Inside his veto fight with the GOP, Trump may have found ‘a gift’

For a president eager to campaign against Washington, say some observers, a GOP split isn’t all bad.

resident Donald Trump promised to fight Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and, with his first-ever veto Friday, he did just that.

“Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it,” he said as he sent a measure that would have terminated his declaration of a national emergency — and the transfer of billions of dollars to build his promised border wall — right back to Capitol Hill.

The day before, a dozen Republican senators had joined with Democrats to pass the measure, an unusually large number of GOP defections from Trump’s line.

While Trump played down the fracture Friday — “I didn’t need the votes,” he said — it showed that by engaging in a battle with Congress over the power of the purse, he has weakened institutional support for the wall, and for his authority, among Washington Republicans.

That is, even some Republicans who say they’re for the wall are drawing the line at Trump declaring a national emergency and seizing spending decisions from Congress to do it.

But some Republicans say that may not be a bad thing for Trump as he heads into the 2020 election.

It’s all the better if he can run, at least a little bit, against both parties, said Matt Schlapp, a Trump ally and chairman of the American Conservative Union.

“They gave him a gift,” Schlapp said of Congress sending him the resolution. “The president is at his strongest when he is fighting and he is seen as credible when he is fighting members of his own party…especially when the principles are on his side.”

Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and frequent Trump critic, noted that the president said Friday he wasn’t upset with Republicans who defected.

As for Trump, Steele added, “he loves the fight, he doesn’t care who he’s fighting, it doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Democrats … for him, politically, it reaffirms for his base why they sent him to Washington.”

“The House and Senate resoundingly rejected the President’s lawless power grab, yet the president has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement released after the veto.

Some Republican critics of the president’s methods, including Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, have raised constitutional concerns, while others have simply worried that a future Democratic president would use the precedent set by Trump to spend money on pet projects not approved by Congress.

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