The president genuinely respects the incoming speaker, and needs her if he’s going to get anything done in the next two years. But the government shutdown is about to test his restraint.
Though she, too, has avoided public name-calling, it’s clear Pelosi doesn’t feel the same admiration for Trump. After a recent meeting at the White House, Pelosi returned to the Hill and questioned his manhood before a room full of House Democrats. She likened negotiating with him to getting sprayed by a skunk, and expressed exasperation that he is even president.
Pelosi’s allies say she doesn’t trust him, pointing to
- a tentative immigration compromise they reached in 2017 that she believes Trump backed out of. She’s noticed how
- he’s blamed Republican congressional leaders when his base decries spending bills, and
- upended their legislative plans with surprise tweets.
“Speaker Pelosi has a history of bipartisan accomplishments. … But the test for this president is figuring where he stands on issues from one day to the next,” said Nadeam Elshami, Pelosi’s former chief of staff.
Pelosi is also uncomfortable with Trump’s handling of facts — a big obstacle, in her mind, to cutting deals with him — and has occasionally called him out. During their first meeting after his inauguration, when Trump opened the gathering by bragging that he’d won more votes than Hillary Clinton, Pelosi was the only person in the room to correct him, noting that his statement was false and he’d lost the popular vote.
Since then, Pelosi has tried to correct Trump privately, her allies say. She doesn’t like fighting in public, they added, and it was one of the main reasons she tried, in vain, to end the sparring match over border wall funding that unfolded on TV live from the West Wing last month.
Sources close to Pelosi say she’s willing to work with Trump despite her party’s total rejection of him. Her confidants note that when Pelosi first became speaker in 2007, some Democrats were calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush over the invasion in Iraq. Pelosi ignored them and went on to strike major deals with Bush, including a bank bailout and stimulus package in response to the 2008 financial meltdown.
“They became friends,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a Pelosi confidant. For the incoming speaker, “It’s always about: Can you get things done? There are always going to be different points of view. How do we overcome them to get to a conclusion?”
Pelosi allies say as long as Trump is willing to compromise on Democratic priorities, she’ll work with him, too. But with the shutdown dragging into Pelosi’s takeover on Jan. 3, there’s a serious question about whether the two can make any headway.
On New Year’s Day, Trump and Pelosi exchanged words on Twitter over the shutdown — relatively mild ones, especially by Trump’s standards — in a sign of the tense days and weeks ahead.
“I think the president respects her and wants to work with her … Their personalities would lend themselves to strike deals,” Short said. “But I don’t know if Democrats will allow it. … She’s going to have so many members who will object to any transaction or communication with the president, that it puts her in a tight spot.”
It’s just as unclear whether Trump is willing to risk the wrath of his base by compromising with Pelosi. Just as he did on immigration, promising a “bill of love” to protect Dreamers from deportation, Trump privately told Pelosi after their contentious televised negotiation session that he wants to make a deal with her. Even after news that she’d questioned his masculinity went viral, he called her that afternoon to reiterate: We can work together to avert a shutdown.
But that was more than three weeks ago. The two haven’t spoken since.
The one way Donald Trump might be like George H.W. Bush
The effect of Bush’s 1992 loss on the current GOP cannot be overestimated. The object lesson for the GOP was that neither preparation nor accomplishment mattered as a metric for political success. The two salient facts for Republicans were:
(1) Bush compromised with Democrats to reduce the budget deficit, thereby reversing his pledge not to raise taxes and alienating the GOP base; and
(2) Bush lost in 1992.
Newt Gingrich supplanted Bush as the GOP standard-bearer. This paved the way for political success and policy disasters.
Donald Trump can do one useful thing for the modern GOP: He can lose in 2020. Trump’s control over his party has already wobbled a bit after the midterms. And as CNN’s Harry Enten noted last week, Trump is laying the groundwork for that kind of ignominious failure:
The difference between Trump’s net economic approval rating and net overall approval rating is astonishingly high when put in a historical context. I looked up every single president’s overall and economic net approval ratings right around each midterm since 1978.
No other president has done this much worse overall than his economic ratings would suggest. On average, their overall net approval rating has actually run 17 points better than their economic net approval rating. Trump is running 27 points worse. The only president to come close to Trump’s negative differential was Bill Clinton in 1998. That was when Clinton was getting impeached….
Trump’s tweets, attacks on the media and improvisational style may be fodder for his base, but they don’t seem to be working on the electorate at-large. A Monmouth University poll earlier this year found that the vast majority of Americans said Trump ran a less conventional administration than normal, and by a 21-point margin, they said that was a bad thing.
If Trump loses in 2020, then maybe the modern GOP would start tacking back toward the style of George H.W. Bush and his aspirations for a kinder, gentler nation.
Trump begins making overtures to Democrats amid skepticism it will lead to any deals
President Trump, facing a Congress that will become dramatically more antagonistic toward him in January, has begun courting Democrats who could determine whether his next two years are spent scoring legislative deals or staving off an onslaught of congressional investigations.
Trump’s charm offensive was on display Monday when he hosted Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) at the White House for a meeting that the two men had spent days trying to schedule. Over a lunch of chicken, green beans and mashed potatoes, Manchin preached bipartisanship — urging the president to work with lawmakers on ending a pension crisis affecting tens of thousands of coal miners nationwide, said Jonathan Kott, Manchin’s spokesman.
During the hour-and-a-half lunch, Manchin also suggested that Trump take a look at a comprehensive immigration bill the Senate passed in 2013 as another area of potential cooperation with Democrats — even though Trump has vehemently opposed the legislation and pursued tougher immigration policies while in office. Trump and Manchin were joined at the beginning of the meeting by Vice President Pence and the president’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump.
