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Trump: ‘We must fight’ hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus in 2018 midterm elections

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said he shares President Trump's frustration with hardline conservative Freedom Caucus members who blocked the Republican health-care bill. Trump tweeted a warning to the group March 30, saying they would "hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast." (Reuters)

By John Wagner, Mike DeBonis and Robert Costa March 30 at 5:30 PM

President Trump threatened Thursday to try to knock off members of the House Freedom Caucus in next year’s elections if they don’t fall in line — an extraordinary move that laid bare a civil war within a Republican Party struggling to enact an ambitious agenda.

In a morning tweet, the president warned that the powerful group of hard-line conservatives who blocked the health-care bill last week would “hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast.”

The president vowed to “fight them” as well as Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections, a threat that his allies said was intended in the short term to make members of the Freedom Caucus think twice about crossing him again. But Trump’s vow was met with defiance by many in the group, including some who accused him of succumbing to the establishment in Washington that he had campaigned against.

Later in the day, Trump singled out three of the group’s members in another tweet, saying if they got on board, “we would have both great healthcare and massive tax cuts & reform.”

Most of the roughly three dozen Freedom Caucus members were elected from very safe Republican districts, and many of them faced no primary opposition in their last election. To make good on his threat, Trump would have to recruit GOP candidates to make the case that the Republican incumbent they face was unhelpful to an unorthodox president.

Trump’s frustrations with the Freedom Caucus reflect only part of his challenge in moving legislation, even in a Congress where both chambers are controlled by his own party. If Trump does too much to mollify members of the Freedom Caucus, he risks alienating a similar number of moderate Republicans in districts won or narrowly lost by last year’s Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

And on many pieces of Trump’s congressional agenda, he’ll need the support of at least some Democrats, particularly in the Senate, an uncertain prospect given the toxic partisan environment on the Hill.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters a few hours after Trump’s first tweet on Thursday that he sympathized with Trump.

“I understand the president’s frustration,” said Ryan, who has been unable to push the health-care bill through his own chamber. “About 90 percent of our conference is for this bill to repeal and replace Obamacare and about 10 percent are not. And that’s not enough to pass a bill.”

Ryan said he had no immediate plans to bring the health-care bill back to the House floor, saying it was “too big of an issue to not get right.”

Trump and his White House advisers have been frustrated by the intransigence of Freedom Caucus members, led by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.).

In a series of White House meetings, Trump lobbied them intensively to support the GOP plan to replace President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, only to see the bill collapse last Friday after Meadows and some of his allies said they would not vote for it. The bill also faced strong opposition from more moderate Republicans who were concerned that it went too far in cutting Medicaid and leaving millions of people without insurance.

House Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) spoke to reporters about the House GOP health-care plan, which failed to come to a vote March 23.(The Washington Post)

“This has been brewing for a while,” a White House official said of Trump’s decision to target Freedom Caucus members and other GOP foes.

“Our view is: There’s nothing as clarifying as the smell of Air Force One jet fuel. So if he needs to bring in the plane and do a rally, he’s going to think about doing that,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

The official added that Trump and White House aides are “sick and tired” of seeing Freedom Caucus members on television in recent days.

Trump’s threat comes as Republican leaders are bracing for a month of potential GOP infighting over spending priorities. Congress must pass a spending bill by April 28 to avert a government shutdown, but the path ahead is narrow and filled with obstacles.

Beyond that, the same divide that derailed the health-care legislation could imperil the next marquee legislation that Trump wants to tackle: tax reform.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday that Trump remains committed to “a bold and robust agenda,” adding: “He’s going to get the votes from wherever he can.”

Since Friday’s debacle, Trump and his aides have increasingly talked up the possibility of working with Democrats on a reboot of the health-care bill and other priorities — but that prospect has also divided Republicans on Capitol Hill.

In in a television interview that aired Thursday morning, Ryan said he does not want to see Trump have to work with Democrats on revamping the Affordable Care Act — a seven-year pledge by Republicans — only to draw flak from some members of his own party, including Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

[Hill Republicans trying to avert a shutdown need Democrats — and Trump]

“He’s irritated,” anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist said in explaining Trump’s decision to lash out at Freedom Caucus members. “During the health-care discussions, the Freedom Caucus would say they’d support him if they got one thing, then they’d want another thing. If you’re Trump, you wonder, ‘Why are these people meeting with me if they’re always going to be a ‘no’ vote?’ There was room for give, and they wouldn’t give.”

If Trump gets involved in Republican primaries, Norquist said he thinks it’s possible Trump could “get some scalps.”

