This week, Donald Trump waddled his increasingly gravid frame into a closed-door Senate GOP luncheon for the first time in over a year, and the smart money in that room wasn’t on reconciliation and kumbaya. It was on Trump hearing from the men he’s betrayed, belittled, and attacked and learning about the terrain of their anger. It was about their growing, inchoate rage over his reckless stupidity, leaving them with the political bill that no amount of party loyalty can paper over.
The smart money, as ever, was right, and the sweeping damage from Trump’s own actions, both to his agenda and their political survival was the spoken and unspoken topic of the entire meltdown.
One lesson you should take from this, when reading the after-action comments, is to always multiply the downside by 10. A “spirited disagreement” is code for near-fisticuffs.
This wasn’t a conference lunch in the normal sense of Washington folkways. It was a wake for a reeking corpse, and everyone in the room who later played Rashomon with the press was, if they were being honest, a mere attendee arguing over the cause of death.
The invitation itself tells the story. Rick Scott (R-Medicare Fraud) extended it without bothering to loop in Majority Leader John Thune (R-Collegial Nothingburger), who found out he was hosting the president of the United States from social media.
You think that shit would have happened when Mitch McConnell ran the place?
Scott’s play wasn’t a scheduling oversight. It was a public act of fealty, a courtier hurling himself at the Umber Menace’s feet while the rest of the conference sat there with their jaws clenched, and Scott knew precisely what he was doing. His hatred of Thune is legendary, and his ambition to replace him is ferocious.
The heat in that room was about Trump’s irrational demands for absolute obedience from the Senate Republicans on the Iran deal from hell, and his ludicrous Millerite fetishization of the so-called SAVE America Act, his promise to kill the housing bill, he demands for everything everywhere all the time.
The fracture isn’t about any single issue. It’s about a structural reality about Trump most of the Senators in his own party have never understood and never will, because grasping it would require them to admit their capitulation and the abandonment of their actual oath of office. A functioning Senate conference’s loyalty (R or D) runs sideways, to each other, not upward to the president.
