Donald Trump meets with Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Chuck
and Nancy and Donald and Ivanka seemed to thoroughly enjoy their
meeting at the White House the other day. Mitch and Paul, not so much.
Does
it really surprise anyone that President Trump betrayed the Republican
leaders who have been trying their best to carry water for him on
Capitol Hill — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House
Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — and is playing footsie with their
Democratic rivals? It shouldn’t.
One thing that should be
blindingly obvious by now is that political loyalty, for the president,
is a one-way street. Yes, McConnell and Ryan embarrassed themselves and
squandered precious political capital in a long, fruitless attempt to
repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Yes, the Republican leaders
have held their tongues time and again when Trump has manifested his
unfitness for office. Yes, they have pretended not to notice the glaring
conflicts of interest between Trump’s private business affairs and his
public responsibilities.
Still,
there was something brazen about the way events unfolded Wednesday.
First, Ryan tells reporters that a short-term, three-month extension on
the debt ceiling,
tied to relief funds for Hurricane Harvey — an idea supported by Senate
Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — was “ridiculous and disgraceful.” Then, in the
Oval Office meeting, Trump stuns everyone by endorsing the
Schumer-Pelosi plan —
and agrees to work with the Democrats on repealing the debt ceiling
altogether, according to The Post. Later, on Air Force One, Trump goes
on about what a productive meeting he had with “Chuck and Nancy,” not
bothering to mention the GOP congressional leaders by name. Ouch.
Some
shell-shocked attendees said they believed the meeting went off the
rails when the president’s daughter Ivanka, who has an office in the
West Wing, cheerily dropped in and disrupted the conversation’s focus.
But this sounds to me like nothing more than a search for a scapegoat.
Ryan and McConnell have no one to blame but themselves.
Trump is many
things, but he is not, nor has he ever been, a committed Republican. He
seized control of the party in a hostile takeover. His campaign
positions on trade, health care, entitlements and other issues bore no
resemblance to GOP orthodoxy. He has instincts — some of them odious,
from what we can intuit about his views on race and culture — but his
worldview is transactional and situational, not ideological.
Ryan,
McConnell and many of their Republican colleagues in Congress convinced
themselves that Trump could be a useful instrument — that he would sign
whatever legislation they sent him, and therefore they would be able to
enact a conventional GOP agenda of tax and entitlement cuts.
Trump
might have gone along with this scenario, at least for a while. But
Ryan and McConnell utterly failed to hold up their end of the bargain.
Look
at the health-care fiasco from Trump’s point of view. His campaign
position was that Obamacare had to be repealed, but that the replacement
should be a system offering health care for “everyone.” What Ryan and
the House delivered, however, was a plan that would make 23 million
people lose health insurance and
cut nearly $800 billion from Medicaid.
Trump
called that legislation “mean” but was so desperate for a big win that
he backed it anyway. In the Senate, however, McConnell wasn’t able to
deliver anything at all — not even a stripped-down measure to repeal the
ACA now and replace it later. Trump was humiliated and angry. “Mitch M”
and “Paul R” became frequent targets of his barbed tweets.
So
on Wednesday, Trump dished out a little humiliation of his own. At the
White House meeting, the president reportedly cut off Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin — who supported the Ryan-McConnell approach to raising
the debt ceiling — in mid-sentence to announce that he was siding with
Schumer and Pelosi.
The stunning slap down almost overshadowed a surprise that Trump had delivered Tuesday evening: After sending Attorney General
Jeff Sessions out to announce the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Trump
tweeted that if Congress did not act within six months, he would “revisit” the question.
What
Trump clearly has already revisited is his belief in the ability of the
conservative GOP congressional majorities to get anything meaningful
done. He seems to be at least flirting with the idea of working instead
with Democrats and GOP moderates — working not with but around the House
and Senate leadership.
I just hope Schumer and Pelosi know not to trust him the way Ryan and McConnell did.
Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
