GOP Operative Turned Advocate and Political Observer
On Friday evening I joined Chris Hayes on MSNBC to about the Montana special election and its implications for Republicans. An hour or two before the show, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell report that Jared Kushner had discussed secret back-channel communications with the Russians in a previously unreported meeting during the transition period. With the news coloring the rest of the show, the segment ended up being a bit of a mashup.
Over at Medium I wrote up a tweetstorm on the Russia/Comey imbroglio and why Republicans might be haunted by the Access Hollywood tape and its anticlimactic aftermath.
Surely this was it. The SS Trump had hit an iceberg, and Republicans were scrambling for life jackets. He had survived ugly moments before, but this was different.
Or was it? The ever observant Chris Stirewalt noted the terms in which most of disavowals had been couched. They had left themselves a rhetorical bread crumb trail just in case.
Surely not, I said. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
In a way we were both right.
Full post here.
I spoke to Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur about Trump’s bumpy week and how it might impact the GOP legislative agenda.
Still, the legislative agenda is on shaky enough ground as it is, according to Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former Republican aide.
“Sausage making is hard enough outside the media vortex of President Trump,” Donovan said. “Each blow complicates the political calculations, strains relations between the White House and Congress, diminishes the President’s leverage, and raises the specter of bigger shoes” to drop, he said.
Full piece here.
I’d add (and did, though it didn’t make it into the piece) that the calendar is already taxed to the breaking point, and that given the health care-tax reform parlay they’ve set up you run the risk of turning the legislative year into a binary event. Without knowing what the future holds, Congressional Republicans would be wise to act swiftly to lock in whatever policy wins they can, even if that means playing small ball.
My latest piece in POLITICO Magazine uses a bumpy week of revelations to surmise when (if ever) Congressional Republicans might tire of this White House, and what would compel them to cut bait. For now voter sentiment is enough to keep them in line, but ultimately Trump’s hold on elected GOPers is only as strong as the promise of the Republican legislative agenda:
The collective action problem facing elected Republicans today is an echo of the dynamic that played out on the campaign trail. Whatever their true feelings, your average member is boxed in unless and until Trump’s numbers begin to crater with their voters; right now, his approval rating among Republicans is in the 80s. While most GOP congressional candidates kept Trump at arms’ length last year, a move validated by their performance, those who openly crossed him did so strategically and in relatively muted tones. The one time you did see a real jailbreak, with the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, it yielded around 50 defections; but those decisions—and the ensuing anticlimax—leave scar tissue to this day. During a crucial week for the health care bill, leaked audio surfaced of Speaker Paul Ryan backing away from Trump mere weeks before the election, an episode that remains a sore spot for the president.
And yet the stakes on the trail were different. Back then you only had to grit your teeth through the last few months of the election, hold on tight and hope for the best. Flash forward and Republicans actually hold all the levers of power. If it was hard to cross the party’s underdog nominee, the thought of breaking with the president of the United States with three and a half years left on the clock is exponentially more daunting. Moreover, the current trifecta may be a once-a-generation legislative opportunity, suggesting a heightened tolerance for Trump’s foibles. When you find yourself in the red zone on a decade’s worth of political goals, it takes a lot of lost yardage to force you to punt.
There still may be more fallout from the Russia meeting, to be sure. For now it feels like a political bomb that didn’t quite go off, even if the audible ticks sent the smarter pols scrambling. But it’s nonetheless an instructive moment when it comes to discerning the pain threshold for the elected GOP. The criticisms may grow louder with each unforced error by the White House, but as long as the legislative dream is still alive it’s hard to imagine any sort of full-scale break. If that dream dies, however, it’s every man for himself.
Read the full piece here.
I spoke with Bloomberg View‘s Frank Wilkinson about the emerging policy and political void as the blank slate of the campaign trail gives way to the legislative and bureaucratic Thunderdome.
Power doesn’t so much concentrate in the White House as shrink there.
“The same problem extends to the broader administration where you can’t fill out a government because many who are qualified aren’t interested, most who are interested aren’t qualified, and among the few who are both you’re seeing people disqualified based on perceived loyalty issues,” Donovan said.
The Trump team, continued Donovan, seems to believe “they can shrink government and/or limit internal sabotage by simply not filling many of these positions — the problem with this approach is that you’re just dividing the same amount of power fewer ways, ceding a ton of it to career bureaucrats by default, for better or worse.”
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“Politically,” said Donovan, “I’d argue it’s less of a vacuum and more of an eclipse. Trump blocks out the political sun for any and all Republicans, much to the delight of the opposition.”
Read the full piece here.