‘Like a pinball machine’: Lawmakers struggle to negotiate with an erratic Trump
Heading into a new week, lawmakers still have no sense of what Trump truly wants on guns and other key agenda items — a pattern that leaders of both parties say has hindered their ability to move forward on knotty issues that could benefit from presidential leadership.
.. After more than a year of the Trump presidency, members of Congress have learned to brace themselves for unpredictable, confusing and often contradictory positions from the commander in chief on issues ranging from health care to immigration to gun rights.
.. With cameras rolling, he pledged to sign any compromise lawmakers could craft, only to reject the outcome days later. Trump’s aides ultimately sent to Congress a lengthy wish list of hard-line immigration ideas Democrats would never support.
.. “I’m sorry to say, I found the president to be totally unreliable when it came to the DACA issue,” said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat whose efforts to craft an immigration deal with Trump foundered. “It really suggests that his effectiveness is compromised as long as his word is unreliable.”
.. “Conceptually, he still supports raising the age to 21,” Sanders said. “But he also knows there’s not a lot of broad support for that.”
.. Sanders also stressed that Trump does not necessarily support “universal” background checks, despite his use of that word previously. “Universal” can mean different things to different people, she said.
.. White House officials and some Trump boosters argue that there’s a method behind what strikes some as madness: sparking conversation among lawmakers, even if it never ends up giving Congress much direction.
.. Others are less charitable, saying that Trump’s flexibility stems from a lack of deeply rooted convictions on many issues.
.. “He’s going with the television headlines from day to day instead of following a policy strategy,” said one Republican consultant close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a more candid assessment. “When he sees backlash from Republican lawmakers and others, he shifts his position and then tries to shift the topic to something else.”
.. “You can’t rely on Donald Trump. He is an unreliable narrator of his own story,” Wilson said. “He works off his urges and impulses and not any sort of philosophical framework.”
.. “The president’s sort of lack of policy foundation allows him to flow where he thinks where the country is going.”
.. GOP consultant Doug Heye said Trump should be “uniquely situated” to broker deals on issues such as immigration and guns, given his previous career as a New York real estate developer and the trust his staunchest supporters place in him.
“His base trusts him in a way they wouldn’t with a President Rubio or a President Walker,” Heye said, referring to two of Trump’s 2016 Republican primary rivals, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
.. On Sunday, senators from both parties implored Trump to take a leading role in pushing for gun-control legislation, arguing that his political cover is vital to passing a bill.