What’s going on: President Donald Trump is having a string of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days... and his own party is partly to blame. Earlier this week, the House voted to limit his power amid the Iran War (a move Trump called “unpatriotic”). Senate Republicans forced him to abandon his $1 billion ballroom budget request, and in a surprising display of bipartisanship, both parties in the Senate applied major pressure to his $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called the amendment “utterly stupid, morally wrong.” And at times, even Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has seemed fed up with the president. Did HR just point congressional Republicans to the bullet point in their job description requiring them to “check presidential power”?
Why this is such an about-face: The rare revolt is significant in the wake of party in-fighting and Trump's obsession with loyalty. After losses in some statewide primaries, the president and many Republicans in Congress have diverging goals. Trump wants to paint a rosy picture of his policies, and lawmakers want to win in November. That’s much harder to do if, say, the party is seen as rewarding Jan. 6 rioters or if being focused on the “anti-weaponization” debate distracts from funding ICE, analysts say. Still, while some congressional Republicans publicly criticized the slush fund, they didn't actually vote against the president’s priority, which he calls a “beautiful thing.”