.. In recent days, Trump has invited the top Democratic congressional leaders to the White House amid a pressing government funding battle and privately told a Democratic senator he would consider legislation to help stem the loss of auto manufacturing jobs in Ohio.
The overtures are a signal that Trump and his White House are at least feeling out whether the self-professed dealmaker can find common ground with Democrats next year even as he faces pressure from Republicans to keep the opposition party at arm’s length.
.. “I’ve seen him when others advise not to make a deal and he moves ahead,” said Marc Short, the former White House legislative affairs director.
But others cautioned that Trump’s bipartisan urges can be episodic and fleeting — a dynamic of which lawmakers and his aides are well aware.
“When he thinks he needs to be bipartisan, he does it for a while,” one adviser said.
.. Trump had requested that Pelosi and Schumer meet with him at the White House this week. Aides said the White House did not specify any agenda, but the meeting has been put off until next week, after memorial services are held for former president George H.W. Bush, who died Friday.
.. In previous interactions with Trump, the two Democratic leaders have shown they can push the president toward their desired policy outcomes — and quickly set the narrative. Last year, Pelosi and Schumer left a White House dinner and eagerly put out word that Trump had agreed to a deal that would combine permanent protections for young undocumented immigrants with border security measures, only to have the administration dispute that any agreement had been reached.
Pelosi and Schumer would often skip the staff and try to meet with Trump, who would welcome a deal and emphatically support one.
“The president would learn the details and then would realize it was a bad deal,” a former administration official said.
Trade is another area that could be ripe for cooperation between Trump and congressional Democrats — leaving GOP leaders increasingly uneasy about Trump’s tendencies.
.. Lighthizer has spoken encouragingly of Pelosi — who has repeatedly bucked presidents, including Barack Obama, on trade — to GOP lawmakers since her views are more likely to align with Trump’s and she could be willing to work with the administration, according to two Republicans briefed on those exchanges.
Last week, Pelosi — joking that the new North American pact “has some kind of gobbledygook name” — said the trade deal “formerly known as Prince” was still a work in progress.
.. Pelosi said. “But what isn’t in it yet is enough enforcement reassurances regarding provisions that relate to workers and to the environment. There also has not been a law passed in Mexico in terms of wages and working conditions in Mexico.”
.. The notion still has plenty of skeptics in the West Wing, with questions over how to pay for new projects. Yet Shahira Knight, Short’s successor as Trump’s main liaison to Capitol Hill, has told one key House Democrat that the president wants to pursue an infrastructure deal and acknowledges that it’ll take real money.
.. The notion still has plenty of skeptics in the West Wing, with questions over how to pay for new projects. Yet Shahira Knight, Short’s successor as Trump’s main liaison to Capitol Hill, has told one key House Democrat that the president wants to pursue an infrastructure deal and acknowledges that it’ll take real money.
The White House outreach has only gone so far — particularly when it concerns committees and lawmakers more likely to be investigating the administration than cutting deals.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Md.), the likely incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has heard “not a word” from the White House as he prepares to lead a panel that plans to scrutinize the administration’s immigration directives and response to natural disasters.
.. Last Wednesday, Trump phoned Sen. Sherrod Brown after the Ohio Democrat requested a call to discuss General Motors’s recent decision to shutter several auto plants, including one in northeastern Ohio. During the call, Brown, who also talks trade with Lighthizer, urged Trump to get behind legislation he drafted that would get rid of tax provisions that could incentivize companies to ship auto manufacturing jobs abroad.
.. Trump said he liked the bill, according to Brown’s retelling, and his office rushed a copy of the legislation over to the White House. But Brown has tried to negotiate with the White House before — notably on the tax legislation last year — only to find that Trump ultimately decided to shun bipartisan dealmaking and go toward a Republican-only approach.
Brown hopes that this time it’s different.
George H.W. Bush represented a different kind of Republicanism
What’s the big deal about thank-you notes that are politically shrewd and reflect the old-fashioned habits of a well-bred patrician?
In fact, those missives of appreciation spoke to qualities that were fundamental to the 41st president of the United States. He was a much shrewder and tougher politician than we remember. He was a patrician, but of a very particular sort, a throwback to a time when elites felt a profound sense of public obligation. Being well-born entailed a commitment to duty and a requirement to live up to certain expectations.
And if his privilege gave him good reason to be a sunny optimist, he shared his cheerfulness with others. Not for him a habit all too common among the wealthy these days of expressing irritation and resentment when others fail to see them as exemplars of greatness and virtue.
.. Bush represented a very different kind of Republicanism. He was a Burkean conservative who saw change and reform as necessary to the work of conserving what he believed to be a fundamentally good society. A fierce partisan when necessary, he refused to see cooperation with political adversaries as a form of ideological treason. As a product of the World War II generation, he did not dismiss government as merely a necessary evil.
.. He cared about deficits in fact and not just in his rhetoric. So he was willing to violate his politically opportunistic 1988 “No new taxes” pledge to get a responsible budget deal two years later.
.. Conservatives never forgave him, although his tax increase was smaller than the one Ronald Reagan signed. Conservatives were willing to forgive their hero almost anything; if the Gipper agreed to raise taxes, it must have been because he had no choice. The right never gave Bush any benefits of the doubt.
.. And it’s worth remembering that when Bush asked Congress to approve the military campaign to reverse Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he did not seek a war vote during the run-up to the 1990 midterm elections. He waited until afterward, thus keeping the war decision out of electoral politics. He showed both resolve and restraint, resisting calls to send U.S. troops to Baghdad after Kuwait was freed from Hussein’s grip. It was a much-contested choice that looks better and better in retrospect.