Well here's a shock, from Axios:
There was an effort yesterday to get House GOP conservatives — the House Freedom Caucus and Republican Study Committee — to meet with GOP moderates — the Tuesday Group — to talk about a path forward after last week's failed health care effort.
It ended up deteriorating into blame-shifting and recriminations.
The Tuesday Group met yesterday, and a Tuesday Group source said there were "fireworks at the meeting," with members resentful at being told to sit down with the Freedom Caucus.
Oh my, there seems to be chronic unpleasantness taking place in the majority party's sandbox. Classic is this quote from a "White House source":
Welcome to my life the last two weeks. This was never about policy. This was about people wanting to oppose each other and it's such a divided conference at the moment it's hard to get things done. We were the ones caught in the crossfire.
That, of course, is unmitigated malarkey. The WH and its antecedent campaign have been in the front lines of blasting away at responsible, coherent governance. In a Politico op-ed, none other than the National Review's Rich Lowry grasps this fundamental point. "Trumpism is in crisis," he writes. "No officeholder in Washington seems to understand President Donald Trump’s populism or have a cogent theory of how to effect it in practice, including the president himself."
As is his wont, Lowry, from there, gets most everything else wrong, such as this beaut of miscomprehension: "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, except with a flame-throwing Twitter feed."
Trump is a natural ally of no one but himself. In my preceding post I quoted Princeton historian David Bell, who really rang the truth of the president's political solipsism: "Trump himself is … nearly always guided by a single principle: his own self-interest." That makes him a friend of nobody and the enemy of all.
And with that kind of executive "leadership," his party will persist in its unpleasant unruliness.