Though Trump’s job approval numbers are sagging nationally, he remains popular in many of the districts from which the Freedom Caucus members were elected. However, most Freedom Caucus members won a larger percentage of the vote last year in their districts than Trump did.

On Capitol Hill, Trump’s tweet was met with a range of reactions — with some members saying it could prove counterproductive and others praising him for using the power of his office in a way he hasn’t to this point. Though Trump met with dozens of lawmakers in the days before the House health-care bill was pulled, he did little to single out wavering members, either on Twitter or by visiting their districts to make the case for the bill.

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), who has called for health-insurance reform to work its way through Congress more slowly, said that with Trump’s tweet on Thursday, the president was taking exactly the wrong approach to House Freedom Caucus members.

“The idea of threatening your way to legislative success may not be the wisest of strategies,” Sanford said Thursday. “His message yesterday was that he wanted to work with Democrats; I guess the message today is ‘we need to fight against Freedom Caucus members and Democrats.’. . . It’s a case of shooting messengers who were, rightfully, pointing out problems in a bill that the American public has not shown a proclivity toward.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), another Freedom Caucus member, said the break with Trump on the health-care legislation was based on real policy differences, not a lack of loyalty.

“The president can say what he wants and that’s fine. But we’re focused on the legislation,” Jordan told reporters.

Some of the harshest responses to Trump came via Twitter, his preferred means of provocative communication. Those included a tweet from Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who said that Trump’s support of the health-care bill signaled he was now part of the Washington establishment that he had campaigned against.

“It didn’t take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump,” said Amash, a member of the Freedom Caucus and one of Trump’s frequent GOP critics. “No shame, Mr. President. Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. Establishment.”

Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who’s not part of the Freedom Caucus, said he was among the lawmakers sympathetic to Trump.

“There’s a fair number of us who are applauding him,” said Cramer, adding that he saw the tweet as being true to Trump’s blustery, aggressive nature. But Cramer, an early Trump campaign supporter, also acknowledged some Freedom Caucus members would only be emboldened by the tweet.

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), however, said Trump’s focus on the Freedom Caucus was well placed.

“He’s obviously frustrated, as many of us are, and there’s only one place where the finger-pointing should go, and that’s to the Freedom Caucus,” he said.

Collins, a member of the Tuesday Group, a group of moderate House Republicans, rejected the notion — put forth this week by members of both groups — that there could be an accommodation on the health-care bill forged between them.

“The Tuesday Group will never meet with the Freedom Caucus, with a capital N-E-V-E-R,” Collins said, spelling out the last word.

The only way the health-care bill could be rekindled, he added, would be if Freedom Caucus members became willing to accept a bill that was substantially the same as the one that failed Friday.“Frankly, I don’t see that happening,” Collins said.

Some Republicans said they see potential for Trump forging a governing coalition that includes some Democrats, which would allow him to look past the Freedom Caucus.

“Trump is a New York-type bargainer who wants to get something done even if that means working with Democrats,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a moderate Republican. “That approach will give him a lot of room to maneuver on taxes and infrastructure. Once you break the barrier that every bill has to have total Republican support, you can be more creative.”

Michael Steel, who was a senior aide to former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), said there is potential in some districts for Trump to dislodge Freedom Caucus members if he puts his political organization behind the effort.

“If the president chooses to support primary challengers to House members who’ve been unhelpful, it wouldn’t necessarily be an ideological challenge,” Steel said. “It would be based on loyalty to the president, or lack thereof.”

But Steel added: “You don’t necessarily have to wait for 2018 for this to have an effect. Even the threat could work in the short term.”

There is precedent for Republican leaders taking aim at Freedom Caucus members. A spate of 2015 ads purchased by the American Action Network, a nonprofit issue advocacy group with ties to House GOP leaders, targeted Jordan and two other hard-liners for opposing a Department of Homeland Security funding bill.

Those ads infuriated members of the Freedom Caucus, then only months old, and spawned a confrontational relationship that culminated in Boehner’s resignation six months later.

One open question is whether the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP’s House campaign arm, would intervene on behalf on incumbents in the Freedom Caucus who are targeted by Trump.

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the NRCC’s chairman, chuckled Thursday after a reporter read him Trump’s tweet about the Freedom Caucus and asked him whether the NRCC might intervene.

“I want to be very clear: We have a policy of helping out incumbents that pay their dues,” Stivers said, referring to the hundreds of thousands of dollars GOP lawmakers are expected to raise for the committee each election cycle. “As long as . . . they pay their dues, we’re gonna be there for them. . . If I was them, I’d take a look and see how I’m doing on my dues.”

Philip Rucker, David Weigel, Sean Sullivan and Scott Clement contributed to this report.