A lot of conservatives with big platforms were very, very angry at Trump this week.
If the government shuts down tonight over President Donald Trump’s demand for $5 billion for a border wall, feel free to blame conservative punditry.
This week Ann Coulter described Trump as a gutless “sociopath” who, without a border wall, “will just have been a joke presidency who scammed the American people.”
Radio host Rush Limbaugh said on his show Wednesday that without the $5 billion, any signing of a budget stop gap would show “Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything.”
Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said that without wall funding, “the swamp wins,” adding that Trump will “look like a loser” without wall funding and stating, “This is worth shutting down” the government.
There’s no way around it: A lot of people on the right are very upset with Trump (and each other) right now. And they’re taking it out on the president — on his favorite television network, on talk radio, on podcasts, and online — and it’s worked to put the pressure on him. Trump has abruptly changed course to demand $5 billion for a border wall (a demand the Senate isn’t likely to give in to). And now the government is facing a “very long” shutdown.
In the words of Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), referring to Coulter and Limbaugh, “We have two talk-radio show hosts who basically influenced the president, and we’re in a shutdown mode. It’s just—that’s tyranny, isn’t it?”
.. Republican voters are still solidly behind Trump (his approval rating among Republicans polled by Gallup is at 86 percent). But unlike some portions of Trump’s base, the voices of the party who supported Trump because of what he could do as president rather than who he is as president are deeply displeased with him.
Some on the right are upset about the administration’s decision to pull out of Syria and, perhaps, Afghanistan — and are very worried by news of James Mattis’s resignation from his role as defense secretary.
Women Who Love Trump
His approval among female Republicans is 93%—higher than among GOP men.
They aren’t just women. They are self-identified Republican women. No one likes Mr. Trump more than Republican women do. This parallel truth about women in the electorate jumped out from the data in the Dec. 17 Fox News Poll, a random national sample of registered voters.
.. Mr. Trump’s overall approval rating in the Fox poll is 46%. His approval among Republican women is 93%—8 points beyond his approval among GOP men. Republican women outrun men in their support for Mr. Trump on virtually every issue Fox polled.
The president should be especially happy with the love he’s getting on the great hate of his life—the Russia-collusion investigation. The percentage of GOP women who think the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016 is a mere 12%. The Republican men in their lives buy the collusion narrative at a 20% rate.
.. The percentage of the Fox sample self-identifying as Republican women is 17%. Mainly, the strength of their belief stands as a benchmark of Trump support. If they ever go wobbly on Mr. Trump in any significant way, he’s done.
.. I will argue until the final day that if Twitter didn’t exist, Mr. Trump would be having a politically successful presidency. The Trump tweets and counterattacks keep the country in a state of perpetual agitation. That artificially created anxiety may net out as a steady downdraft on the Trump presidency.
.. No other potential Democratic candidate registers a heartbeat among these women, with one exception—Joe Biden, with what I’d call a nonnegative rating of 41%.
Meet the Next Ted Cruz
In November, Chip Roy is likely to be elected to Congress. Top House Republicans worry that he’ll be to the right of the Freedom Caucus.
When Chip Roy was a top staffer for Ted Cruz, he was an architect of the Texas senator’s strategy to shut down the government over Obamacare.
.. process does matter. That’s kind of what I’m getting at. We ought to think about this differently. We shouldn’t be thinking about it in terms of all of the discussions that happen behind closed doors and then come together and say, “OK.” The leadership drops the bill and says, “This is the bill.”.. Roy: We should all be extremely critical and circumspect of anybody running for office. That’s our job as Americans. Whether it’s Ted Cruz, whether it’s Donald Trump, whether it’s somebody in the Congress, whether it’s me, we should all be looking at it through the eye of,
- “Are you doing what you said you would do?
- Are you representing me the way I think you should?
- Are you following the Constitution?”
I was viewing it through that lens, and I think it was reasonable for Americans to go, “Well, wait a minute. Who are you and what are you about?” I knew what Senator Cruz was about. I had prayed alongside him. I had worked side by side with him. I knew where he was..
.. I don’t always agree with him on every way he tweets or everything he says, but if you look through what we’ve accomplished, it is truly hard to be critical from a conservative perspective on a lot of fronts. I’d like [the Trump administration] to be better on spending, but I really think that if you look through what we’ve accomplished on regulatory relief, on tax relief, on judges, on the embassy in Jerusalem, on taking on the swamp and truly changing the game in Washington from that perspective, it’s hard to argue with those results, even if I might have an issue with one or two things. You don’t agree with everybody, as they say.
.. One thing you talk about in your campaign is this idea of a “deep state” that is in some sense acting as a shadow government—unchecked and out of control. It’s interesting because often, the most damaging leaks to President Trump have come from within his West Wing from folks close to him. When you talk about the deep state, what exactly do you mean and what is your real concern?
.. If, for example, Secretary [Betsy] DeVos at the Department of Education wants to try to push school choice, and there’s some bureaucrat that she’s hired who is a conservative school-choice advocate, if a future president comes in and a secretary of Education doesn’t want to advance that policy, that policy shouldn’t be being advanced by an unelected person deep within the Department of Education. This is why I believe a lot of that needs to be thinned out so that we don’t have those issues. Why do we have these massive entities up there that are largely unchecked?
.. You’ve brought us full circle from talking about Rick Perry and his “oops” moment. If you were king for a day, would you eliminate any of these departments or agencies?
Roy: I think so, but it’s kind of like talking about the wall. I don’t want to refer to it as metaphorical as much as I just want the power eliminated and the number of people making these decisions unchecked reduced. I want spending reduced on all these things. The number of agencies is almost academic. Fine, eliminate one of them. Could you take some of the pieces of the Department of Energy, with all due respect to my former boss who is currently the secretary, and put it at the Department of Defense because it’s nuclear-related? It’s like a corporate reorganization. You can reorganize all you want; the question is where’s the decision-making occurring? How many bureaucrats are there doing it? How much of that should be being done in Washington or not?