As the first two years of President Donald Trump's administration close, Republican allies still haven't figured out how best to influence a leader who takes cues from the forces that swept him to office and seems to fear losing them above all else.
Republicans on Capitol Hill and even the president's closest advisers have been whipsawed over a series of recent actions that show how intently Trump relies on what is sometimes called his gut — an adherence to campaign promises he made that are being reinforced by a constellation of election gurus, Fox News personalities and others who hold sway like few others.
"I know he can be a handful, but he is the president," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told The Associated Press.
On the domestic front, no sooner had Trump signaled he might be backing off his demand for $5 billion to build a border wall with Mexico — easing away from a partial government shutdown — than he took a U-turn after being scolded by conservative allies and pundits, who accused him of wavering on a campaign promise. Now, three days into the shutdown, his budget chief says it could drag into the New Year.
On issues abroad, Trump acted against the advice of his national security advisers and issued a surprise decision to pull troops from Syria. That prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to step down and Trump's special envoy to the coalition fighting Islamic State militants, Brett McGurk, to resign. A drawdown of troops in Afghanistan also appeared to be in the works.
As the stock market tumbled on Christmas Eve, Trump lashed out at the Federal Reserve sowing more uncertainty over his public criticism of chairman Jerome Powell.
Now, as Republicans prepare to relinquish their hold on government, with Democrats taking control of the House in January, the opportunities — and limits — of the GOP alliance with the Trump White House may be running their course.
"I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal," the president tweeted.
Over and again, Trump has shown himself to be more of a tactical, than strategic, thinker, acting to avoid short-term pain rather than seeking long-term gain.
When Congress was about to keep the government running without a fight over border wall money, Trump felt the outcry from his base and intervened.
Trump told House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican leaders at the White House he wouldn't sign a Senate-passed compromise bill, which would have kept border security money at $1.3 billion, not the $5 billion he wanted for the wall with Mexico.
The House and Senate gaveled in for a brief Christmas Eve session Monday only to close up quickly for the holidays.
"Trump is plunging the country into chaos," the Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement. "Instead of bringing certainty into people's lives, he's continuing the Trump Shutdown just to please right-wing radio and TV hosts."
Trump's sudden moves on Syria left top Republicans on Capitol Hill criticizing his decision to pull out all of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., signed on to a letter with other GOP senators urging Trump to reconsider.
Graham used a weekend luncheon with conservative lawmakers at the White House to impress on the president the rightness of his instinct on both the border wall and the troop withdrawal in Syria, while also sharing with Trump some ideas for smoothing the policy around both issues.
"I told the president, I'm not arguing with your general philosophy," Graham said. "He's a good listener."
Graham reminded Trump that while shoring up the border wall is important, "a Southern wall isn't going to protect you against ISIS."
It's unclear if Trump was listening. The Pentagon said Monday that Mattis has already signed the order to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria.
And Mattis, who was also unhappy with Trump's order to develop plans to pull out half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, was being pushed out two months early. Irritated by a surge of criticism over his decision, Trump said Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will take over as acting secretary on Jan. 1.
Trump's allies chock up the president's year-end moves to a wager that the intense support from his base of voters will continue to propel his electoral chances in 2020 — even if polling suggests otherwise.
An analysis of VoteCast, a nationwide poll of more than 115,000 midterm voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, highlights the fractures.
A small, but significant slice of voters — the 18 percent who described themselves as only "somewhat" approving of the president — expressed concerns.
Compared with the 27 percent of voters who describe themselves as strong Trump supporters, the "somewhat" Trump voters are much more likely to disapprove of Trump on key issues and have reservations about his personality.
In a warning signs for Republicans, who just lost their House majority in the November election, those voters are more likely to have voted for Democrats in 2018. They are more educated, somewhat more likely to be women, and more likely to live in suburbs.
The president has been busy on the phone to allies on Capitol Hill, talking late into the night with some.
Trump seemed "exuberant" at the luncheon, said one Republican, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who was the only member of the GOP leadership to attend.
Ryan, who is retiring, and McConnell have become almost side actors to the year-end shutdown they both tried to avoid, but now will partly own. Both offices said it was up to Trump and Democrats to cut a deal.
Shelby said that at lunch Trump did seem like he wanted to reach a deal. At the same time, it's not always clear whether any of the hours of conversation result in decisions that drift too far from Trump's own instinct to stay close to his base.
"I don't think it's imminent we're going to reach a deal," Shelby said. "I wish we could."
Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Catherine Lucey, Jill Colvin, and Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is out to win votes by scoring some laughs at the expense of Donald Trump, unleashing mockery with the goal of getting under the former president's thin skin and reminding the country of his blunders.
Like a comic honing his routine, the Democratic president has been testing and expanding his jokes over the past few weeks. It started with jabs about his Republican opponent's financial problems, and now Biden regularly pokes fun at Trump's coiffed hair, his pampered upbringing and his attempt to make a few extra bucks by selling a special edition of the Bible.
