How Republicans are preparing for life after Trump

As Donald Trump continues to lag behind Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the polls, Republicans in Congress are taking strategic steps to prepare for the post-Trump political landscape.

Several prominent GOP lawmakers have rediscovered their strong aversion to a soaring federal deficit, threatening to tank any bill costing another $1trn (or more) that would bolster the economy and health and education systems amid the coronavirus pandemic, despite the president’s desperation for a deal.

Some senators — Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, to name a few — have more openly and aggressively rebuked the Trump administration in recent months, on everything from the president’s impeachment, to his handling of protests against police brutality and the federal government’s Covid-19 response.

And virtually no one — not even the president’s own top aide — has signalled a willingness to give in to Mr Trump’s antics about moving back the 3 November 2020 election date.

"We're going to hold an election on November 3rd and the president is going to win," White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told CBS on Sunday, shutting down any chatter about Mr Trump’s proposed delay.

The deficit hawks

But Mr Trump is dealing with flagging support among several Republicans in the Senate.

Hedging against Mr Trump’s defeat this November, many of them are already acting like a presidential opposition party against Mr Biden by raising concerns about federal spending and a runaway deficit they themselves helped perpetuate.

These are the same senators who added trillions more dollars to the national debt via a sweeping tax cut in 2017 and authorised $2.7trn on federal coronavirus relief efforts in the spring.

Now, they’re vowing to vote against the president’s wishes to buoy an underwater economy and health care system with another $1trn in aid — never mind the roughly $4trn offer Democrats have made.

"What the hell are we doing?" Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, an original Tea Party conservative and deficit hawk, asked in a meeting with GOP senators, as he decried the White House’s proposed spending levels on Covid-19 relief.

Mr Cruz is not alone.

Nebraska’s Mr Sasse — a Yale-educated historian who fits snugly into the category of Republicans who frequently express their “concern” and “disappointment” with Mr Trump’s words but never actually do anything to hold him to account — has likened Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Mr Trump’s chief negotiator on economic deals with Congress, to big-spending Democrats.

“We have two big government Democrats — Secretary Mnuchin on behalf of the Trump administration and Speaker Pelosi on behalf of binge-spending politicians everywhere — playing gross games with your kids’ money,” Mr Sasse said last week on the state of Covid-19 negotiations.

“The White House is trying to solve bad polling by agreeing to indefensibly bad debt. This proposal is not targeted to fix precise problems — it’s about Democrats and Trumpers competing to outspend each other," Mr Sasse said.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump and the half-dozen Senate GOP incumbents who are in tight re-election races this cycle are desperate to deliver results for their constituents in the form of another coronavirus relief package, even if that means the federal government must raise taxes down the line to offset those losses.

Mr Trump’s chief selling point for 2020 was always going to be a humming national economy, with unemployment at a modern low point of 3.5 per cent and steady GDP growth.

Coronavirus has relegated that sales pitch to the dust bin.

Unemployment has been at double-digit levels for months now. National GDP was down by nearly 33 per cent in the second quarter. Investing markets remain extremely volatile (although, largely, on the up-and-up).

It’s not fair to place all the blame for Covid-19’s economic destruction on Mr Trump’s shoulders, but if Republicans can’t reach a deal with Democrats for more relief as cases continue to surge in some states — many of which broke for the president in 2016 — that’s where it’s going to fall this November.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have railed against their Republican colleagues for being “in disarray” when the nation is most in need of bipartisan cooperation

“They can't even get a bill passed on their side, even if it just took 51 votes,” Ms Pelosi said in an interview with MSNBC last week.

Deficit-hawk Republicans aren’t budging.

They’ve read the tea leaves — that is, polling data showing Mr Trump trailing Mr Biden in virtually every swing state he won in 2016 — and they’re positioning themselves as authentic fiscal conservatives to oppose a profligate Biden presidency.

That means a handful of Republicans will vote against whatever Covid-19 relief bill emerges from negotiations between Ms Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who faces well-funded Democratic challenger Amy McGrath this November.

“Republicans are going to be divided on this one” GOP Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a one-time deficit hawk, told CNBC last week.

Open criticism

At the same time, some GOP senators have become more aggressive in their rejection of Mr Trump’s more brazen statements.

Across the board, most of them have struck more sombre tones about simmering racial tensions and the broken relationships between minority communities and their local police departments.

Some have even outright criticised the president.

Mr Sasse issued an increasingly common reprimand of the Trump administration’s actions at Lafayette Square in June, when horse-mounted law enforcement personnel used tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash bang grenades to disperse a crowd of peaceful protesters so Mr Trump could safely make his way from the White House to St John’s Episcopal Church to pose before TV cameras and photojournalists with a bible in his right hand.

"There is a fundamental — a Constitutional — right to protest,” Mr Sasse told Politico at the time, “and I’m against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that treats the Word of God as a political prop.”

And Mr Romney, the only Senate Republican who voted to convict Mr Trump during his impeachment trial earlier this year, has continued to hound the president, most recently over his posture towards China.

At a Senate Foreign Relations hearing with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week, Mr Romney applauded the secretary for his "very clear-eyed evaluation of China's intent and their actions" regarding the country’s economic warfare against the US.

"It's also a welcome departure from the president's fawning praise of [Chinese Communist Party Leader] Xi Jinping and [Mr Trump’s] celebration of agreements that China hasn't honoured,” Mr Romney said.

And two of the most prominent Republican moderates, Alaska’s Ms Murkowski and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who is in a tossup race this November, have declined to say whether they’ll be supporting Mr Trump in November.

“My inclination,” Ms Collins told the New York Times recently, “is just to stay out of the presidential and focus on my own race.”