Tennessee senator says the president should stay out of negotiations over tax plan, prompting Twitter rebuke
Mr. Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said the president should stay out of negotiations over the tax-overhaul effort. Mr. Corker has played a key role in the tax bill so far, cutting a crucial deal with Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) on the Senate’s budget, allowing for up to $1.5 trillion in tax cuts over a decade.
.. “I would just like him to leave it to the professionals for a while, and see if we can do something that’s constructive,” Mr. Corker said ..
Mr. Trump responded .. where he called Mr. Corker a “lightweight,” referred to him as “liddle’ Bob Corker,” said the two-term senator “couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”
.. “I think that he’s proven himself unable to rise to the occasion. I think many of us, me included, have tried to…I’ve intervened, I’ve had private dinner. I’ve been with him on multiple occasions to try to create some kind of aspirational approach, if you will, to the way that he conducts himself. But I don’t think that that’s possible, and he’s obviously not going to rise to the occasion as president.”
.. Many Republicans now believe coming up short on a tax-code rewrite would cost them control of the House majority, and Mr. Corker’s comments risk undermining it.
What Bob Corker Sees in Trump
His concerns are widely shared. The senator deserves credit for going on the record with them.
.. but of course they understand the volatility that we are dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes from people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
Among them are Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Chief of Staff John Kelly : “As long as there’s people like that around him who are able to talk him down, you know, when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision is made. I think we’ll be fine.” He said of the president: “Sometimes I feel like he’s on a reality show of some kind, you know, when he’s talking about these big foreign policy issues. And, you know, he doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.”
.. The Los Angeles Times had a story on Mr. Trump’s reaction to Mr. Kelly’s efforts at imposing order on the White House: “The president by many accounts has bristled at the restrictions.” The article quotes allies of the president describing him as “increasingly unwilling to be managed, even just a little.” A person close to the White House claimed Messrs. Kelly and Trump had recently engaged in “shouting matches.” In the Washington Post, Anne Gearan described the president as “livid” this summer when discussing options for the Iran nuclear deal with advisers. He was “incensed” by the arguments of Mr. Tillerson and others.
.. An adviser said of Trump, “He’s lost a step... former chief strategist Steve Bannon warned the president the great risk to his presidency isn’t impeachment but the 25th Amendment, under which the cabinet can vote to remove a president temporarily for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”There are a few things to say about all this. First, when a theme like this keeps coming up, something’s going on. A lot of people appear to be questioning in a new way, or at least talking about, the president’s judgment, maturity and emotional solidity. We’ll be hearing more about this subject, not less, as time goes by.
.. If you work in the White House or the administration and see what Mr. Corker sees, and what unnamed sources say they see, this is the time to speak on the record, and take the credit or the blows.
Right and Left React to Senator Bob Corker’s Rebuke of Trump
“He has calibrated his retirement announcement to encourage speculation about a 2020 bid, for which his recent comments are clearly useful in positioning him as an establishment primary challenge to Trump. What is it, exactly, that anyone should respect here?”
.. Republicans must honestly face the president’s mental health, admit that the president often tells falsehoods and recognize that the real power lies in the Senate — not with the executive branch.
.. “That Corker is the only Republican openly remarking on the irresponsibility of this behavior is, frankly, an indictment of the rest of the party.”
Mr. Shepp does not think that the president’s critics should give Mr. Corker and others like him too much credit. “They had enough evidence to know exactly what kind of erratic person they were hitching their wagons to last year, and went ahead and endorsed him anyway,” he writes.
.. “Corker is saying out loud what I hear privately from sources throughout the military and the U.S. government, and from both foreign ambassadors and visiting foreign diplomats.”
.. Perhaps he can subpoena executive branch witnesses, or draft legislation “about the procedure, the grounds, and the justifications before the U.S. commits troops to war.”
.. After Mr. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, many pundits ascribed a strategic genius to him and his team that everyone missed. The shorthand for this was saying that he was playing three-dimensional chess while everyone else was playing a more traditional game. According to Mr. Cillizza, however, this latest spat between the president and the senator shows that there is really no strategy at play. Mr. Trump, if he cared about getting tax reform accomplished, Mr. Cillizza writes, would not attack an important and respected member of the Senate. “Hitting everyone who hits you, of course, isn’t a strategy. It’s a tactic. And, not a very good one at that.”
.. “For perhaps the Republican senator with the strongest reputation on foreign affairs to say that the president was risking ‘World War III’ isn’t just talk; in politics, talk often is action.”
For Trump, the Reality Show Has Never Ended
Mr. Trump’s West Wing has always seemed to be the crossroads between cutthroat politics and television drama, presided over by a seasoned showman who has made a career of keeping the audience engaged and coming back for more. Obsessed by ratings and always on the hunt for new story lines, Mr. Trump leaves the characters on edge, none of them ever really certain whether they might soon be voted off the island.
“Absolutely, I see those techniques playing out,” said Laurie Ouellette, a communications professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied reality television extensively. “Reality TV is known for its humiliation tactics and its aggressive showmanship and also the idea that either you’re in or you’re out, with momentum building to the final decision on who stays and who goes.”
.. dismissed Mr. Corker on Tuesday by mocking his height and suggesting he had somehow been conned. “The Failing @nytimes set Liddle’ Bob Corker up by recording his conversation,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Was made to sound a fool, and that’s what I am dealing with!”
.. Mr. Trump later denied that he had demeaned his secretary of state. “I didn’t undercut anybody. I don’t believe in undercutting people,” he told reporters, in a comment that must have amused the many people he has undercut since taking office.
.. “With Jemele Hill at the mike, it is no wonder ESPN ratings have ‘tanked,’ in fact, tanked so badly it is the talk of the industry!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.
.. Andy Cohen, the creator of the “Real Housewives” reality television show franchise, found that too rich. “This is actually happening,” he wrote on Twitter. “All the wives are fighting. Even I AM SPEECHLESS.”
.. This has exceeded what would have been allowed on ‘The Apprentice,’” she said. “It’s almost a magnification. It’s like reality TV unleashed. Yes, he was good at it, but I always felt like he had to be reined in in order not to mess up the formula. Here, he doesn’t have that same sort of constraint.”