The Note: Trump puts the pressure on his party

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March 22, 2017

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Trump puts the pressure on his party

The Big Story

This is set up for something big – bigger even than the actual stakes. The Trump White House team has put everything it has into making the health care vote in the House a defining moment, for President Trump and the GOP congressional leadership whose fate is now tied to his leadership. The president's blunt warning to one House Republican who opposes him - "I'm going to come after you" – may have been said with a smile. But nobody thinks he is really kidding. With major conservative groups that focus on health care – Heritage, the Club for Growth, Freedom Partners – lining up in opposition, Trump is asking House members to trust not just his word but his political power, all for a bill that would still stand a slim chance of passing the Senate. That's a reminder of the actual stakes: Since when is a Republican president's winning a vote in the Republican House considered a major achievement? (Former Vice President Joe Biden comes to the Hill today, but mainly to serve as a reminder that Democrats aren't part of his equation.) And yet, a Trump-era warning applies. Why think this will turn out normally, at any turn?

The Sleeper Story

Amid the political insanity, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been taking place in a bubble, in a time warp to a recent past of serious questioning sprinkled with predictable political sparring. It's been a refreshing return to Washington normalcy; even tired talking points, traded between the parties as they are, can sound somehow comforting. It may stand as a credit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it can operate as if nothing outside the hearing room has changed. It also stands to benefit the nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, who has come across as earnest, human and humorous through his first two days in front of the committee. Gorsuch has looked slightly testy under questioning by Democrats, but he remains on a glide path to confirmation. The only reminders that he's being considered for confirmation in Trump's Washington have come when the president himself comes up; Trump's interest in what it would have taken him to win Colorado is about as Trump a question for a Supreme Court nominee that one can imagine.

The Shiny Story

"A very limited role for a very limited amount of time." That was White House press secretary Sean Spicer's description of Paul Manafort's role in the Trump campaign, where his role was limited to running the whole campaign during a period of months that included locking down the nomination, running the Republican National Convention and choosing a running mate. That line is, of course, laughable. But no one at the White House can imagine chuckling over The Associated Press story out this morning. The AP unearthed decade-old work Manafort did for a Russian billionaire, where he promised a strategy that "can greatly benefit the Putin Government." Manafort increasingly looks like a focus of investigators' scrutiny of ties between the Trump operation and Russian interests, thus the distance between Trump and Manafort that the White House is trying to open up. It's a reminder that the Russia story doesn't disappear just because no one inside the Trump White House is implicated.

TLDR

The stakes are high for Thursday: Trump and his administration are making the health care vote a critical moment for his presidency, but he's still very much lining up votes with no guarantee it will pass the House, never mind the Senate.