Below the leadership level, Republicans are defying Trump more often, and McConnell and Ryan aren’t always standing in their way. You can see this defiance in the bipartisan Senate investigation of the Russia scandal. You can see it in the deal on Russian sanctions. And you can see it in the Senate’s failure, so far at least, to pass a health care bill.
.. During Watergate, as the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein has noted, most Republicans stood by Richard Nixon until almost the bitter end.
.. “The current congressional G.O.P. seems less supportive and more constraining of the Potus than basically any in history,” Glassman wrote to me, “save the unique circumstances of Andrew Johnson (who wasn’t really a Republican) and John Tyler (who bucked his party aggressively), neither of whom were elected.”
.. Many of today’s Republicans avoid going on television as Trump surrogates. They mock him off the record, and increasingly on therecord, too. In recent weeks, eight senators have publicly stood in the way of a health care bill. Republican senators are also helping to conduct an investigation of Trump’s campaign and have backed the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
One reason is that they don’t fear Trump. About 90 percent of Republican House members won a larger vote share in their district last year than Trump did
.. In the months ahead, unfortunately, that level of resistance is unlikely to be sufficient. Trump has made clear that he isn’t finished trying to take health insurance away from millions of people or trying to hide the truth about his Russia ties. “The constitutional crisis won’t be if Trump fires Mueller,” as the A.C.L.U.’s Kate Oh put it. “The constitutional crisis is if Congress takes no real action in response.”
Why some inside the White House see Trump’s media feud as ‘winning’
To President Trump, no place is more comfortable than the middle of a fight.
.. This week had it all: Vicious tweets, nasty nicknames, an entrenched foe in the mainstream media and the reprisal by Trump of one of his favorite roles — the victim.
.. For Trump and his legions of loyalists, the media has become a shared enemy.
“They like him, they believe in him, they have not to any large degree been shaken from him, and the more the media attacks him, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the side of the Trump supporters who fervently believe the media treat him unfairly,” said Tony Fabrizio, the chief pollster for Trump’s campaign. “It’s like, ‘Beat me with that sword some more!’ ”
.. Fabrizio estimated that just a quarter of Americans know who Brzezinski is and predicted that conservatives would instinctively side with Trump, as they did when he attacked then-Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly and other media personalities during last year’s campaign.
“Everybody inside the Beltway knows who she is, but the average working guy doesn’t know who she is,” Fabrizio said of Brzezinski.
.. Certainly a big part of the success the president had last year was this sweeping, counterculture pushback against information being dictated to the American people.”
.. Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser and longtime confidant, likened Trump’s attacks on the media to the strategy employed by former president Richard M. Nixon to discredit organizations such as The Post that were breaking stories on the Watergate investigation.
“The difference is Nixon had no Internet-based alternative media [that] would aggressively cover his side of the argument,”
.. West Wing officials viewed CNN’s mistake as a public vindication that the Russia investigation — and its ensuing media coverage — is simply a “witch hunt,”
Who in the White House Will Turn Against Donald Trump?
this concocted dumb show of loyalty only served to suggest how unsustainable it all is.
.. The reason that this White House staff is so leaky, so prepared to express private anxiety and contempt, even while parading obeisance for the cameras, is that the President himself has so far been incapable of garnering its discretion or respect. Trump has made it plain that he is capable of turning his confused fury against anyone in his circle at any time.
.. blamed the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, for the legal imbroglio that Trump himself has created.
.. The President has fired a few aides, he has made known his disdain and disappointment at many others, and he will, undoubtedly, turn against more.
Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Sean Spicer–––who has not yet felt the lash?
.. Trump’s egotism, his demand for one-way loyalty, and his incapacity to assume responsibility for his own untruths and mistakes were, his biographers make plain, his pattern in business and have proved to be his pattern as President.
.. Veteran Washington reporters tell me that they have never experienced this kind of anxiety, regret, and sense of imminent personal doom among White House staffers
.. by retailing information anonymously they will be able to live with themselves after serving a President who has proved so disconnected from the truth and reality.
.. Pat, who on vacations resided separately from the President.
.. making sure that Henry Kissinger was no longer seated at state dinners next to the most attractive woman at the occasion.
.. Nixon, who barely acknowledged, much less touched, his own wife in public, resented Kissinger’s public, and well-cultivated, image as a Washington sex symbol.
.. Incident after incident revealed Nixon’s distaste for his fellow human beings, his racism and anti-Semitism, his overpowering personal suspicions, and his sad longings. Nixon, the most anti-social of men
.. It was all for the sake of “history,” Nixon said.
.. Kennedy and Johnson had taped selectively, but Nixon wanted it all for the record––his own records––but no one was to know.
.. there is little evidence that the show of bogus loyalty performed last week has any basis in real life.
.. Will Bannon, Spicer, Conway, Sessions, Kushner, and many others who have been battered in one way or another by Trump, keep their counsel? Will all of them risk their futures to protect someone whose focus is on himself alone and the rest be damned? Will none of them conclude that they are working for a President whose honesty is on a par with his loyalty to others?
Five Reasons the Comey Affair Is Worse Than Watergate
A journalist who covered Nixon’s fall 45 years ago explains why the current challenge to America may be more severe—and the democratic system less capable of handling it.
the worst version of what Nixon and his allies were attempting to do—namely, to find incriminating or embarrassing information about political adversaries ranging from Democratic Party Chairman Lawrence O’Brien to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg—was not as bad as what came afterward.
.. attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election
.. as part of a larger strategy that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
.. meant to destroy trust in democracy
.. But even in his stonewalling, Nixon paid lip service to the concepts of due process and check and balances.
.. Stennis compromise
.. he wanted to act as if he was doing so while sticking to some recognizable rules.
.. Nothing Donald Trump has done, on the campaign trail or in office, has expressed awareness of, or respect for, established rules.