Donald Trump, the President Without a Party

[question everything]

By Gerald F. Seib

Increasingly, Donald Trump is a president without a party.

With virtually no Republican votes to spare in the Senate, where his agenda hangs in the balance, he has nonetheless become estranged from two key figures in his own party. First it was John McCain of Arizona, over his defiance of the president on health care. Next it was Bob Corker of Tennessee, who feuded with the president in a remarkable weekend of exchanged insults.

As it happens, Mr. McCain is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Mr. Corker is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Thus, the president is alienated from the two most important Senate figures on national security at a time when two critical national-security issues are coming to a boil: the fate of the nuclear deal with Iran and the increasingly dangerous standoff with North Korea.

(snip)

After a conversation with Mr. Bannon in recent days, Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect summarized his agenda this way: “Bannon’s current obsession is to blow up Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Senate incumbents whom he regards as hostile to his brand of nationalism.”

(snip)

The immigration principles surely are negotiable. Still, they seem to leave Mr. Trump trapped in a kind of immigration no-man’s-land, between Democrats wanting a Dreamers fix and Republicans hoping to use that fix as a lever to push through broad immigration changes they’d like to make. The question is: Where is this all supposed to lead?

There is an answer to that—in the long run. Mr. Trump would like to lead, and Mr. Bannon would like to create, a Republican Party different from the one that exists. It would be a party molded in the Trump image: nationalist, skeptical of immigration and trade agreements, dubious about the virtues of diplomacy and international negotiations, with economic strategies skewed to help workers in traditional American industries.

(snip)

But ultimately, Mr. Trump failed to win the popular vote even as he won the presidency in 2016, and he has never come close to winning majority approval for the job he’s doing as president. Meanwhile, while waiting for that Republican Party to emerge, Mr. Trump confronts the job of governing today. The current party has just 52 members in the Senate, and, as noted, Mr. Trump doesn’t have the loyal support of all of them. Mr. Bannon and his allies are threatening to challenge other Republican incumbents in primary elections next year, which won’t exactly keep those targeted at his side.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-the-president-without-a-party-1507563185

[LuvLoogie]

1. Bullshit. He and the GOP are joined at the ass.

[question everything]

6. Similar opinion from the WaPo

This portrait of the president increasingly isolated in the capital city is based on interviews with 18 White House officials, outside advisers and other Trump associates.

In a late-afternoon, unsolicited email to reporters Monday, Pence’s office blasted out a blanket response under the vice president’s name addressing “criticisms of the president.” The statement bemoaned “empty rhetoric and baseless attacks” against Trump while touting his handling of global threats, from Islamic State terrorists to North Korea.

“That’s what American leadership on the world stage looks like and no amount of criticism at home can diminish those results,” the statement concluded.

But Pence’s words did little to reassure some Trump allies, who fear that the president’s feud with Corker could cause more trouble for the administration and further unravel threadbare relationships on Capitol Hill.

“We have been watching the slow-motion breakup of the Republican Party, and Trump is doing what he can to speed it up,” said Patrick Caddell, a veteran pollster who has worked with Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, who now runs Breitbart News, a conservative website.

“Trump is firmly placing himself on the outside, trying to become an almost independent president,” Caddell said. “He knows that many people will be with him, that he helps himself when he’s not seen as the Republican president. But what about his program? That’s the question — and possibly the cost of what he’s doing.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-pressure-cooker-trumps-frustration-and-fury-rupture-alliances-threaten-agenda/2017/10/09/41115744-ad0d-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html

[LonePirate]

2. Oh please! He says jump and the Repubs in Congress and their voters ask how high.

[Borchkins]

3. He is a REPUBLICAN!!!!

[world wide wally]

4. Bullshit

[dalton99a]

5. Trump is the natural apex of modern GOP conservatism

and he is the official leader of the GOP