By Lauren Fox and Dan Merica
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is scheduled to have lunch Monday afternoon with President Donald Trump after a tumultuous several months in which Trump has attacked the Senate’s Republican leader by name and the President’s former adviser Steven Bannon has threatened all-out war on rank-and-file Republicans up for re-election.
The meeting comes as pressure on the Senate intensifies to pass tax cuts and give Trump at least one major legislative victory before the end of the year. The Senate will move this week to pass a budget, the first step in its effort to overhaul the tax code.
Trump and McConnell’s lunch Monday follows a weekend speech by Bannon, the former White House chief strategist. During an appearance at the Value Voters conference in Washington on Saturday, Bannon further declared war on the GOP establishment and called out McConnell by name.
“It’s not my war, this is our war and y’all didn’t start it, the establishment started it,” Bannon said.
He added, “Right now, it’s a season of war against a GOP establishment.”
McConnell and Trump’s relationship has been fraught ever since the Senate failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act in July. Over the August recess, Trump publicly bemoaned McConnell’s leadership.
Trump successfully ran for president by demeaning his enemies and rallying his base to deride his opponents. Those habits have followed him to the White House, and McConnell has regularly been that punching bag.
“Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done,” Trump tweeted in August. “Must Repeal & Replace ObamaCare!”
McConnell has declined to publicly respond directly to the President, instead telling reporters that he isn’t a fan of the “daily tweets.”
“I’ve been pretty candid with him and all of you that I’m not a fan of the daily tweets,” he said earlier this year.
Trump’s own aides, many of whom are tasked with working with Congress to turn Trump’s campaign promises into legislation, have privately lamented that the President’s attacks against members of his own party — most importantly McConnell — have made it more difficult to win over skeptical lawmakers.
Last week, some conservative outside groups, including the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks, called on McConnell and other leaders in the Senate to step aside.
Even rank-and-file members say that McConnell’s in a tough position if he cannot find a way to convince a majority of Senate Republicans to back a tax cut proposal. McConnell can only lose two Republican senators and still pass a bill.
“If we don’t cut taxes and we don’t eventually repeal and replace Obamacare, then we’re going to lose across the board in the House in 2018. And all of my colleagues running in primaries in 2018 will probably get beat,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” over the weekend. “It will be the end of Mitch McConnell as we know it.”
The-CNN-Wire ™ & © 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.
