The morning after one of the busiest primary election days of the year, Donald Trump chatted briefly with reporters and took aim at one of his own party’s members of Congress. Referring to Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania (while also referring to himself in third person), the president said, “He likes voting against Trump. You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.”
Trump didn’t elaborate on what that meant, but he didn’t have to. Over the course of just two weeks, the president orchestrated the defeats of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and several Republican state senators in Indiana who refused to go along with a White House-backed gerrymandering scheme. The back-to-back-to-back results have not only left Trump with renewed confidence about his political power, they have also led to the kind of message he seemed eager to tout on Wednesday morning: GOP officials who fail to obey his demands should expect to lose.
Whether the president appreciates this or not, however, his momentum is a mirage. He’s no better off now than he was two weeks ago.
There’s no denying the recent success of his revenge tour. Trump identified members of his party whom he deemed insufficiently loyal; he and his political operation set out to end their careers; and those efforts proved successful. In the process, the political world was confronted with fresh evidence of a president who continues to hold sway with much of the Republican Party’s base.
But it’s hard not to notice the applicable limits of Trump’s influence. Just in recent days, we’ve seen:
- several congressional Republicans express public discomfort with the president’s $1.7 billion fund (with one GOP senator going so far as to label it a “slush fund”);
- several congressional Republicans express opposition to public funding for his ballroom vanity project;
- several congressional Republicans voice public disagreement with Trump after his endorsement in Texas’ Senate primary;
- and growing Republican support for limiting Trump’s war powers in Iran.
If the president were some kind of political colossus, inspiring fear in his skeptics, none of this would have happened. But it did. Indeed, the developments dovetail with GOP lawmakers also ignoring Trump’s demands on everything from the SAVE Act to the gas tax, the future of the filibuster to the job security of the Senate parliamentarian.
It’s best not to overstate matters, and I’ll gladly concede most congressional Republicans still act like mindless presidential employees who left their free will in the Oval Office. But that doesn’t change the fact that the president is racking up a series of legislative defeats, even as he racks up a series of primary wins.
This, coupled with his awful poll numbers and a growing Democratic advantage on the generic ballot, leave little doubt that reports of Trump’s upswing have been greatly exaggerated.
The post Trump dispatched some Republican foes, but his momentum is still a mirage appeared first on MS NOW.
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