In demeaning tweets and public statements, Trump blamed McConnell (Ky.), who remains popular among GOP senators, for the party’s inability to muscle through an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act. The president also urged McConnell to “get back to work” on that and other campaign promises, including cutting taxes and spurring new infrastructure spending.
.. Trump associates said the attacks, which began Wednesday night and resumed Thursday, were intended to shore up Trump’s outside-the-Beltway populist credentials and would resonate with core supporters frustrated by a lack of progress in Washington.
.. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), a Trump adviser, said on Fox News Channel that the president bears some responsibility for the Republican failure on the health-care legislation.
.. Even some Republicans close to the president suggested that the attacks on McConnell would hurt him on Capitol Hill, where relations with GOP leaders have seriously frayed as Trump’s agenda has stalled.
.. “Discerning a particular strategy or goal from these tweets is hard,” said Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee communications director and a former Capitol Hill staff member. “It just doesn’t help enact any part of his agenda, and it sends a further troubling sign to Capitol Hill Republicans already wary of the White House.”
.. McConnell has been one of the most steadfast supporters of Trump’s agenda in Congress, and, at least publicly, Trump has had a smoother relationship with McConnell than he has with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and other congressional leaders.
.. In April, McConnell orchestrated the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court pick, changing the Senate rules so that Democrats could not block the nomination. The Gorsuch confirmation is Trump’s largest victory on Capitol Hill.
.. Politico first reported that Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire heavily involved in Trump’s political ascendancy, is making a donation to a group supporting former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward, who is challenging Flake in a Republican primary next year.
.. However, inside the White House, Trump has a collection of advisers who have had antagonistic relationships with McConnell and Senate GOP leaders.
- Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, came from Breitbart, a news organization that regularly antagonized McConnell’s leadership team.
- Stephen Miller, chief policy adviser to Trump, was not considered an ally to the Senate leader’s staff when Miller was a top adviser to Jeff Sessions (Ala.) in the Senate.
- .. Moreover, one of Trump’s top legislative affairs advisers is Paul Teller, who served as Sen. Ted Cruz’s top aide during a period when the Texas Republican accused McConnell of lying about trade legislation.
- And Mick Mulvaney (S.C.), Trump’s budget director, was a constant critic of the Senate during his three terms in the House, regularly opposing fiscal compromise deals that McConnell brokered with the Obama White House.
I’m a Trump supporter. Thank you for disagreeing with me.
I like that Trump is a game-changer, a disrupter, a practitioner of what I see as “crafted chaos.” Our stale system and its corrupted processes are in need of disruption.
To me, much of the blowback that Trump gets is a reaction to all this disruption, to the establishments he challenges in both parties and to a news media that was, for at least a year, planning extensive and glowing coverage celebrating the first female commander in chief. Trump spoiled that, too, and they are not pleased.
‘A Better Deal,’ or Just a Better Spiel?
Democrats have unveiled their 2018 agenda, and it suggests they understand why they lost to Trump.
not everyone on the left wants to focus on winning back the voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who backed Barack Obama but rejected Mrs. Clinton. Some would rather try to rebuild the twice-successful Obama coalition of young voters, minorities and socially liberal whites. The mathematical reality is that Democrats will probably have to do a little bit of both.
.. Therefore, the party needs a message that resonates with its base but also with voters who are turned off by the overt racial and ethnic appeals Democrats have long relied on.
.. Whether “A Better Deal” will do the trick may be up to President Trump. His low job-approval numbers don’t much faze him. He has done little to broaden his appeal, perhaps because he isn’t on the ballot next year. His base seems to care more about his in-your-face style than concrete legislative accomplishments. The president ought to understand, however, that some of his support is quite soft and has already started to erode. Republican and independent voters who reluctantly backed Mr. Trump have lost confidence in his ability to address their concerns.
.. Mr. Trump can earn loyalty from lawmakers and officials in his administration by demonstrating it himself. If he wants to change the subject to tax reform from Russia investigations and internecine strife in the West Wing, maybe he should stop sounding off to New York Times editors about matters best handled out of public view.
.. Now that voters have handed the GOP control of the Oval Office and both the House and Senate, the party is out of excuses.
.. It’s progress if Democratic leaders have accepted why they really lost last year. But the party still needs to spend the next 15 months figuring out how to win again. Demonizing Mr. Trump didn’t work last time.
Why Trump voters are not “complete idiots”
There are the “elites” and there is everyone else. These two Americas are segregated, culturally, socially, geographically, and economically. They have gotten more segregated over the last 40 years.
The growing income inequality is one measure of this. Yet it is more than that. The elites have removed themselves physically. They cluster in certain towns (NYC, LA, Northern Virginia, Boston) and within those towns in certain neighborhoods. They dress differently. They eat differently. There is a culture of elitism.
The best single measure of elitism I see is education, the type and amount. A Harvard professor of sociology is more similar (despite different politics) to a Wall Street trader, than either is to a truck driver in Appleton, Wisconsin, or a waitress in Selma, or a construction worker in Detroit.
.. If you earn your money using your intellect (like Jonathan Chait), you score high on elitism, and you probably view the world very differently from a man driving heavy equipment in Birmingham, Alabama, who uses his body for labor.
.. As any trader will tell you, if you are stuck lower, you want volatility, uncertainty. No matter how it comes. Put another way. Your downside is flat, your upside isn’t. Break the system.
.. Where do most of the press and elites get it wrong? They don’t believe that we live in a two-tiered system. They don’t believe, or know they are in, the top tier. They also don’t understand what people view as value.
.. When the Democrats under Clinton in the early ‘90s shifted towards a pro market agenda, they made a dramatic shift towards accepting the Republicans definition of value as being about the economic.
Now elites in both major parties see their broad political goal as increasing the GDP, regardless of how it is done.
.. For many people value is about having meaning beyond money. It is about having institutions that work for you. Like Church. Family. Sports Leagues.
.. large parts of the US have become completely isolated, socially and economically.
.. When they turn to religion for worth, they are seen by the elites as uneducated, irrational, clowns.