The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website October 9, 2017:
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump’s escalating feud with Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, captures in miniature why he’s been ineffective during his first nine months as president.
— It’s unclear what exactly triggered the thin-skinned commander in chief to post three tweets attacking the Tennessee senator on Sunday morning. The most plausible explanation is that he was reacting to a segment on “Fox News Sunday.” The show aired a soundbite of Corker telling reporters last week that Rex Tillerson is one of three people in the administration who “separate our country from chaos.” That came in response to an NBC report that the secretary of state had called the president a “moron.”
“Senator Bob Corker ‘begged’ me to endorse him for re-election in Tennessee. I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” Trump tweeted. “He also wanted to be Secretary of State, I said ‘NO THANKS.’ He is also largely responsible for the horrendous Iran Deal! Hence, I would fully expect Corker to be a negative voice and stand in the way of our great agenda. Didn’t have the guts to run!”
— Corker, who has felt liberated since announcing his retirement last month, gleefully fired back. His office quickly went on the record to insist that Trump had, in fact, promised to endorse him, urged him not to retire and just last week asked him to reconsider his decision. The 65-year-old then tweeted this:
Fully uncorked, Corker then called a New York Times reporter to say that Trump’s reckless threats toward other countries could set the nation “on the path to World War III.” “He concerns me. He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation,” the chairman said during a 25-minute interview with Jonathan Martin. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.”
Trump’s myopic impulse to counter-punch whenever he feels attacked caused him to lose another news cycle and will overshadow an immigration proposal that the White House planned to talk about today. It also underscored several of the factors that have caused the president so much trouble:
1) Trump is unserious about passing legislation.
Make no mistake, going after Corker will make it harder for Trump to get his way on both tax cuts and the Iran deal. The senator was quoted on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post expressing concern about his party’s hypocrisy on the national debt. He says he will vote against any tax bill if he doesn’t think it will reduce the deficit.
If he sincerely cared about getting big bills done, he wouldn’t go to war with Corker. Especially when his party has a working majority of just two seats in the Senate.
Nine months in, with unified control of the government, Republicans have failed to pass a single significant piece of legislation into law.Trump has repeatedly gone all-in for health-care bills that subsequently failed. He’s threatened to shut down the government to get funding for his border wall – only to blink. Twice. He’s set deadlines and drawn red lines – only to see them ignored or blown past.
2) Trump has alienated several Senate Republicans that he needs more than they need him. Since taking office, Trump has criticized Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, Dean Heller, Rand Paul and others by name. That doesn’t include several others he went after as a candidate, including Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse.
Corker said that his concerns about Trump’s ability to govern are shared by nearly every Republican in the Senate. “Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he told the Times. “Of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
Going after Corker is like when Trump described the health bill that passed the House as “mean.” It makes it less likely that other lawmakers will go out on a limb for him. The president has triangulated against congressional Republicans for political purposes (i.e. having a scapegoat to justify his inability to deliver on his campaign promises) at the expense of substantive policy achievements.
3) Trump cares more about showmanship than statesmanship. In between his attacks on Corker, Trump praised Vice President Pence for walking out of an Indianapolis Colts game to protest players kneeling during the national anthem. The episode was a pre-planned publicity stunt designed to fan the flames of outrage among Trump’s base and keep alive a divisive culture war that had been drifting out of the news.
Corker called Trump “a reality show” president last night, telling the Times that he acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”
4) Trump still does not understand how government works. Much of what has gone haywire since January was a foreseeable consequence of electing someone with no prior government or military experience to lead the government.
Because he’s never been in government, Trump does not grasp how many things – big and small – that committee chairmen like Corker can do to thwart a president under the radar. Even if he doesn’t vote “no” on the tax cut bill, the outgoing senator is not going to be in any mood to do favors for Trump when the White House calls. Whenever Tillerson departs from Foggy Bottom, as an example, Corker will chair the confirmation hearing for his successor. He can easily hold up other nominees or initiatives, as well.
Corker, who is close with Tillerson, believes Trump is in way over his head. He is mad that the president undercut his chief diplomat’s negotiations with North Korea last weekend. “A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Corker told the Times. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out.”
When asked whether Trump is fit to be president, Corker declined to directly answer. Instead, he replied that the president is not fully aware of the power of his office. “I don’t think he appreciates that when the president of the United States speaks and says the things that he does, the impact that it has around the world, especially in the region that he’s addressing,” Corker told the Times. “And so, yeah, it’s concerning to me.”
5) The president’s credibility is shot in Washington.
Trump claims Corker “begged” him for his endorsement. Corker says Trump repeatedly offered his support and called him just last week to ask him to change his mind about retiring. Someone is not telling the truth. Whom do you believe?
“I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” Corker told the Times. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”
Trump’s penchant for twisting the truth on things big and small makes it very hard for people to take him at his word. Remember, he categorically denied James Comey’s accounts of their one-on-one conversations – even though the ousted FBI director had written memos about them immediately after they took place. “This is why people take contemporaneous notes when they speak to the president,” quipped Preet Bharara, a U.S. attorney who was fired by Trump after being told he’d be kept on.
Because Trump always wants the last word, he tweeted about Corker last night for a fourth time after the Tennessean pushed back:
In fact, Corker opposed the deal. (Read his August 2015 op-ed for The Post: “Congress should reject the bad Iran deal.”)
— What Corker does next will count the most in determining his legacy. “If he believes what he says, then as the chairman of the relevant committee in the Senate he has important tools to use,” James Fallows writes in The Atlantic. “He can issue subpoenas and summon executive branch witnesses as soon as he can get his colleagues back in town. He can draft legislation about the procedure, the grounds, and the justifications before the U.S. commits troops to war. …
“As it happens, there’s a convenient precedent for Corker to apply.Just over 50 years ago, his predecessor as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee was another man from the middle south: J. William Fulbright, of Arkansas. … In 1966 Fulbright decided to use his power as committee chairman to convene a high-level, merciless series of hearings on whether his fellow Democrat in the White House, Lyndon Johnson, was making a disastrous error with his deepening commitment to Vietnam.
“J. William Fulbright had his share of failings, notably alignment with the Old South segregationist forces in the Senate. … But Fulbright was on the right side of history in doing everything he could to change a course of disastrous error set by his own party’s president. He is rightly honored for his foresight, toughness, and courage in taking that stand. And he had at his disposal exactly the tools that Bob Corker will have through the 15 months left in his term: chairmanship of one of the Senate’s most important committees. … (Fulbright) didn’t manage to avert that era’s war. Maybe (Corker) can be remembered for doing better to head off this era’s catastrophe.”
View the post here.