Trump's Senate Hostages Bite Back
It's a clustertrump!
Yesterday, 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 10x. 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.
