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On
Monday, almost immediately after saying he empathized with the
effort by his former strategist Steve Bannon to back challenges
against Republican senators in next year’s congressional
elections, Trump stood with Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, pledging party unity and saying they were “fighting
for the same thing.”
For months, McConnell had been the object of Trump’s wrath for
the failure of the Republican-led Congress to repeal and replace
the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare - a longtime
Republican goal and a key promise of Trump's 2016 campaign.
In the White House Rose Garden, Trump played down any conflict,
saying the two were “closer than ever before.”
But Trump would not disavow Bannon’s pledge to take down
Republicans who are not fully behind Trump’s agenda and to drive
McConnell from the Senate’s leadership.
Bannon, who helped mastermind Trump’s election campaign but left
the White House in August, appeared at a gathering of
conservative activists on Saturday and declared: "Right now,
it's a season of war against a GOP establishment."
In comments directed at McConnell, Bannon told the gathering:
"Up on Capitol Hill, it's like the Ides of March. They're just
looking to find out who is going to be Brutus to your Julius
Caesar."
Brutus, once an ally of Caesar, was among the assassins of the
Roman leader on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.
Working with well-funded outside political groups, Bannon is
encouraging anti-establishment candidates to challenge
Republican incumbents in the party's nominating races for the
2018 elections in which all the seats in the House of
Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for election.
Republican leaders, such as McConnell, worry that the
anti-establishment candidates might be less palatable to general
election voters and cause Republicans to lose their majority in
the Senate and possibly also the House.
'NOT GOING TO BLAME MYSELF'
Asked about Bannon before a meeting of his Cabinet on Monday,
Trump said he could “understand where Steve Bannon’s coming
from” and took a jab at the Republican-led Congress in the
process.
"We're not getting the job done,” Trump said. “And I'm not going
to blame myself, I'll be honest. They are not getting the job
done."
At the later news conference with McConnell, Trump said,
however, he may try to persuade Bannon not to back primary
challengers in several upcoming congressional races.
“Steve is doing what Steve thinks is the right thing,” Trump
said. “Some of the people that he may be looking at
(challenging), I’m going to see if we talk him out of that,
because frankly, they’re great people.”
Still, when McConnell went further, criticizing Bannon for
favoring fringe candidates who cannot “appeal to a broader
electorate,” Trump was noticeably silent.
Trump is still stinging from his decision to support the
Republican incumbent in the recent Alabama Senate primary,
Luther Strange, at McConnell’s behest. Strange was beaten
handily by arch-conservative Roy Moore, the challenger backed by
Bannon.
While it has been unusual for a president to support a primary
challenger in his own party, Trump has signaled he may be
willing to do so in states such as Arizona, where Senator Jeff
Flake, up for re-election next year, has been critical of the
White House.
(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Caren Bohan
and Peter Cooney)
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