T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 1 President Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short
time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil
war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him.
A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washington’s usual rules
and consequences of politics do not apply to him, Mr. Trump now finds
himself shackled by them.
In stopping the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party’s
professed priority for the last seven years, the rebellious far right wing
of his party out-rebelled Mr. Trump, and won a major victory on Friday over
the party establishment that he now leads.
Like every other Republican leader who has tried to rule a fissured and
fractious party, Mr. Trump faces a wrenching choice: retrenchment or
realignment. Does he cede power to the anti-establishment wing of his party?
Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the
partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats he has
improbably blamed for his party’s shortcomings?
“It’s really a problem in our own party, and that’s something he’ll need
to deal with moving forward,” said Representative Tom Cole, a moderate
Republican from Oklahoma who is part of the center-right Tuesday Group,
which stuck with Mr. Trump in the health care fight and earned the president
’s praise in the hours after the bill’s defeat.
“I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made
a lot of accommodations — but in the end there’s a group of people in this
party who just won’t say ‘yes,’” Mr. Cole said. “At some point I think
that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal maker,
and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.”
Mr. Trump is not there yet. So far he is operating from the standard-issue
Republican playbook. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems
determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican
support to pass spending bills, an as-yet unformed tax overhaul and a $1
trillion infrastructure package.
On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White
House residence to grieve and assign blame. He asked his advisers repeatedly
Increasingly, that blame has fallen on Reince Priebus, the White House chief
of staff, who coordinated the initial legislative strategy on the health
care repeal with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, his close friend and a fellow
Wisconsin native, according to three people briefed on the president’s
recent discussions.
Mr. Trump, an image-obsessed developer with a lifelong indifference toward
the mechanics of governance, made a game effort of negotiating with members
of the far-right Freedom Caucus, even if it seemed to some members of that
group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, that he did not have the
greatest grasp of health care policy or legislative procedure.
He told one adviser late Friday that his loss — a legislative debacle
foreshadowed by the intraparty fight that led to the 2013 government
shutdown — was a minor bump in the road and that the White House would
recover.
In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Trump insisted that
the administration was “rocking.” The problem, he suggested, was divisions
among Republicans.
There are “a lot of players, a lot of players with a very different mindset
,” Mr. Trump said. “You have liberals, even within the Republican Party.
You have the conservative players.”
But his advisers were more realistic. Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen
K. Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions,
described what happened as a flat-out failure that could inflict serious
damage on this presidency — even if Mr. Bannon believes Congress, not Mr.
Trump, deserves much of the blame.
Mr. Bannon and the president’s more soft-spoken legislative affairs
director, Marc Short, pushed Mr. Trump hard to insist on a public vote, as a
way to identify, shame and pressure “no” voters who were killing their
last, best chance to unravel the health care law.
One Hill Republican aide who was involved in the last-minute negotiations
said Mr. Bannon and Mr. Short were seeking to compile an enemies list. But
Mr. Ryan repeatedly counseled the president to avoid seeking vengeance — at
least until he has passed spending bills and a debt-ceiling increase needed
to keep the government running.
Mr. Trump, bowing to the same power-sharing realities that the besieged Mr.
Ryan must cope with in leading the fractured Republican majority in the
House, decided to back down. But the president’s advisers worry about the
hard reality going forward — the developer with the tough-guy veneer was
steamrollered by various factions in the Republican Congress.
The president and his team lamented outsourcing so much of the early bill
drafting to Mr. Ryan, and one aide compared their predicament to a developer
who has staked everything on obtaining a property without conducting a
thorough inspection.
Despite the president’s public displays of unity with the speaker, Mr.
Trump’s team was privately stunned by Mr. Ryan’s inability to master the
politics of his own conference, according to two West Wing aides. The
president, they said, is still sizing up Mr. Ryan’s abilities, despite Mr.
Trump’s public statements of support.
As the dust settled on the health care debacle, it was clear that Mr. Trump
’s lieutenants in the Republican civil war had been divided on how they
thought the health care fight should have been handled, which does not augur
well for the political battles to come.
Mutual disgust with the Freedom Caucus seems to be pulling Mr. Trump and Mr.
Ryan together, at least for now — just as it briefly united President
Barack Obama and John A. Boehner, Mr. Ryan’s long-suffering predecessor,
during their doomed effort to reach a “grand bargain” on a tax overhaul in
2011.
In a meeting before the Republican House conference convened on Thursday
night, Mr. Trump’s team met for two hours of negotiations with Freedom
Caucus members, leaving them sour and frustrated at the ever-changing list
of demands emerging from the group’s leader, Representative Mark Meadows of
North Carolina.
Many on Mr. Trump’s team disengaged from the process even as he dug in.
