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.

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.”

…

“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.

While the broad strokes of the House Ways & Means Blueprint are promising, there are still potential pitfalls in the details, well beyond the DBCFT fight. I spoke with Richard Rubin from the Wall Street Journal about the treatment of pass-through business income:

Republicans want to lower the tax rate for these businesses in conjunction with corporate rate cuts. But they haven’t decided what should be taxed at 25%, as a firm’s business income, and what should be taxed at 33%, as the owner’s wages at the firm.

…

They have a few choices, said a House GOP aide. One is a pure numerical split, allocating, say, 70% of pass-through income to wages and 30% to business profits. That is simple but politically toxic.

“It’s not a real 25% rate. That’s more like a 31% rate, in which case you’ve got trouble,” said Liam Donovan, director of legislative and political affairs at Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group. “Using a blunt instrument is a non-starter.”

You can read the full piece by clicking here.

I spoke with The Atlantic‘s Ron Brownstein about the 2016 presidential map as a window into the congressional electoral future.

The vividly contrasting voting patterns of 2016, with Trump posting big gains over Romney in heavily blue-collar House districts and Clinton improving over Obama in a broad swathe of white-collar districts, may have offered a fast-forward preview of how the House may evolve in coming years. “It was like looking decades in the future, and this is what it looks like,” said GOP strategist Liam Donovan, referring to the 2016 results. “If you just push down the gas and let it rip [on the class resorting], this is what it is going to look like.”

…

“Where Hillary enjoyed a big bump in these congressional districts, it was clustered in the affluent ’burbs of Dallas, Atlanta, D.C., Chicago, L.A.,” said Donovan, the GOP strategist and director of legislative and political affairs for the Associated Builders and Contractors trade association. “The question for the long run is: What is more likely, that those people fully evolve into Democratic voters or do they snap back to the Republicans?”

As education and diversity levels both rise, Republicans are divided over whether the long-term demographic swap in each party’s House caucus is a good bet for the party. Patrick Ruffini, a GOP consultant who specializes in demographic trends, said House Republicans can offset any Trump-era losses in white-collar and diverse districts with even deeper gains among blue-collar voters or by finding creative ways to separate themselves from him. “To what extent are you going to see the non-college white population … feeling even more alienated and therefore voting more Republican?” he said. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s top White House strategist, also pointed to a blue-collar GOP future when he told The Washington Post in an email Tuesday that the administration is “developing populist nation-state policies that are supported by the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans, but are poorly understood by cosmopolitan elites in the media that live in a handful of our larger cities.”

Tom Davis, by contrast, is dubious Republicans will ultimately benefit from this rolling class realignment: “It didn’t surprise me that Trump saw this [resorting] and put an exclamation point on it,” Davis said, “but it’s still a loser for Republicans long-term.” Donovan largely agrees: “Even as these Trump [blue-collar] gains happened, the share of the non-college white vote actually dropped and the college vote increased. So if you are handicapping the future … going all in on the Trump path is a dangerous proposition.”

Full piece here– recommended reading.

The Hill‘s Jonathan Swan looks at Trump’s apparent consolidation of the GOP base down the stretch:

“We treat him like a toddler who should get an electoral cookie for not soiling himself in public,” said Liam Donovan, a former aide to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Then again, Republican voters seem to be rewarding him for it, so go figure.”

More than anything he has done or said, Donovan thinks Trump’s improved standing probably has to do with FBI Director James Comey shifting the public’s focus to Clinton by informing lawmakers last week of the FBI’s discovery of emails that may be relevant to the bureau’s investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information.

“Especially insofar as FBI leaks and WikiLeaks chatter have crowded out any Trump oppo,” he added, “and kept what has been dropped from getting any real traction.”

Full piece here.

UPDATE:

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— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) November 6, 2016