THE TORTURED MARRIAGE
IT WAS BITTERLY COLD AS DONALD Trump sat down to dinner on Jan. 5 at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Republican leaders and Administration officials had joined him for what needed to be a frank conversation. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, sat to Trump’s left; Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, to his right. The group had planned to take stock of their first year in power and hash out strategies for the next. But try as they might, Ryan and McConnell struggled to get the President to focus.
Trump had something else on his mind: a gossipy, unflattering new book, Fire and Fury, that was consuming Washington’s chattering class. The President seethed at the disloyalty of his former counselor Stephen Bannon; he raged about the book’s author, Michael Wolff. Guests gently tried to bring the President back to the topics at hand: a packed congressional to-do list, the looming midterm elections and the many potholes in their path. But Trump kept fuming, his arms crossed. At least it’s not the Russia investigation this time, McConnell and Ryan thought, according to aides. As both men later told allies, they should know better at this point than to be surprised.
The evening illustrated the accommodation the President and his party have reached one year into their marriage of necessity: Trump will do what Trump will do, and the Republican Congress will try to mind its own store. The partnership hasn’t been easy, but it has, for both sides, been fruitful. For all of Trump’s impulsive behavior, Republicans wrung much that they wanted out of 2017. The passage of the tax bill in December was the first time Congress had delivered on such a thorny issue since Ryan was slinging McDonald’s hamburgers as a Wisconsin teenager. Trump appointed a conservative to the Supreme Court and many more to the federal judiciary, while rolling back scores of regulations. In exchange for putting up with Trump’s chaos, lawmakers got a respectable list of policy wins in the traditional GOP mold. It was, McConnell said at Camp David, “the most consequential year” of his more than three decades in Washington.
For his part, Trump got the big victories he
