Trump Is Losing His Friends

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/opinion/mattis-republicans-congress-trump.html

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The people who are supposed to be President Trump’s biggest political allies are not happy with him.

These people — congressional Republicans and even members of Trump’s own administration — are unhappy with his foreign policy. They’re also unhappy with how he is handling year-end budget negotiations. And their dissatisfaction is a problem for Trump. It has already made him a weak president and could soon make him weaker.

The big news yesterday, of course, was the resignation of Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, who released a goodbye letter that contained an unusually detailed description of his disagreements with the president he had served.

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Mattis’s record of standing up to Trump within the administration wasn’t perfect. But Mattis resisted Trump’s overtures to Russia and, as J. Kael Weston writes in The Times, reined him in on torture and tried to protect American alliances even as Trump undermined them.

Mattis’s resignation led to a rare rebuke from Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader: “I am particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership.”

Such criticism is becoming more common from congressional Republicans. Over the past few weeks, they have bucked him on Yemen and Saudi Arabia. This week, they have harshly criticized Trump’s Syria policy and ignored his pleas for border-wall funding.

This level of defiance from members of a president’s own party isn’t normal. “President Trump continues to be a very weak president,” Matt Glassman of Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute wrote to me yesterday. “All presidents, of course, are powerful in the absolute sense. But we differentiate them by their ability to influence public policy outcomes.”

Trump is struggling to do so, Glassman said, because members of Congress have made a habit of “ignoring his legislative agenda when it differs from theirs and speaking out vocally against his executive actions.” Their criticism influences public opinion and also signals to people within the White House and Cabinet agencies that “it is safe to ignore or push back against the president’s initiatives,” as Glassman put it. In response, Trump has been stymied on a range of issues, including NATO, North Korea, Russia, the border wall, health care and Robert Mueller’s investigation.

I still don’t think congressional Republicans have been nearly courageous enough, given Trump’s behavior. And the crucial moment for the Mueller investigation may come soon, requiring more congressional backbone than we’ve seen so far. But Glassman makes an important point: No other recent president has had as many struggles with Congress, or as much resistance from inside his own administration.

For more, I recommend following Glassman on Twitter or subscribing to his free weekly newsletter. I also recommend David Frum’s latest piece in The Atlantic urging Republican lawmakers to constrain Trump in the wake of Mattis’s departure.

A First Step. There was one sign of a functioning government yesterday — and it was a good sign. Congress overwhelmingly passed the First Step Act, which makes modest but meaningful reforms to the federal criminal justice system. “This year is ending with one truly surprising development, a real man-bites-dog story: Donald Trump is poised to sign bipartisan legislation that will make America a slightly more decent place,” my colleague Michelle Goldberg writes.

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