Trump's feud with Republicans intensifies

   US President Donald Trump turned up the heat Thursday on Republican leaders in Congress, accusing them of foot-dragging on his key priorities, in an intensifying feud that puts his policy agenda in jeopardy.
When lawmakers return from summer recess on September 5, a deeply divided Congress will need to come together by month’s end to fund the government into 2018 and raise the legal cap on federal borrowing in order to avoid a debt default.

Republicans desperate for a major legislative victory under the new president also want to rewrite the tax code and improve American infrastructure — making for a hefty autumn workload on Capitol Hill.
But as the critical showdown looms, Trump has clashed with and antagonized members of his own party, while threatening a shutdown of the federal government unless he gets funding for his promised US-Mexico border wall.
“Believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall,” Trump warned Tuesday in an angry and divisive speech at an Arizona rally that made some Republicans wince.

Over the past week, Trump has widened an already yawning rift with congressional leaders like top Republican Senator Mitch McConnell — who he attacked once again Thursday, using the bully pulpit of Twitter.
The president castigated both the Senate majority leader and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives, for not taking his advice to tie crucial debt ceiling legislation to a popular veterans bill that recently passed Congress.
“Could have been so easy — now a mess!” Trump tweeted.
Now, the threat of a shutdown less than six weeks from now will weigh heavily on the negotiations.
‘Most people’ don’t want shutdown
The White House is demanding that the government funding bill include credits for Trump’s border wall — a call opposed by Democrats who have the power to block the bill in the Senate, triggering a shutdown on October 1.
Both McConnell and Ryan have sought to downplay divisions with Trump — and talk of either any shutdown or a debt default, which would be the first in US history.
“I don’t think a government shutdown is necessary, and I don’t think most people want to see a government shutdown, ourselves included,” Ryan told reporters Wednesday.
McConnell has meanwhile insisted he and the president are on the same page, after an explosive New York Times report suggested their relationship had rapidly deteriorated.
“Anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly not part of the conversation,” McConnell said in a statement Wednesday.
But the following day, the White House essentially doubled down, refusing to say that Trump had backed away from his shutdown threat over the wall.
“He campaigned on the wall, he won on talking about building a wall. And he’s going to make sure that that gets done,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.
‘Political dysfunction’
With tensions building two weeks before lawmakers return to Washington, Trump appeared unwilling to draw a line under his feud with McConnell, berating him Thursday for coming up short in an effort to dismantle Barack Obama’s health care law.
“The only problem I have with Mitch McConnell is that, after hearing Repeal & Replace for 7 years, he failed!” Trump tweeted.
Beyond the party leadership, the US president has publicly attacked a string of Republican lawmakers — including Senators John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Dean Heller, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — at the risk of weakening his chances of driving legislation through Congress.
Other Republicans have meanwhile grown more assertive in their criticism of the president, following the furor triggered by his equivocal response to the violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker last week said Trump had yet to demonstrate “the stability, nor some of the competence” needed to be a successful leader.
While Sanders insisted relations between the president and Republican were “fine,” she bristled when asked about Corker’s criticism, calling it “ridiculous and outrageous.”
Top Democrats meanwhile urged Republican leaders to act responsibly and commit to avoiding a government default.
“Republicans need to stop the chaos and sort themselves out in a hurry,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Thursday.
Passage of the government spending bill will require support from Democrats, who oppose inserting border wall funding into the legislation, and are also opposed to spending cuts as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, as some conservatives want.

source: Gulf News