Will Democrats take advantage of a weakened Trump? Will their base let them?

After two months and two weeks in office, Donald Trump’s poll approval numbers are awful for a new president. But one thing Trump has going for him is that while most progressives and Democrats are united in their loathing for the 45th president, they’re divided on what to do about it.

Furious over Trump winning while losing the popular vote — and winning after a campaign loaded with transgressive moments — many on the left initially rejected the idea that Trump should even be accepted as president. But now, after the Republican health care debacle, the dynamics in Washington have changed — starting with Trump souring on the hardline House Freedom Caucus, which seems no more likely to bend to Trump’s wishes then it was to President Obama’s. In Politico, conservative pundit Rich Lowry wrote ...

The supposed affinity between Trump and the Freedom Caucus is one of the great ideological misunderstandings of our time. Just because Trump and the conservative caucus are both “anti-establishment” doesn’t mean they have anything else in common. Trump is more naturally an ally of the moderate Tuesday Group [of Republican lawmakers], except with a flame-throwing Twitter feed.

Vanity Fair Hive blog author Abigail Tracy noted the hints that Trump was considering cutting a grand deal with moderates in his party and with moderate Democrats on tax reform and other big issues. One way to look at this is it’s Trump being Trump, hunting for a deal and not being driven by rigid ideology. Another is to see it as a profound sign of early-term presidential weakness — one that Democrats should look to exploit by winning more favorable compromises than they ever might have expected.

This is why House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote a letter to House Democrats calling for discussions of how to shore up the Affordable Care Act after it escaped repeal — “perhaps even with the president.” Two more of America’s highest-profile Democrats — California Gov. Jerry Brown and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, both harsh Trump critics — almost certainly agree. They want to work with the president on his plans for a long-term $1 trillion infrastructure program.

But the problem Pelosi, Brown, Schumer and similarly minded Democrats face is that it’s becoming clear that many on the left didn’t just initially reject the idea that Trump should be accepted as president. They permanently rejected it. This is from an analysis by CNN political reporter Eric Bradner:

Buoyed by its initial victory on health care, Democrats are interested in using the improved bargaining position that the party’s House and Senate members suddenly find themselves in. ...

Instead, progressives are continuing to demand total opposition to Trump. ... Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-California, said ... the party’s constituencies ... believe they can hamstring Trump for the duration of his presidency.

Democrats are suggesting they’ll work with Trump only if he fully embraces their ideas — an unlikely prospect.

Huffington Post blogger Steve Heimoff puts it this way:

President Trump, if you’re considering “outreach” to us Democrats, fuggedaboudit. We don’t want or need your help; you need ours, but you’re not going to get it.

This suggests a new kind of D.C. gridlock. Instead of two sides, there will be three: the we-won’t-give-an-inch folks of the left, the we-won’t-give-an-inch folks of the right and a group of politicians on the left and the right who agree on little but who believe Congress should occasionally, you know, tackle national problems.

This three-way fight could be on display in coming months when Congress will be asked to again raise the debt ceiling to enable the borrowing that the Treasury Department has to undertake because the federal government spends more than it takes in. The old GOP conventional wisdom was that Trump and deficit hawks could use the debt ceiling to squeeze concessions from Democrats on spending. But that depends on the strange idea that if the Treasury runs out of money and the federal government shuts down this fall, Democrats with little clout would face more heat for not making concessions than the Republicans who control the White House and Congress.

And even if Trump doesn’t play hardball and just pushes for a straightforward increase in the debt ceiling, that too could be a disaster waiting to happen. That’s because the White House won’t have to just worry about Democratic lawmakers urged by their radicalized base to never help him on any issue ever. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma, told the Washington Examiner, “If we couldn’t get 216 votes to repeal Obamacare, count me as skeptical that there’s 216 Republicans that will vote to increase the debt ceiling.”

The longest of the 17 previous shutdowns of the federal government — the 21-day impasse in late December 1995 and early January 1996 that led to White House intern Monica Lewinsky meeting President Clinton — could end up seeming ho-hum compared to the shutdown looming come football season.

Would such an embarrassment for President Trump satisfy the left-leaners who loathe him? Maybe. But not all of them. In my decades of being a politics junkie, I’ve never seen more progressives contemplate the idea of using violence to express dissatisfaction than in the past year, and Trump is why. This is from Vann R. Newkirk II, writing in The Atlantic last June:

The central premise of a Trump presidency is violence, and the coercive threat of violence: building a wall and intimidating Mexico into paying for it, banning immigrants based on religion, expanding the country’s already-expansive deportation protocol and punishing women for abortions. ... [Advocacy of nonviolence] becomes a cudgel against the oppressed when violent people in power require those without power to adopt it as the sole way of reacting to violence.

After anti-conservative violence in Washington D.C., Berkeley and Middlebury, Vermont, Emmett Rensin wrote an essay last month that rejected mainstream views and discussed the “promise” of such a reaction to Trump. The piece didn’t appear on a fringe website. It ran in Foreign Policy magazine. Here’s a sampling:

With the ascension of Donald Trump, the United States finds itself in an uncertain place, and this uncertainty is felt most acutely among the poor and oppressed. Perhaps it should not surprise us that under such circumstances, more and more people are convinced that the official channels of political redress have broken down, that the system is not working and therefore extreme measures must be taken. For two years, mainstream American media has called Trump a fascist. I don’t believe that, but for those who do, what strategic conclusion can they reach? You don’t fight a fascist the same way that you fight a standard stock reactionary. You certainly don’t fight him by calling your congressmen and writing sternly worded takes. ...

If violence is an extraordinary recourse, then its use signifies extraordinary circumstances, affirming the abnormality and urgency of its conditions. A voice calling in the wilderness may not be heard. It is difficult to ignore a forest fire.

This sort of thinking worries liberal commentator Amanda Kerri. She wrote in The Advocate that ...

... far too many of us are beginning to justify and normalize the idea of violence against our opponents, and that’s what frightens me.

If Democrats embarrassing Trump is a safety valve against the Rensin view gaining traction, maybe that’s not a bad thing. The idea of normalizing Trump has been traumatic enough for a lot of Americans. In an already painfully divided nation, normalizing political violence would be catastrophic.

Reed is the deputy editor of the editorial and opinion pages. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com. Twitter: @chrisreed99

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