WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s relationship with the Republican Party, always a marriage of convenience, is showing signs of serious strain.
The president threatened his bond with virtually every GOP constituency this past week.
His move to withdraw troops from Syria led to the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and left Washington’s Republican foreign policy establishment aghast, drawing unusual criticism from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., normally a Trump ally.
Trump’s initial openness to a government funding bill that didn’t include money for his much-heralded border wall with Mexico infuriated conservatives, including the talk radio and cable television personalities who often shower the president with praise. By pushing the government into a partial shutdown with no clear strategy out, Trump frustrated the rest of his party, which was hoping for a holiday break from Trump-driven dramas.
The divergent plotlines had a common theme: Trump’s rejection of his party’s counsel as he looks once again to rely on his own instincts to guide his political future.
The whirlwind week seemed to foreshadow what probably will be a rocky two years ahead as Trump, a businessman-turned-politician, gears up for re-election by putting his political interests ahead of those of his adoptive party. Trump is ending the year with his political vulnerabilities exposed, unwilling or unable to forge consensus and catering to a narrow base that he hopes will recreate his improbable 2016 election victory.
“This is tyranny of talk radio hosts,” said retiring Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican and frequent Trump critic who skipped a White House meeting Friday on the spending impasse. “You have two talk radio hosts who completely flipped a president.”
In an attempt to shift blame for the shutdown, the outsider president who ran on a slogan of “drain the swamp” embraced the tactic employed of so many of his predecessors: positioning himself in contrast to the far-less-favorably viewed Congress. He vented publicly and privately at lawmakers for failing to get him…
