Welcome to Donald Trump’s dysfunction junction
For the past decade we’ve been hearing about how Donald Trump has an “ironclad grip” keeping the Republican Party in “lockstep” with him. Those phrases have been used so often by the media and pundit class, it’s easy to just assume it’s true. And it often is true. But here’s the thing.
House and Senate Republicans would love nothing more than to side with Trump every time. It keeps Trump from attacking them. It keeps Trump’s base from turning on them. It’s the path of least resistance. In fact all Trump would have to do is give House and Senate Republicans something they can all swallow, and they’ll gladly do it. Except he and his regime are so dysfunctional, they can’t even figure out how to do that right.
The Republican House was, one supposes, always going to pass Trump’s unhinged extremist budget. And why not? They have just large enough of a majority for a handful of their most vulnerable members in moderate districts to go against it and still have it pass.
But the Republican Senate is a different story. The majority math is different, and Senators tend to be on the self-important side. For the Republican Senate to swallow what Trump is dishing out, he has to serve up something that’s only halfway evil or three quarters evil, not 100% glaringly blindingly evil.
Yet instead of simply giving Republican Senators something that they could feel comfortable passing, he fed them the kind of budget that could only ever get through the House. And so now Trump is facing yet another round of negative headlines, this time about how he can’t govern and can’t control his own party. These kinds of headlines make him look weak in the eyes of everyone. But here we are, with Donald Trump and his regime doing precisely that.
So where will all of this land? By the time Trump and the House are done making enough concessions to convince the Senate to pass the budget, it’ll end up looking pretty much like what Trump should have just sent to the Senate to begin with. Instead he’s insisting on making himself look like an inept incompetent idiot. Which is fitting, because he is one.
