More bad news for congressional Republicans coming out of the White House Tuesday: Politico reports that Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff is whipping up donors to “purge” GOP lawmakers who don’t rally behind the president’s legislative agenda.
“Just imagine the possibilities of what can happen if our entire party unifies behind him,” Nick Ayers told a group of wealthy GOP donors Tuesday morning. “If—and this sounds crass—we can purge the handful of people who continue to work to defeat him.”
Ayers warned that Republicans are “on track to get shellacked” in the 2018 midterm elections. He advised donors to threaten sitting congressmen that “we’re recruiting opponents, we’re maxing out to their campaigns, and we’re funding super PACs to defeat all of you” if they fail to pass tax reform by the end of the year.
“Look, if we’re going to be in the minority again, we might as well have a minority who are with us as opposed to the minority who helped us become a minority,” Ayers said.
The White House declined to comment on whether Pence shared Ayers’s views about the politics of the 2018 midterms—though they seem to be in concert with the outside political operation supporting President Trump.
Trump’s political team is looking to boost at least one primary challenger to a sitting, anti-Trump Republican, Senator Jeff Flake, next year. And the president himself has been quite vocal in his frustration with GOP leadership in Congress, particularly Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Pence, on the other hand, has pretty much stayed out of Trump’s tiffs with Capitol Hill Republicans. That’s why Ayers’s off-the-record comments are so jarring.
There’s one reason for PenceWorld to be upset with the GOP establishment in Washington: Luther Strange. The vice president flew down to Alabama to support the Republican senator, who had McConnell’s strong backing in his runoff primary. Strange lost last week’s runoff to Roy Moore, an embarrassment to Pence as much as it was to Trump, who also endorsed Strange.
Mark It Down—“The honest answer is, I’m not sure we’re on track to do that.” —Nick Ayers, Vice President Pence’s chief of staff, on the likelihood of passing tax reform, October 3, 2017.
After President Trump picked a Twitter fight with Puerto Rican officials last week, his trip to the hurricane-wracked island territory on Tuesday was supposed to be a peacemaking mission: surveying the damage from Maria and pledging his administration’s continued sympathy and support.
Instead, Trump veered off-script in a speech at Luis Muñiz Air National Guard Base, downplaying the devastation, bragging about his administration’s hurricane response, and inviting Puerto Rican officials to do the same, while insisting that “it’s not about me.”
“Your governor, who I didn’t know, I heard very good things about him. He’s not even from my party, and he started right at the beginning appreciating what we did,” Trump said. “This governor did not play politics. He didn’t play it at all. He was saying it like it was, and he was giving us the highest grades.”
Trump acknowledged the devastation on the island—more than half of the residents are still without clean water—only in broad platitudes and made a head-scratching comparison to the “real catastrophe” of Hurricane Katrina.
“If you look at the—every death is a horror,” Trump said. “But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with a storm that was just totally overpowering . . . You can be very proud. Everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”
Congress Watch—This is an odd one. If his former mistress is to be believed, Republican congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania isn’t exactly a paragon of the pro-life virtues he espouses. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Shannon Edwards texted Murphy in January after the eight-term congressman posted a statement about the March for Life on his official Facebook page.
“And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,” Edwards said in the text. The Post-Gazette reports that a message back from Murphy’s cell phone number read: “I get what you say about my March for life messages. I’ve never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don’t write any more. I will.”
The newspaper also obtained a 6-page memo Murphy’s chief of staff sent to the Republican about his “abusive” conduct toward his congressional staff.
Feature of the Day—A gripping and outrageous story from Nevada about the elderly guardian racket that’s squeezing senior citizens for their money and depriving them of their freedom. The New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv delivers a must-read. Here’s an excerpt:
I can’t imagine the first lady will be too pleased with a new art installation coming the National Mall and in view from the White House. “Activists are working to bring a steel sculpture of a 45-foot-tall nude woman to Washington, where she will temporarily face the White House from a perch on the National Mall,” reports the New York Times. “Transporting the sculpture from its home in San Francisco will be an undertaking, but its artist, Marco Cochrane, said he saw it as an opportunity to start a conversation about violence against women.”
The cost of the move, the Times reports, is $90,000.
Song of the Day—“Against the Wind” by Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band.
