Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is addressing his constituents at the Kentucky Farm Bureau’s annual ham breakfast Thursday morning, as tensions with President Donald Trump continue to escalate.
After a failed vote to repeal Obamacare last month, tensions between Trump and McConnell have escalated. The two men haven’t spoken since an August 9 phone call, which CNN reported earlier this week devolved into a shouting match.
McConnell opened his remarks with a joke about how being Senate majority leader is similar to being a “groundskeeper at a cemetery.”
“Everybody’s under you, but nobody’s listening,” he said, adding, “That’s what you get with 52 to 48,” a reference to the breakdown of members in the chamber, Republican to Democrat, respectively.
Mere minutes before McConnell was expected to speak, the President tweeted a message criticizing congressional Republican leadership, citing both the Kentucky Republican and House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“I requested that Mitch M & Paul R tie the Debt Ceiling legislation into the popular V.A. Bill (which just passed) for easy approval,” Trump said in a series of two consecutive tweets. “They … didn’t do it so now we have a big deal with Dems holding them up (as usual) on Debt Ceiling approval. Could have been so easy-now a mess!”
While staff has been in communication, the White House told CNN Wednesday that there are no current plans for McConnell and Trump to speak again until September when Congress returns from recess and they can talk in person.
A key moment in their public feud came earlier this month when McConnell told an audience in Kentucky that Trump had “excessive expectations” when it came to legislating, a statement that drove Trump to publicly attack McConnell’s leadership and Senate rules on Twitter.
Over the last several months, Trump has also threatened McConnell’s rank-and-file members, putting individual members’ re-elections and McConnell’s majority at risk. In a speech in Phoenix Tuesday night, Trump — without mentioning names — continued his tough talk as he lashed out at incumbents Sen. John McCain (who voted against the health care bill) and Sen. Jeff Flake, who has a long history of tangling with Trump during the campaign.
But the strain in the relationship between McConnell and Trump comes at a time when Congress and the White House have a long list of items that must be accomplished in relatively short order.
In the fall, McConnell and Trump have to agree to raise the debt ceiling, pass a budget and fund the government, an item that seems especially in jeopardy after Trump suggested Tuesday night that he would be willing to risk a shutdown if he didn’t get funding to build his long-promised border wall.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie told CNN at Thursday’s event that in a lot of ways McConnell had been superior to Ryan on health care even though the House passed a bill and the Senate did not, praising McConnell for at least bringing up for a vote the 2015 bill on a straight repeal of Obamacare.
“There were a lot of differences that were papered over after the election not just between McConnell and Trump, but Paul Ryan and Trump and now I think some of those are coming to the surface,” Massie said. “But, we’ll work through this.”
McConnell’s tried to downplay the drama. In a statement Wednesday, McConnell said “the President and I, and our teams, have been and continue to be in regular contact about our shared goals.”
“We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we are committed to advancing our shared agenda together and anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly not part of the conversation,” McConnell said. The White House issued a similar public statement later Wednesday.
It is unclear if McConnell will address Trump’s recent actions or rhetoric in his address at the Kentucky State Fair Thursday morning, but one thing is for certain: McConnell is walking a fine line. McConnell might be the most powerful senator in the country, but choosing to publicly spar with Trump, a candidate who won Kentucky by roughly 30 points, is still a risky proposition.