The jokes are the latest attempt to crack the code on how to clap back at Trump, whose own insult comedy schtick has redrawn the boundaries of what is acceptable in modern politics. Few have had much luck, whether they try to take the high road or get down and dirty with Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
“This is a constant challenge,” said Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama. Trump is “not someone who plays by the rules. So it’s up to Biden to figure out how to adapt and play by new rules of engagement.”
So far, Biden has been trying to thread a delicate needle to boost his chances of a second term. He uses humor to paint Trump as a buffoon unworthy of the Oval Office, but the president stops short of turning the election into a laughing matter.
Sometimes he finds that a few jokes can energize an audience even more than a major policy victory and draw precious attention away from an opponent who otherwise commands the spotlight even while stuck in a New York courtroom for his first criminal trial.
The latest example came at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night. After years of Trump constantly needling Biden as “sleepy” and mocking his age (Biden is 81, Trump is 77), Biden lobbed the insult back after Trump appeared to doze off in court. Trump's campaign disputed that he was asleep, and with no video camera in place and trained on him there’s no way of knowing for sure.
Still, Biden nicknamed his rival “Sleepy Don,” adding, “I kind of like that. I may use it again.”
”Of course the 2024 election’s in full swing and, yes, age is an issue," he said. "I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”
Trump didn't seem to appreciate the ribbing, posting on his social media platform that the dinner was “really bad” and Biden was “an absolute disaster.”
But jokes at the annual black-tie affair, which also features a professional comedian (this year it was Colin Jost of NBC's “Saturday Night Live”), are nothing new. The real meat of Biden's routine comes during campaign speeches in which he devotes a few moments to taking digs at Trump in between recitations of policy proposals and legislative accomplishments.
“Remember when he was trying to deal with COVID? He suggested: Inject a little bleach in your vein,” Biden said Wednesday to a labor union, describing Trump's guidance from the White House during the pandemic. “He missed. It all went to his hair.”
In Tampa, Florida, the day before, he assailed Trump for the Supreme Court's ruling that overturned abortion protections — with three justices nominated by Trump voting in the majority of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — and then pivoted to the former president's hawking of a $60 “God Bless the USA” Bible.
“He described the Dobbs decision as a ‘miracle,’” Biden said of Trump. “Maybe it’s coming from that Bible he’s trying to sell. Whoa. I almost wanted to buy one just to see what the hell is in it.”
Biden rarely references Trump's court cases, but jokes about financial problems that began soon after the former president was ordered to pay $454 million in a civil case in New York.
"Just the other day," Biden said at a fundraiser in Dallas last month, “a defeated-looking guy came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, I need your help. I’m being crushed with debt. I’m completely wiped out.’ I had to say, 'Donald, I can’t help you.'”
Even when Biden tries his hand at humor, he rarely strays far from talking about policies. He likes to note that he signed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law — after his opponent failed to do so despite repeatedly holding White House events to drum up support for an idea that never materialized.
“He promised ‘Infrastructure Week’ every week for four years and never built a damn thing,” Biden said this month to a group of laughing union members.
The dilemma is that Trump, who tells voters the whole American political system is hopelessly corrupt, can get away with name-calling that would backfire on other candidates. During his rallies, Trump imitates Biden as a feeble old man who cannot find the stairs after giving a brief speech, and he calls the president “crooked” and “a demented tyrant.”
The Republican's campaign said the insults will only intensify as Biden tries to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said Biden is “shuffling his feet like a short-circuited Roomba,” referring to the robot vacuum, while failing to address the “out-of-control border” and “runaway inflation.”
Rick Tyler, who worked on the presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in 2016, said voters have a double standard because expectations are different for Trump, who first became famous as a real estate developer and the star of the reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
“Celebrities don’t really have standards, and Trump is in that lane,“ Tyler said. For a politician going up against Trump, "it’s like trying to play a sport with the wrong equipment.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., found that out the hard way in the Republican primary in 2016. After Rubio joked about Trump having “small hands” — suggesting that another part of him was small, too — Trump swung back by saying, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.”
“Nobody has ever beaten Trump by getting in the ring with him,” said Alex Conant, communications director for Rubio's campaign.
Karen Finney, who advised Democrat Hillary Clinton in her 2016 White House run, said Trump can bait opponents into "communicating on his terms, not your terms.”
“It’s the kind of thing where you have to have a balance," she said. "You could spend all day just responding.”
But if Trump's humor is blunt, Biden sometimes tries to get the most mileage by staying subtle. During a Pittsburgh stop earlier this month, Biden spoke elliptically about Trump's trial, betting his audience was already in on the joke.
Trump, he said, is “a little busy right now.”
President Joe Biden laughs as host Colin Jost speaks at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Saturday, April 27, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
FILE - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, answers a question as Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., listens, during a presidential debate March 10, 2016, in Coral Gables, Fla. President Joe Biden is out to win some votes by scoring laughs at the expense of former President Trump, but Trump can get away with name-calling that would backfire on other candidates. After Rubio joked about Trump having “small hands” — suggesting that another part of him was small too, Trump swung back by saying, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)
President Joe Biden laughs as host Colin Jost speaks at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Saturday, April 27, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
President Joe Biden attends the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Saturday, April 27, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
