Trump's GOP guardrails obliterated after impeachment

Five days after President Donald Trump was acquitted in the Senate’s impeachment trial, whatever restraints the Republican Party envisioned for him going forward are being utterly obliterated.

The president is ousting impeachment inquiry witnesses like Alexander Vindman and Gordon Sondland with hints at more to come and attacking senators whom he may need down the stretch to support his agenda. He’s defeated the GOP’s free-traders and is continuing to shift billions of Pentagon funds toward the border wall, despite Republicans’ reservations about his use of the national emergency statute.

And after initially treating Trump-sought investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden with skepticism, key Senate Republicans are now plowing ahead with probes of their own into their old colleague.

The upshot is the Senate GOP’s robust anti-Trump wing from four years ago has been whittled down to a handful of Maybe Trumpers. And those who had hoped the president would be chastened by becoming the third president ever to be impeached by the House are doing little to rein him in even though he emerged with a different lesson entirely.

“Presidential personnel matters are for the president to make,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who criticized Trump for requesting probes into the Bidens but found his conduct not impeachable. He declined to reassess his belief that Trump may be humbled after impeachment: “My hope is that the president will have learned something.”

Trump almost surely would have faced outrage from Republicans three years ago for ousting two impeachment witnesses, targeting Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and belligerently going after his critics at the National Prayer Breakfast. But what once was a frantic push and pull between congressional Republicans and the president has now become a nearly party-wide synergy with Trump.

They don’t embrace the actions or rhetoric of the confrontational and controversial head of their party, but Republicans are done fighting with him as they head together into a November election in which their fates are tied.

“I hope that’s a last-week phenomenon. And it’s not going to carry on in the future,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) of Trump’s retributions since being acquitted. He declined to implore Trump to put an end to it: “I’m not going to tell him how to do his job.”

Efforts to dial back Trump’s tariffs have been abandoned. Shifting new money from military priorities to the border wall is met with little outrage. The Senate has yet to pass sanctions on Turkey for its Syrian incursion, which came after Trump withdrew troops in the fall and prompted loud handwringing from Republicans.

GOP critics like former Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee are gone, replaced by stalwart allies like Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who was appointed to the seat previously held by John McCain (R-Ariz.).

“The style of how he does things — he’s different in that sense,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), a freshman senator. “In general, I like how he’s trying to shake things up around here.”

And attacks on colleagues like Romney, the lone congressional Republican to support impeaching and removing Trump, are met with only mild concern that the GOP’s whip counts could be affected.

“The president’s never been a legislator. And his view of those relationships would be different than ours would,” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of GOP leadership. “Our view is the next vote’s the most important vote. And we’re going to have it before too long.”

Where there is occasional dissent, it is on votes forced upon the GOP by Democrats. The minority party is using its procedural powers to try to curb Trump’s authority to attack Iran and block the national emergency Trump declared to seize wall funding.

But the number of Republicans that support rebuking the president in those areas consistently falls far short of the 67 votes needed to override Trump’s impending veto. And even on those symbolic votes, most in the GOP are loath to break with Trump.

Overall for Republicans, the story of Trumps’ presidency is one of a daily outrage only to be replaced by another. GOP senators have learned to embrace the upbeat economy, the tax cuts, the conservative judges and the deregulation. When Trump finds himself embroiled in controversy, these days they wait until the storm passes, knowing another will follow.

“Things have a short shelf life around here. I think the president, like all of us, is going to be ready to move on,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.).

Whereas Corker once responded to the president by calling the White House an “adult daycare,” the current targets of Trump’s barbs mostly try not to fire back at him. Manchin, who Trump called “munchkin,” said being on the receiving end of Trump’s vitriol is “to be expected.”

“I've dealt with a lot of people like the president before so I can work with anybody and everybody. Sometimes they can't control their own emotions,” said Manchin, who Trump savaged during his 2018 re-election campaign. “It’s not a good way to live your life.”

Romney mostly refused to engage with Trump’s attacks on him Monday, which have ranged from calling him a “failed presidential candidate” that didn’t work hard enough to beat President Barack Obama to alluding to him as among the people “who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” a reference to Romney’s remarks on why he chose to vote to remove Trump from office.

“I don’t really have any comment on his reaction. I expect he’ll say what he believes,” Romney said.

Romney, like every Republican interviewed for this story, said Trump was entitled to fire Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, and reassign Vindman, a lieutenant colonel, from the National Security Council after they testified in the impeachment inquiry. The Utah senator did say he admired them for responding to congressional subpoenas.

A handful of Republicans did try to delay the firing of Sondland — a longtime donor to Senate Republicans — in a bid to shield Trump from allegations that he was punishing those who testified against him in the impeachment inquiry. But it doesn’t appear there was a full-scale effort to save Sondland’s job.

“Ambassador Sondland was planning on leaving. He had been there for two years,” said Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who Sondland donated to in the past. Tillis, who did not speak directly to Trump, suggested to the White House that “we have a little bit longer glide path. But now it is what it is.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was also working to delay Sondland’s firing but downplayed it as “a couple phone calls” aimed at letting Sondland resign rather than be fired.

Johnson was more enthusiastic about digging into Hunter Biden’s role at a Ukrainian energy company during the time his father was vice president. Johnson and Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are requesting the State Department release any documents related to Hunter Biden.

The Wisconsin Republican said he’s received “virtually none.” Now that Trump’s trial is over, he expects things to pick up as Republicans join the president's call for probes into his enemies rather than urge Trump to move on from the Ukraine saga.

“We have not been getting document production and the White House has been reluctant during the impeachment,” Johnson said. “So hopefully now that that's past we'll start getting” documents.