The following article by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman was posted on the New York Times website December 13, 2017:
WASHINGTON — President Trump does not readily admit defeat. Knocked to the mat in Alabama with the stunning loss of a Senate seat, he got right back up on Wednesday and defiantly claimed that he had known his candidate would lose all along. He may have been humbled by voters, but Mr. Trump does not exactly do humble.
Aides to the temperamental president reported being pleasantly surprised that he did not rage against the setback in private, as he is wont to do in moments of difficulty. But neither did he concede a mistake in backing the Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, despite sexual misconduct allegations, attributing the loss to Mr. Moore and the national party establishment that abandoned him.
All but ignoring the political earthquake in Alabama in public appearances on Wednesday, Mr. Trump pushed forward with his drive for major tax cuts, giving little indication that he shared his party’s panic about potentially worse defeats to come in next year’s midterm congressional elections. While aides anticipate possible staff changes, Mr. Trump showed no signs of shifting from the strident, base-oriented politics that have animated his presidency.
“I don’t think it’s going to affect it,” Mr. Trump said of the election’s impact on his agenda as he met with Republican lawmakers writing the final version of his tax legislation. “I think we’re doing a lot. This is the biggest thing that we’ve worked on.”
Behind the scenes, some advisers hoped the loss would persuade Mr. Trump to stop listening to Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist who has vowed war against the Republican establishment. But Mr. Trump talked with Mr. Bannon for 15 minutes by phone on Tuesday, aides said, and seemed disinclined to cut the adviser from his circle.
Nor was it clear that Mr. Trump was any more eager to reach across the aisle and build new coalitions with Democrats even as his party’s control of the Senate narrowed to a single seat. With Wednesday’s agreement on a final tax cut bill, Mr. Trump seems poised to push through his first major achievement after a year of legislative frustrations, but it remained uncertain how he would proceed after that.
“I think he’s going to have a compelling story to make that ‘my agenda is making the country better,’” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. But he recommended that Mr. Trump recruit Democrats for legislation on criminal justice and infrastructure. “I think the president and the administration should look for allies outside of the leadership as well — not in opposition to leadership — but there are other voices that might lead to a different coalition of members that would support their agenda.”
Mr. Trump flirted with bipartisanship briefly during the fall when he cut a three-month spending deal with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leaders. But when he sought to extend that cooperation with an agreement to allow younger immigrants brought into the country illegally to stay, conservatives objected and he quickly retreated.
Other presidents have been knocked off stride by special elections that ultimately presaged greater defeats. In 1991, George Bush was stunned when his attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, lost a special election for Senate against Harris Wofford, a little-known Democrat whose strategists went on to help Bill Clinton topple the incumbent president a year later.
In 2010, Barack Obama was likewise thrown by the election of Scott Brown, a Republican, to fill a vacant Senate seat in heavily Democratic Massachusetts. The election not only cost Democrats their filibuster-proof supermajority just as they were trying to pass health care legislation, but it also foreshadowed a Republican landslide in midterm elections later that year.
“It becomes the chink in the armor of the person who just a year before or 18 months before was the most popular figure in the country,” recalled Jennifer Psaki, a veteran of Mr. Obama’s White House. “For us, it was certainly the case that you have a moment of depressed sulking. And then you have to pick yourself up and figure out how to move forward.”
For Mr. Obama, the special election forced a strategic re-evaluation. Some aides advised him to trim his ambitions for health care and seek a narrower bill. But Mr. Obama opted to push for his original, more sweeping legislation. Ultimately, he pushed it through without Republican backing, but it never developed bipartisan support and remains a target of efforts to repeal it.
For Mr. Trump, who has already endured off-year Republican election defeats in New Jersey and Virginia, Alabama has now delivered not one but two humiliating defeats in a state that he won by 28 percentage points just a year ago. In a Republican primary to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, Mr. Trump first endorsed Luther Strange, the choice of the party establishment, only to watch him lose to Mr. Moore, who was backed by Mr. Bannon.
Undeterred by allegations that Mr. Moore sought sexual contact with teenagers as young as 14, Mr. Trump endorsed him against the advice of White House advisers. But as he sat watching the results in the White House residence on Tuesday, alone for much of the evening with the first lady out of town, Mr. Trump once again saw his preferred candidate defeated, in this case by Doug Jones, a Democrat in a state that had rebuffed Democrats for decades.
Mr. Trump called Mr. Jones on Wednesday to congratulate him, but he also sought to justify himself. “The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. “I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”
For the rest of the day, Mr. Trump solicited the opinion of almost every adviser he encountered, asking what they thought of his tweet or whether he had made a mistake supporting Mr. Moore. In private conversations, the president said he had been left with several bad options, aides said — he had backed Mr. Strange, but he had said he would back the Republican nominee.
Some White House aides hoped that Mr. Trump would write off Mr. Bannon after the loss. But Mr. Bannon has served as a kind of Seeing Eye dog for the president. Mr. Trump is a reactive politician who relies on the sights and sounds of his rallies. With fewer such events these days, he is left more reliant on the reconnaissance of others. Mr. Trump is also relieved that Mr. Bannon serves as something of a human shield, absorbing criticism that otherwise might be directed at him, according to two advisers.
The defeat may prompt or at least coincide with staff changes. Even as votes were counted in Alabama on Tuesday night, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison, resignedafter criticism that the office had not done enough to build coalitions.
Another aide who came in for finger-pointing primarily from outside the White House on Wednesday was Bill Stepien, the president’s political director. Mr. Trump has appeared more open to the need for change, two advisers said, and they anticipated that Mr. Stepien’s influence might be diminished by the addition of other aides.
Mr. Stepien, who worked for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and was a figure in the bridge-closing scandal, is well liked by most of the White House employees and seen by some as an unfair straw man for larger problems.
Mr. Trump made no public mention of staff on Wednesday. But ever ready for a fight, he seemed to hark back to last year’s election by referring to an insulting term that Hillary Clinton once used for some of his supporters.
“Somebody else called me and everybody else the ‘deplorables,’” he said at a White House event with families he said would benefit from his tax plan. “Have you ever heard that term? Right? We’re proud to be the deplorables and we’re doing well.”
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