More Tiny Steps
And perhaps more to come.
More Republicans are starting to break with Donald Trump…just a very small bit at a time.
Three weeks ago, I noted that there were a few tiny signs of GOP resistance to Trump in Congress. Now we have seven Republican Senators sponsoring a bill to take back some of the authority that Congress has delegated to presidents on tariffs. It’s enough of a mini-revolt that the White House actually issued a veto threat instead of just ignoring the whole thing, even though the anti-tariff Senators are still far short of the 60 votes they would need to beat a Senate filibuster if it somehow reached the Senate floor. Nor do they have any hope of getting the bill considered in the House.
That said: The real question here isn’t so much what’s in this particular bill, or the chances of it passing, but exactly how hard these Senators are willing to fight on this issue. We don’t know yet. It’s very possible they don’t intend to fight at all; the bill is meant merely as position-taking, so that they can claim to their constituents that they were against what is happening. On the other hand, seven Republican Senators who were willing to make tariffs their top priority could threaten to derail executive branch and judicial nominations and the rest of the Republican agenda, including the big tax cut bill working its way through Congress, unless Trump backs off on this issue. Yeah, I don’t see that happening either.
There’s middle ground here: They may want to signal their unhappiness with the policy to the president and not just to constituents. I suspect that’s where they’re at now…but part of why the White House might be alarmed is that they could be joined by others and eventually ramp up their willingness to fight.
That said, there’s a real problem here for the anti-tariff seven. Tariffs are probably Trump’s top priority, and it’s not at all clear whether he cares about confirming nominees or any legislative agenda. Meanwhile, most of that agenda is strongly supported by congressional Republicans. That limits their leverage. Indeed, even if all they cared about was policy, most Republicans would probably be willing to swallow a lot to keep Trump on their side when it comes to tax cuts and other party priorities.
There’s a bit of a puzzle in analyzing what all of this means. It’s hardly unusual for same-party, same-ideology Members of Congress to stick with the president, especially early in the term. It shouldn’t surprise us too much that the three-time party nominee would command a fair amount of support from his party on the Hill even if he didn’t demand it so crudely.
At the same time, there’s not exactly a lot of examples of presidents announcing a policy which immediately produces a massive drop in the stock market and is likely to cause a lot of (party-threatening) damage.
So what happens next? My best guess is that at the end of the day, politicians are politicians. Almost every Republican in Congress began the year more afraid of future primary elections than future general elections, something that’s been true for Republican politicians for at least the last decade.1 It would take a lot to change that. But Trump is already sporting negative approval numbers;2 Republican candidates are badly underperforming in special and off-year elections; and there are plenty of signs of anti-Trump enthusiasm that are harder and harder to miss.
What’s more is that there is some safety in numbers. Trump is famous for lashing out at his enemies, of course. But surely Republican politicians noticed that nothing much happened (at least so far) to the dissenters I noted three weeks ago, and that makes it a little easier for this slightly larger round of public opposition. It’s one thing to take on two or three Senators, and another to take on seven, or eight, or more.
A normal president might shift course; a normal president would have worked to get allies on board before announcing a major risky policy. Trump doesn’t know how to do any of that. His only real move is to bully people, and he doesn’t have a lot of back-up moves available when it doesn’t work.
Again: The opposition among elected Republicans so far is small, and not particularly intense. But what we’re seeing is that at least to some extent, the normal rules apply. The president does something foolish and becomes less popular, and party politicians begin to back away.
We don’t know yet how many will do so, or how far back they’ll wind up, or what exactly it will take to get them to do significantly more than they’ve shown any sign of to date. I do suspect we’ll have plenty of opportunity to test the effects of Trump failures on Republican politicians.
Iron Law of Politics: All politicians are paranoid; the question is what they’re paranoid about.
G. Elliott Morris now has Trump at 46.4 approval/49.8 disapproval, and that’s without any effects yet from the stock market meltdown. Or the immediate effects of Trump’s tariffs. Or the medium and long-term effects. Remember, he’s already the least popular president of the polling era at this point, except for his own first term.