Resigned to Trump’s woes, GOP keeps working on legislative goals

WASHINGTON - As James B. Comey was testifying that President Donald Trump was a liar, Sen. John Hoeven held two meetings about health care, and pondered ideas about infrastructure.

“We’re working,” said Hoeven, R-N.D., though he conceded that the president’s travails “make it tougher.”

For their part, his Republicans colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee made it clear at Comey’s hearing that they had no appetite to confront the president, saving their criticism for Hillary Clinton and spending much of their time focused on the fact that Trump himself was not under investigation.

As they have traveled through the various stages of grief over the unpredictability of their president and the realization that Trump is unlikely to change, congressional Republicans appear to have landed at acceptance, basically hoping that the president does not get in their way.

They have largely ceased defending or explaining Trump’s more ostentatiously reckless remarks or Twitter posts, and at their most critical they casually chide his behavior - as did Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who told Comey at the hearing that Trump “never should have asked you, as you reported, to let the investigation go.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan seemed to chalk up Trump’s attempt to pressure Comey into backing off an investigation into his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, to the incompetence of a newcomer. “The president’s new at this,” he told reporters Thursday.

Realizing that Trump has served as neither a strong advocate for their positions - indeed he often criticizes them - nor a focused student of public policy, Republicans are letting Democrats serve as Trump’s loudest critics while trying to establish the president as inept, perhaps, but not criminal.

“If being crude, rude and a bull in a china shop was a crime, Trump would get the death penalty,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "It’s not.”

With Trump still broadly popular among rank-and-file conservatives, Republican lawmakers are uneasy about aggressively criticizing the president and potentially angering their voters. So even while deeply critical of Trump in private, readily questioning his fitness for office, many of them leap to his defense before the cameras.

“Their calculation is that there’s no percentage in being public,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump critic. “Now I know what Vichy France must have felt like. Everybody is a patriot after 6 o’clock in the privacy of their own living room.”

Few Republicans who were interviewed Thursday thought Trump was immediately imperiled by Comey’s testimony. But there is growing fear that the drumbeat of questions about Trump’s conduct, the prospect of a loss in a highly anticipated special House election this month in Georgia, and months more of legislative inaction could debilitate Republicans going into the 2018 midterm elections.

In contrast to the Republicans in the capital who offered a defense of Trump, the party’s candidate in the Georgia House race was far more measured.

“I will look at the facts and let the facts take us to where the appropriate action should be,” Karen Handel, the Republican nominee, said in a debate that took place just as Comey’s hearing began. Handel, running in a district Trump narrowly carried last year, noted that she was “not an extension of the White House.”

Republicans in blue states are trying to execute even more limb-testing contortions. Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois, who is facing re-election next year, drew attention this month for a local TV interview in which he declined to mouth Trump’s name and ignored five successive questions about whether he had even voted for the president.

How Republican officials at all levels handle Trump will be similarly shaped by their own political interests, depending on whether they represent the president’s more enthusiastic backers or a more skeptical constituency.

Should Trump’s popularity continue to fall, as it has in consecutive polls over the past few months, some congressional Republicans may reconsider their support, especially if it is not yielding an accomplished agenda. In the long term, elected officials will also care deeply about the findings of Robert S. Mueller III, the special prosecutor investigating Trump’s campaign.

But even as his overall approval ratings fall, the president is retaining support among bedrock Republicans. A Quinnipiac survey this week that showed Trump’s job approval ratings slipping to just 34 percent also indicated that 81 percent of Republicans still approved of the president’s performance.

With the economy continuing to add jobs and the stock market growing, most Republicans believe there is little in the short term that could dislodge the party’s grass roots from their support of Trump. The only caveat to this assessment is if there is a national crisis of some kind.

“They know he understands business and thus jobs and the economy,” said state Sen. Jim Merritt of Indiana, a Republican who represents a district in the Indianapolis suburbs. “They feel that’s why they elected him. But if something happened on our soil, they’d be curious about how he would perform.”

For Republican candidates eyeing the prospect of contested primaries next year, their assumption is plainly that Republican voters expect them to rise to Trump’s defense.

“The Republican base is strongly for President Trump,” said Attorney General Bill Schuette of Michigan, who is planning to run for governor in 2018. Not so subtly invoking one of his potential Republican rivals who abandoned Trump’s candidacy, Schuette noted, “The base knows very clearly who was with Trump and who wasn’t.”

Local party leaders, while shrugging off the Russia investigation, concede there is a rising frustration that Republicans have yet to advance their legislative agenda. But in a sign of how much latitude they are giving Trump, Republican activists are more inclined to point a finger at Congress.

“There’s some frustration with the faithful not so much with the president, but with the House and Senate for dragging their feet on issues,” said Mark Lundberg, who was the longtime Republican chairman in Sioux County, Iowa, where Trump memorably bragged last year that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”