President Trump will return on Saturday after more than a week overseas to a series of controversies and governing challenges that even his mostly praised performance abroad could not shake.
From yet another legal setback in the case against his travel ban to leaked details about his conversation with the Filipino president, Trump will confront several problems that arose during his eight-day foreign trip when he touches down in Washington. And although the discipline he displayed on his overseas tour contained existing controversies and prevented the administration from encountering new ones, intrigue over an FBI investigation involving his associates remained high in Trump’s absence.
“I think this trip so far has been excellent,” Sen. John McCain, one of Trump’s harshest Republican critics, said after the president visited Saudi Arabia on the first leg of his journey.
Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said this week that Trump’s conduct during the trip has been “extremely helpful” to Republicans who want to move out from under the shadow of the White House’s recent turmoil.
“I think there are very few Republicans who aren’t going to be pleased with the president’s performance,” Cole said. “I think it’s been exceptional. … We’ll just let him keep going.”
“I saw with great pleasure that he stayed on script,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
Trump’s actions abroad — from reassuring Arab allies of U.S. commitments to pressuring NATO members to meet their defense obligations — have drawn praise from many foreign policy experts and leaders who had questioned whether the unconventional president could handle himself in a diplomatic setting.
But the storm surrounding the Trump administration raged on at home while the president notched successes abroad.
In Trump’s absence, the White House faced new wrinkles in the Russian investigation when former CIA Director John Brennan testified before the House Intelligence Committee and described “contacts and interactions” between Trump campaign associates and Russians that had troubled him. Even though Brennan’s testimony provided no new information and made clear that, at the time of his departure from government, the intelligence community did not have evidence to suggest collusion occurred, critics seized on the testimony as further proof of Russian connections.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on Thursday to sustain the block on Trump’s executive order suspending immigration from several Middle Eastern countries — what Democrats have referred to as a “Muslim ban” — dealt another blow to the administration. That policy quickly became a morass for Trump after he attempted to enact it first through a broad executive order and then through a narrower one. Courts have consistently blocked both.
Leaked portions of Trump’s conversation with Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte further complicated the political situation to which Trump will return on Saturday. Although Duterte has earned widespread condemnation from the international community for extrajudicial killings of suspected drug addicts, Trump reportedly praised him for doing an “unbelievable job” on eradicating his country’s drug problem.
On the legislative front, Trump’s efforts to shepherd a healthcare bill through Congress hit a snag when the Congressional Budget Office predicted on Wednesday that the House-passed version of Obamacare reform legislation would leave millions more people uninsured than the current system would if left intact.
And Trump’s fellow Republicans were forced into an even more uncomfortable position this week after the GOP candidate in a Montana House race violently shoved a reporter to the ground in order to avoid a question about the CBO score. Critics questioned whether Trump’s hostility toward the media had created the conditions for an assault on a journalist, although there is no evidence to support that theory.
Despite the challenges awaiting Trump in Washington, his string of successes abroad has likely stabilized a White House that was in a tailspin just before he took off for Riyadh. Trump avoided his usual outlet for controversial statements — Twitter — and stuck to a largely traditional script as he reclaimed his presidential image in meetings with foreign leaders and in cultural engagements. By doing so, he helped the administration beat back characterizations of total chaos, although he will return on Saturday to many of the same controversies that plagued his team before he left.
