Washington Republicans have spent long stretches of the past 10 months — their first with unified control of the federal government in a decade — alternately contending with and rationalizing President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior.
Some groused in private, others scolded or lamented Trump in public remarks; most dodged or demurred when confronted with the controversy du jour. When compelled, a few might issue censorious statements or tweet their concerns. But Trump has carried on, spitting Twitter venom at political foes (and allies he felt slighted by), seemingly oblivious to — or actively spiteful of — the sensitive mechanisms and relationships that typically drive policy-making on Capitol Hill.
Republicans in the Senate, and a handful in the House, have been subject to routine humiliations and insults from their President.
After Obamacare repeal failed and his agenda looked to be falling apart, Trump pressed on, personally demeaning GOP officials who crossed him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. John McCain, Sen. Jeff Flake, Sen. Bob Corker — the list goes on — have all come under attack. The latter pair will retire rather than seek re-election in 2018.
Though some of them have occasionally barked back at Trump, none truly bared their teeth or threatened a damaging bite. If Trump was supposed to feel brushed back, or his skeptics emboldened, by Flake’s broadside from the Senate floor in late October, well, he wasn’t — and they weren’t.
Why?
On a personal level, we might never really know. Everyone has their own angle. But when framed more broadly, the trade-off is pretty clear. From the day he was sworn-in, Republicans knew, or hoped against hope, that this moment would come.
Now, with the GOP likely days away from passing a generational restructuring of the American tax code — one that will permanently slash the corporate rate by more than 40% (from 35% to 20%) and repeal the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to buy health insurance — their faith looks destined to be rewarded.
The details of the final tax bill remain a bit of a mystery, and will until the Senate passes its version and gets together with the House to hash out a single piece of legislation from their respective plans. (Or the House could simply pass the Senate edition. We’ll see.) However it plays out, one thing is for sure: Trump will sign whichever bill lands on his desk — and do it with a big smile followed by a prolonged victory lap and a series of triumphal tweets.
For the Republican senators, like Flake and Corker and McCain, who have questioned the President’s competence or cast him as some kind of existential threat to American democracy, the tax fight might have represented their last best chance to undermine Trump in a way that might alter the balance of power in Washington.
But in the end, they kept the course. The tax agenda, paired with Trump’s pledge to pursue subsequent spending cuts, that have for decades animated the Republican establishment, proved too good to pass up. And if that meant tying themselves inextricably to Trump, and taking a political beating here and there, then so be it.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a Fox News interview after Republicans suffered a round of bruising election defeats earlier this month, was asked if the party needed to consider distancing itself from the man in the White House.
“We already made that choice,” Ryan answered. “We’re with Trump.”
He continued, staking out without reservation the terms of the GOP’s pact with the President.
“That’s a choice we made at the beginning of the year,” he said. “That’s a choice we made during the campaign — which is, we merged our agendas. We ran on a joint agenda with Donald Trump. We got together with Donald Trump when he was President-elect Trump and walked through what is it we want to accomplish in the next two years. We all agreed on that agenda. We’re processing that agenda.”