama-era program that provides protections to young, undocumented immigrants.
Madden said Trump’s desire to shine a spotlight on immigration will likely create tensions with GOP leaders who want candidates to spend their time reminding voters who put more money in their paychecks.
“A methodical focus on tax reform, and the broader issue of economic optimism, requires a level of message discipline that Trump just might not have. He’s so reactive to the coverage of immigration on his favorite cable news channels and constantly searching for a positive feedback loop from his base,” Madden said. “Because of that, the immigration issue and the fierce debates that come with it are irresistible to him.”
