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.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump backed the losing candidate in a Republican primary run-off in Alabama, finding himself trapped between the party establishment whose choice he supported and the social conservative foot soldiers who backed Roy Moore, the candidate who actually won.
Now, Mr Trump’s once and perhaps current political guru, Steve Bannon, has set out to attack much of the rest of the Republican caucus in the Senate. He’s also gunning for the entire GOP congressional leadership, with which the president is himself increasingly disillusioned.
After a conversation with Mr Bannon in recent days, Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect summarised 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.”
Mr Trump has tried to adjust to this growing estrangement from leaders of his own party by opening the door to co-operation with Democrats on immigration and health care. But after seemingly striking a deal with Democrats to protect the legal status of so-called Dreamers — young immigrants brought here illegally as youths — he plotted strategy over how to follow through on that agreement with a group of Republican senators over a White House dinner last week.
What emerged was a list of demands that may well blow up any pending immigration deal. To get the Dreamers deal Democrats want, Mr Trump called for, among other things, funding for a wall he wants along the Mexican border, new restrictions on those seeking asylum in the U.S. and punishment for localities that declare themselves “sanctuary cities.” Those 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 moulded in the Trump image: nationalist, sceptical 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.
After all, Mr Trump has said on several occasions — most notably at a conservative conference in February — that he wants the GOP to be the party “of the American worker.” There are three problems with that vision, though. First, that party doesn’t exist today. The current version of the GOP was built largely by merging the interests of the business community with the agenda of social conservatives. Neither of those groups would win top billing in the vision for a new, Trump-inspired party.
The second problem is that it isn’t at all clear that such a new Republican Party would, in fact, be a majority party. There are disaffected people loitering in both current major parties — disgruntled blue-collar workers, fearful middle-class Americans, trade sceptics, those who feel culturally alienated from the current Democratic establishment — who are drawn to such a vision.
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.
The third problem is that, 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.
Meantime, Mr Trump hasn’t forged reliable tactical alliances with enough Democrats to make up the difference. Which leaves him a leader in search of reliable followers. The Wall St Journal
