'Blindsided' at every turn: Trump has Senate GOP leader at wit's end

Punch Bowl News reported Friday that it seems like every time Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) gets ahead, he is thrown back several steps by Donald Trump.

House and Senate Republicans don't see eye-to-eye on much, but they can both agree they've been waylaid by Trump just when it seems they're "turning a corner." For Thune has accelerated over the past month.

Thune "had just about the worst luck over the past couple of months, getting blindsided repeatedly by a president who sometimes seems not to care that much about the fate of his congressional majorities," the report explained.

The holiday edition of the site's morning news explained that Thune had things well in hand before being thrown into a tilt-a-whirl being run by a madman. While lawmakers were desperate to end the government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump began demanding that lawmakers help him fund $1 billion in funds for his ballroom project. Trump initially said that $200 million is all he would need and that he would fundraise to afford it. That has since changed to be $600 million and Trump was only able to raise half of it.

There was backlash from Republicans, but in the end, taxpayers must pay for half of it. In another matter, Republicans thought they'd be able to fast-track Trump's choice for the Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte. That was scrapped and his lack of support turned Pulte into an "acting" secretary. Trump then shut down the hearing for his real choice that was scheduled for this week.

"Thune has seen that even when he does what Trump wants, the favor is rarely, if ever, returned," wrote the Punch Bowl team.

Meanwhile, Thune is taking it in stride, managing to only flash "some anger here and there. But his relationship with Trump has clearly taken a hit.

On Thursday, Thune said he hadn't spoken to Trump since the previous weekend, so there was no interaction about Trump abruptly trying to stop Jay Clayton's confirmation hearing set for Wednesday.

“I’ve never been asked to slow a nomination down before,” Thune told Punch Bowl. “We’re just executing — or trying to execute — on what they had asked us to do. They nominated him.”

Instead of Clayton's confirmation, Pulte will take over and start making big changes. There are challenges with that, as Pulte appeared not to know the basics about the post.

It remains unknown why Clayton's nomination hearing was stopped, and Republicans were just as "perplexed that Trump was deliberately slowing down his own pick’s confirmation process."

The GOP lawmakers have also been public about their dissatisfaction with Trump's Iran deal. Thune had been asking all week for the White House to brief him, but for an unknown reason, he "was consistently stiff-armed."

Then there's the infighting in the Senate GOP itself. A closed-door meeting on Wednesday resulted in a battle after Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) began "undermining the GOP majority by continuing to push for the SAVE Act," Trump's flagship voting rights restrictions.

Thune made it clear the SAVE Act was dead unless they killed the filibuster, and that's never happening, he made clear.

“Everybody knows we’re not nuking the filibuster,” Thune told Punchbowl. “It was on the floor for two weeks. We’ve had now five votes on it, none of which have gotten 60, and SAVE America hasn’t even gotten 50. So at some point, it seems like we ought to start making this an issue with the Democrats rather than with each other. That was the gist of the [lunch] conversation, and that would be my view.”

It's a rare rebuke of one Republican by another, the report sussed.

Meanwhile, Republicans are preparing to debate a bipartisan housing bill because they want to refocus Trump on issues that Americans actually care about. That hasn't worked in the past, however.

Thune, rather than Trump, has been the one to get the blame, even if other Republicans don't think it's right

"What’s true is that Trump is never going to accept the limits of the Senate’s legislative power. Thune is always going to have to tell him 'no' when the votes aren’t there. And 'no' is a word Trump doesn’t like," the report closed.

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