Behind the Curtain: Trump, alone
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President Trump meets with U.S. travel executives in the Oval Office last week. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Top White House officials and elected Republicans tell us the same thing in private: They no longer even try to persuade President Trump to do or not do something.
- "Why bother?" a longtime adviser and admirer told us. "He's the boss."
Why it matters: For nearly a decade, Republicans acquiesced to nearly every Trump demand and idea — and rationalized it by saying his instincts proved smarter than theirs. Now, many no longer trust those instincts. But they find it just as futile to push back against virtually anything he wants.
Start a war without an endgame? OK.
- Post a cartoon of you — wielding a hockey stick and sporting a Trump-branded USA jersey — towering over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, sprawled on the ice, and telling him to "GET UP"? On it.
- Toss together an egocentric, first-ever Republican midterm convention that many endangered candidates don't want? Sounds like a good plan, boss! (Gavels in Wednesday in Dallas at 4 p.m. ET, in fact.)
- Oh, you want to speak both nights? Done!
- Make ads featuring you when your popularity is near its all-time low? You came to the right place, sir.
- Make the midterms a referendum on you? Check.
- Spend precious time obsessing about ballroom construction, and gilding and marbleizing the White House? You are the new Caesar Augustus.
What we're hearing: Many aides and confidants have been worn down by Trump. They know they can't stop him, and they don't even try.
- More and more, they humor his whims.
- "He's an 80-year-old man who did it his way," said a donor who recently met with the president. "What he wants, he gets."
- White House insiders insist there's a semblance of structure and reason, and that the president doesn't act on every impulse. They declined to provide examples of times he resisted.
Between the lines: Republicans are pessimistic about keeping their House majority in midterms, and worried about the Senate. Regardless of the outcome, Trump will officially be a lame duck 56 days from now.
- On Nov. 4, the day after Election Day, attention will start turning to the 2028 race — and to the Democratic leaders who are likely to have new juice on Capitol Hill.
Trump, a top adviser emphasized, is no lame duck: "Discount Trump at your peril."
- "He wields enormous power in the party, in politics and culturally," the adviser said. "Anyone who thinks he's going to retreat into the shadows is either stupid or has bad political instincts."
The bottom line: Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump.
- "He's going to remain the dominant political figure even after his term ends," the adviser said. "And everybody knows it."
Axios' Marc Caputo contributed reporting from Dallas.