Gary D. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser, had originally been tasked
with playing a large role in shepherding the legislation from the White
House side. But Mr. Cohn had grown leery of the bill, and the White House
recognized that Mr. Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs and a liberal
Democrat, was not a good messenger to deal with recalcitrant conservatives.
Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who returned on Friday from a family
skiing trip to Aspen, Colo., had said for weeks that he thought supporting
the bill was a mistake, according to two people who spoke with him. The
president, according to two Republicans close to the White House, expressed
annoyance that Mr. Kushner, who has described himself as a first-among-
equals adviser, was not on site during the consequential week of wrangling.
And Tom Price, who left Congress to become Mr. Trump’s health and human
services secretary, was singled out for blame for the bill’s failure.
Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, took on a bigger role pushing
the bill, telling his former colleagues that the president wanted an up-or-
down vote on Friday.
Mr. Trump had told allies on Wednesday night that if he did not push for the
bill himself, it would not pass. Several, speaking on the condition of
anonymity, expressed astonishment that the president had not come to that
realization much earlier.
Until the final week, Mr. Trump’s team was deeply divided over whether he
should fully commit to a hard sell on a bill they viewed as fundamentally
flawed, with Vice President Mike Pence pointedly advising the president to
label the effort “Ryancare,” not “Trumpcare,” according to aides.
Mr. Trump brushed aside those concerns in the last few days, and embraced
the conventional role as leader of his party. He has one speed when he
decides to shift to sales mode, aides said, and he had trouble modulating
his tone, issuing cringe-inducing superlatives like “wonderful” to
describe an ungainly bill his aides described as anything but.
After it was all over, the president dutifully blamed the Democrats, a party
out of power and largely leaderless, after turning his back on their offers
to negotiate on a bipartisan package that would have addressed shortcomings
in the Affordable Care Act while preserving its core protections for poor
and working-class patients.
Several aides advised him the argument was nonsensical, according to a
person with knowledge of the interaction.
For Mr. Trump’s Republican opponents, here was poetic revenge served cold.
As a candidate in 2016, he initially scoffed at signing a Republican loyalty
pledge, at times behaving more like an independent invading the Republican
host organism than a normal presidential candidate.
As president, Mr. Trump has left dozens of critical administration jobs
unfilled, rejecting stalwart Republican applicants deemed insufficiently
loyal to him — and now he is decrying the disloyalty of the 20 to 30
conservative members who outmaneuvered and overpowered him on health care.
“We all learned a lot — we learned a lot about loyalty,” a solemn Mr.
Trump told reporters late Friday.
The dynamic that led to his defeat is bigger than Mr. Trump, despite his
tendency to personalize every win or loss. Republicans who gained power by
savaging Washington are in full control and cannot agree on a path forward.
“We were a 10-year opposition party,” Mr. Ryan said late Friday. “Being
against things was easy to do.”
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, said on Friday, with a
chuckle, that he was “getting some déjà vu right now.”
“Do you think Donald J. Trump goes home tonight, shrugs and says, ‘This is
what winning looks like’?” Mr. Gingrich added. “No! But this is where
the Republican Party is right now, and it’s been this way for years.”
But Mr. Trump put on his best face on Saturday morning. “ObamaCare will
explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare
plan for THE PEOPLE,” he said on Twitter. “Do not worry!” | S*********g
发帖数: 24893 | 2 大胜了，too much winning
老头的脑袋spin了
short
over
【在 T**********e 的大作中提到】
: President Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short
: time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil
: war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him.
: A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washington’s usual rules
: and consequences of politics do not apply to him, Mr. Trump now finds
: himself shackled by them.
: In stopping the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party’s
: professed priority for the last seven years, the rebellious far right wing
: of his party out-rebelled Mr. Trump, and won a major victory on Friday over
: the party establishment that he now leads.
| f*******g
发帖数: 1290 | 3 SB NYT 想引诱Trump 放弃茶党，跟主党报团。
short
over
【在 T**********e 的大作中提到】
: President Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short
: time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil
: war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him.
: A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washington’s usual rules
: and consequences of politics do not apply to him, Mr. Trump now finds
: himself shackled by them.
: In stopping the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party’s
: professed priority for the last seven years, the rebellious far right wing
: of his party out-rebelled Mr. Trump, and won a major victory on Friday over
: the party establishment that he now leads.
| s****y
发帖数: 491 | 4 fake news，床铺肯定在庆祝胜利呢，至于是什么胜利，床粉们早就列出来了
: SB NYT 想引诱Trump 放弃茶党，跟主党报团。
: short
: over
【在 f*******g 的大作中提到】
: SB NYT 想引诱Trump 放弃茶党，跟主党报团。
:
: short
: over
| A**d
发帖数: 13310 | 5 Madam President又赢了！左逼屁眼也不疼了!
【在 S*********g 的大作中提到】
: 大胜了，too much winning
: 老头的脑袋spin了
:
: short
: over
|
|
