Trump’s filibuster fixation intensifies after a tough week for the GOP

By Adam Cancryn, Sarah Ferris, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump knows he’s losing the politics of the government shutdown so far. But that’s not making him any more inclined to give ground on the Democratic demands that could bring the standoff to a swift end.

Trump has repeatedly urged Senate Republicans to unilaterally reopen the government by killing the filibuster, insisting in public and private that the so-called nuclear move is the simplest way to resolve the crisis — and put him back on offense following one of the toughest weeks of his second term.

The president’s push to bypass Democrats completely has intensified since the GOP’s electoral drubbing on Tuesday, even as party leaders on Capitol Hill oppose such drastic action, and despite a pickup in bipartisan talks that lawmakers hope can eventually end the shutdown.

“He’s pressing — which he’s not going to get — the elimination of the filibuster,” said one person with knowledge of the behind-the-scenes shutdown discussions. “That’s not going to happen and he just has to accept that.”

Yet Trump remains undeterred, arguing that the filibuster is enabling Democrats’ opposition, impeding his own ambitions and dampening Republicans’ chances of staying in power beyond next year’s midterm elections.

The filibuster rule allows a minority of senators to block legislation if they can marshal 41 votes against it, giving the party out of power some measure of influence. Most Republicans see that as a structural benefit that has preserved conservative policies over time and prevented Democrats from enacting sweeping reforms.

On Friday, Trump urged the GOP in three separate Truth Social posts to cut off negotiations and change the rules instead. He reprised the argument at length during a White House meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“They’re making a big mistake,” he said of Republicans not eliminating the filibuster. “If we do it, we will never lose the midterms, and we will never lose the general election, because we will have produced so many different things for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose an election.”

Nuclear option is a nonstarter on the Hill

The president’s filibuster fixation has not appeared to sway many senators. GOP congressional leaders have said plainly to Trump — in public and in private — that nuking the filibuster is off the table. Even those who are personally open to the idea argue it’s an unhelpful conversation right now.

“Any minute we spend talking about this right now — that’s what the Democrats want. They want us to fight amongst themselves,” GOP Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio told local conservative radio host Bob Frantz on Friday. “This isn’t coming up for a vote in the US Senate. It’s not going to be voted on.”

Trump earlier this week acknowledged that he would “probably not” blow up his relationship with Republican lawmakers over the filibuster, though he’s continued to press them relentlessly since then.

And it has further complicated efforts to negotiate an end to the record-long shutdown, leaving members unsure of what exactly Trump might accept as part of a compromise deal — and Democrats more emboldened to stay dug in, especially after their electoral victories.

Senate Democrats have so far rejected the GOP’s offer of a vote on extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies at the center of the funding battle, countering on Friday with a call to continue the subsidies for a year while the two parties negotiate a longer-term deal.

Republican lawmakers quickly opposed the proposal, leaving the two sides deadlocked heading into the weekend.

A White House official cast the Democrats’ offer as a “massive climbdown” from the party’s initial push for a wide range of concessions, as well as reinforcement that Democratic lawmakers are the ones driving the shutdown in pursuit of their policy aims.

But the official declined to say whether Trump opposed the substance of the offer, sticking instead to the administration’s stance that it won’t negotiate until the government is open.

“They should open the government, and we’ll meet with them on the tax credit and work with them on it,” the official said, adding that Trump “doesn’t like that Americans are paying the price for Democrats trying to negotiate their policy agenda.”

Republican lawmakers have pushed for Trump to apply clearer pressure on Democrats, rather than on the filibuster, as negotiators search for a funding-and-health care formulation that can unlock the stalemate.

“I don’t know how we get out of this,” said one GOP leadership source, summing up the bleak situation on Capitol Hill as lawmakers prepared to work through the weekend.

But Trump has declined to get more directly involved. And aides and allies say the president’s own attitude toward the shutdown is far more high level: He just wants it over with — but also to emerge with some semblance of a victory.

GOP feels the shutdown’s political blowback

The electoral results earlier this week served as the clearest sign yet that the shutdown offers little remaining upside for Trump, with public polling largely showing Americans faulting Republicans and the president.

“We got our asses kicked the other night,” said one Trump political adviser, who blamed the shutdown for juicing enthusiasm among Democrats. “I don’t think there’s any question it had an effect.”

There is some hope within the administration that more voters will begin to blame Democrats after the party’s Friday decision to continue holding out, the White House official said.

But there’s little expectation that public attitudes are shifting significantly. Trump allies in recent days have also passed around a report by the conservative Media Research Center claiming the overwhelming majority of broadcast television coverage of the shutdown has favored Democrats, gloomily citing it as evidence there’s little hope of breaking through enough to turn around public opinion.

White House officials in the meantime have grown concerned that the shutdown is diverting attention from the administration’s policy successes, contributing to voters’ dissatisfaction with cost-of-living issues that Trump and his aides have blamed in part on Americans not knowing what he’s accomplished thus far.

“If you look at affordability, which they campaigned on, they lied, because they talked about all prices are up,” Trump claimed Friday, referring to winning Democratic campaigns in Virginia and New Jersey. “No, no. Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially.”

Later Friday, Trump announced that he’d order the Justice Department to investigate meatpacking companies he accused of driving up the price of beef — a grocery staple whose soaring cost he has tried over the past month to bring down. But despite Trump’s claims, it’s not just beef that’s grown more expensive this year — dozens of grocery items have too.

Trump presents few alternatives

Still, despite those broader headwinds, Trump has remained resistant to giving in to Democrats’ demands for concessions on health care — or even to meeting with them. The president is still eager for a win even as he wants the standoff done with, advisers said, a combination of desires that landed him on killing the filibuster as a way to achieve both.

While at least two dozen Republicans would oppose weakening the 60-vote threshold — including staunch conservatives otherwise closely allied with the White House — Trump has only grown more attached to the idea since Tuesday, arguing it could also unlock a far more expansive agenda that could only pass with a simple majority.

On multiple occasions this week, the president rattled off a long list of post-filibuster priorities, including measures to further tighten voting rules ahead of next year’s midterms.

“It doesn’t make any sense that a Republican would not want to do that,” Trump said Friday, adding that reopening the government “is one of the reasons, not the major reason, by the way. I think it’s less important than the other things that we get.”

But with little fresh appetite on Capitol Hill for killing the filibuster and the negotiations at a standstill, Trump has presented few alternative paths out of the crisis. Asked Thursday where he stood on the debate over extending the ACA subsidies, Trump said he “won’t weigh in” and that there were “a lot of great ideas out there.”

“That’s not my fault,” he said of the steep rate increases that many Republicans worry could prove politically disastrous if the subsidies aren’t continued. “I didn’t want Obamacare.”

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