LACHLAN MARKAY, ASAWIN SUEBSAENG, GIDEON RESNICK, SAM STEIN 09.25.17
The Trump White House is gearing up to lay blame for a series of likely failures this week squarely at the feet of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), according to sources in and outside of the administration.
On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in Alabama are poised to reject Trump and McConnell’s preferred pick for the seat, Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL). The next day, a Republican-authored last-ditch attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare is almost certain to go down to defeat after , if it comes to a vote at all.
On Monday night, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) became the third Republican senator to announce her opposition.
The dual setbacks could have profound ramifications throughout the party, forcing it to reckon with a Republican electorate deeply upset with its inability to move an agenda and its own inability to get that agenda moved. The rush to assign responsibility for that failure is taking place before it even occurs.
One senior Trump administration official told The Daily Beast that the president is “well prepared to” shovel blame onto McConnell if and when the latest Obamacare repeal effort goes down in flames later this week. Another Trump confidant noted that the president regularly vents about “Mitch’s” seeming inability to get “anything over the finish line.”
A White House official joked that it has proven a winning “formula” for Trump to go after the unpopularity of top GOP brass, including McConnell, ever since the campaign. Trump even spent the last few days hammering home the point that Strange (who is locked in an election fight against former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore) isn’t even all that close to McConnell politically or personally, and that Strange would be “fighting Mitch” in the Senate as an authentic conservative.
The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss strategy.
Tensions between the president and Senate Republicans—McConnell in particular—have been building for months. Last month, Trump reportedly berated McConnell during a phone call for refusing to “protect” the president from federal and congressional investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. According to The New York Times, the call “quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.”
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