In recent weeks, it has become clear that the ongoing power struggle between the Republican and Democratic Parties is no longer the most important political conflict in the country. While the Democrats have a sufficient minority in the Senate to prevent it from doing much of anything, their ability to make policy is crippled by their lack of control of any branch of the national government and abject humiliation in state governments. They are therefore relegated to an important but secondary role until such a time as they can increase their electoral presence - or as we shall see, unless the president chooses to use them to bend the GOP to this will. Instead, the conflict that will have the most immediate bearing on the remainder of President Trump's current term of office is the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party.
Tensions, which have been evident since the days of the primary campaign, boiled over this week when Trump shocked his party by agreeing to a Democratic proposal to tie a temporary raise in the debt ceiling to hurricane relief. His doing so compromised the entire Republican negotiating position both now and in December, and congressional Republicans were correspondingly shocked and angry. One reporter noted that Republican staffers he spoke to used the "full range of expletives" to describe the deal.
Trump's move seems random and erratic, and certainly blows up the tidy partisan loyalties to which one expects adherence in modern Washington. It is, however, only a reflection on the fact that Trump is not and never has been a Republican in the traditional sense, and ultimately either he or the party establishment will have to assert control over the apparatus of that party. Republicans look at this deal and see a total capitulation, but that characterization is only true if one assumes that Trump values what he has given up relative to what he has gotten in return.
What he got, in terms of Republican policy, was less than nothing. But what he got in terms of his own prestige was a spat of flattering coverage that presented him, for the first time since his inauguration, in a bipartisan light. Arcane budgetary issues like the debt ceiling, and the sort of concessions that Democrats will wrest from Republicans in exchange for a raise later on, do not interest him. He was hungry for an accomplishment after months of sustained disappointment, and can now claim that he averted a messy partisan showdown over a disaster relief bill.
On a broader scale, I have gotten the distinct impression that the firing of Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and his replacement with John Kelly has lulled the Republican establishment into a false sense of security with respect to Trump. The later ousting of extreme right wing voices like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka seemed to encourage the Party in its persistent delusion that it can harness and control Trump to its own ends. Trump is a man accustomed to getting his way, and his core attitudes are much closer to the Bannons of the world than the Kellys and Paul Ryans. If Trump should find the Republican Party as it exists an unsuitable vehicle for his ambitions, he will attempt to bend it to his will and do as he pleases in the meantime.
The cold fact of the matter is that the party lacks any effective means of controlling Trump, while the electoral threat to anti-Trump Republicans is very real. Already, two of the president's most outspoken Republican critics in the Senate - Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada - face primary challengers for 2018 who are explicitly pro-Trump, and have made the president their central campaign issue. Both sitting Senators trail in their respective primaries according to early public polling.
Such challengers to anti-Trump Republicans are likely to succeed in general. In a staggering finding, a recent NBC/WSJ poll found that 98% of Trump primary voters still back him, and this group is in itself a majority of the Republican primary electorate. These Republicans may see themselves as making a bold stand for a more inclusive, 21st century conservatism, but they will find to their sorrow that the base they have cultivated does not agree. Republican voters overwhelmingly blame the congress and not the president for the failure of his early initiatives, a notion which the president has endorsed explicitly and repeatedly.
It may take some time for the effect to be felt, but I believe that Republican resistance to Trump himself, or at bare minimum to Trump-style politics and policies, is doomed. In the absurdly gerrymandered world they created after the electoral bloodbath of 2010, a bare majority of the primary electorate rules the Republican Party and with it - at least for the moment - the country. The Republicans did not foresee that the weapons they used to secure their own power would enslave them to a base that sided with them less because of policy agreement than because of shared cultural fears. The same NBC poll cited earlier found that more than 60% of Trump primary voters said they were threatened by social changes in recent decades - among those who voted for other GOP primary candidates the number was half that.
The data make it very clear that the rank and file voters in the Republican Party side firmly with the president over the Congress and party establishment. The more that individual members of Congress defy him, the more at risk they themselves will be in primary elections. Should the challenges to Heller and/or Flake be successful, even the threat of a similar fate may encourage existing Senators to fall in line or step aside for someone more reliable from the point of view of the president. He has already made it abundantly clear that he has no qualms at all with targeting members of the party he ostensibly heads.
The reason for that is because Trump does not have any attachment or commitment to that party in itself. Donald Trump wants prestige and control. Should he perceive that the Republican leadership are failing to further that goal, he will work with the Democrats if he thinks, as he did in this case, that they will be more useful. But he will also do whatever is in his power to support people within the GOP who support him, and use his large base to do so. That base ultimately, in my view, guarantees his victory. What becomes of the Republican Party in that event I don't pretend to foresee.
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