Whatever Donald Wants, Donald Gets
Trump’s march through the GOP is leaving it in ruins.
“YOU DON’T LET A FIRE BURN because Donald Trump wants to campaign on ashes,” Sen. Patty Murray told her Republican colleagues last week. But that’s just what they did minutes later, by killing off a historic bipartisan border deal at the behest of Trump and his subservient GOP House.
The death of the deal is deeply troubling in ways that go even beyond a besieged border with Mexico and who gets credit for addressing it. They range from Trump’s iron hold on Republican brains, judgment, and institutions to America’s role in the world, the future of political compromise, and the basic ability of our government to function.
It’s been nearly two years since I risked writing about “a golden era of bipartisanship.” There were so many deals in process or already law—on infrastructure, postal reform, China competitiveness, Electoral Count Act reform. Back then, shortly after Russia had invaded Ukraine and two days after President Joe Biden imposed a ban on Russian oil imports, the House passed a bill codifying the ban, toughening a sanctions law and requiring a review of Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization. The vote was 414–17.
I did caution that we should enjoy it while it lasted, and it did not last all that long. To be precise, it ended a week after the 2022 midterms, when Trump announced his third bid for the presidency. He’s been dividing, conquering, and manipulating events ever since.
Last year, out of necessity, Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy managed to reach a debt-and-spending agreement for the new budget year. That was the beginning of the end for McCarthy. His GOP House resisted the spending blueprint, a government shutdown loomed, he relied on Democratic votes to keep the government open, and a handful of hard-right lawmakers managed to oust him from his job. That was unprecedented, but current House Speaker Mike Johnson could meet the same fate this year after delaying the same deadlines until early March.
THE SENATE IMMIGRATION AND BORDER AGREEMENT might have been the most important bipartisan negotiation of 2024. But before it was public or even finished, Johnson repeatedly branded it DOA in the House unless it was the same as H.R. 2, a partisan immigration bill that passed the House and stood no chance in the Democratic Senate. Trump hadn’t seen it either, but said for weeks in public and private that he wanted it dead. He got his wish and now boasts about this “massive victory.”
“We crushed Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous open borders bill. Crushed it. Mike Johnson did a very good job and the whole group did a great job in Congress. We crushed it. We saved America from yet another horrific Biden betrayal,” he said at a rally Saturday in Conway, South Carolina.
The true victim of a horrific betrayal was Sen. James Lankford, the lead Senate Republican negotiator on the bill, and the perpetrators were Trump and the Trump GOP. Lankford, described by Democratic Sen. Chris Coons on ABC’s This Week as “the most conservative adult human I’m friends with,” is no RINO. But he is a realist.
“Americans, whether they are Republican, Democrat, or independent, are all unanimous on this issue: This is a problem that needs to be solved; do what you can. Today, we get to decide if we are going to do that or not; if we are going to do nothing or do something,” Lankford said on the Senate floor shortly before almost all of his GOP colleagues chose the former.
He correctly cast the compromise he had reached in negotiations with Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy as the only way forward: “Welcome to the United States Senate. That’s what we have to do. While I have people from around the country and back home that say, ‘Do a Republican-only bill; just get all of our priorities and none of theirs,’ I smile at them and say, ‘Welcome to governance.’”
In a Congress on path to set records for low productivity, the House has passed and sent to the Senate at least one bipartisan bill this year that’s not imperative to keep the government running, as the Hill points out—a tax package that expands the child tax credit for low-income families and includes several tax benefits for businesses.
The Senate, meanwhile, has sent to the House an equally bipartisan but much iffier proposition: the $95 billion aid bill for the Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and civilians in Gaza. It is much delayed because of the demand months ago for a border security component, and its future is murky because it has no border provisions now, and that is because Trump and Johnson teamed up to kill them.
Also impeding the national security aid package is the bizarre Trump/GOP affinity for Russia and Vladimir Putin, and an equally incomprehensible view of American interests that has cut heavily into Republican support for Ukraine. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham, once strongly supportive of Ukraine, now says he agrees with Trump that aid to the embattled country should be a loan.
THE HANDFUL OF DISSENTING REPUBLICANS who would have supported the Senate border deal and who support the separate security package as well need to face facts. Trump will incite chaos and dictate terms as long as they let him. And they should never forget: His top priority is always, always himself—in particular, reclaiming the legal firewall of the presidency and fleecing every Republican donor in America, rich or poor, to cover his court and campaign costs.
Right now, Trump has far too much control over Republicans who should know better, using a disconcerting but effective combination of brute force and sinister charm.
He’s rampaging through U.S. politics like a modern-day William T. Sherman on his Atlanta-to-Savannah March to the Sea. Gen. Sherman’s goal was to foster fear, inflict pain, and get Georgians to ditch the Confederate cause. Trump has adopted his own fear-and-pain approach on his march toward ever-greater domination of the GOP House, the Republican National Committee (he wants it run by an election denier and his daughter-in-law, nothing to see here), and, of course, the Republican presidential primary season and 2024 nomination.
A famous number from Damn Yankees, the 1955 musical, sung by a temptress trying to seduce her man, conveys Trump’s subtler wiles. Substitute his name for Lola’s and the lyrics are a chilling, perfect fit for our moment:
Whatever Donald wants
Donald gets
Make up your mind
To have
No regrets
Recline yourself
Resign yourself
You’re through
I always get what I aim for
And your heart and soul
Is what I came for.
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