President Donald Trump could have been able to pass some of his promised legislation -- instead, he went another route.
In an interview with Politico podcaster Isaac Dovere, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) revealed that Trump tried to persuade him to switch parties ahead of a rally announcing Gov. Jim Justice was becoming a Republican. Manchin wasn't interested. Nor was he keen on supporting the GOP's tax bill that would increase taxes on many of Manchin's voters or killing Obamacare without an alternative. That was the end of his relationship with the president.
"I said, ‘You need more Democrats like me, you don’t need Republicans,’” Manchin told Politico.
Trump didn't reach out to Democrats and with a fractured Republican Party, his legislative agenda has suffered from it. The GOP hasn't managed to pass any substantial legislation Trump promised he would on "day one." Manchin noted that it would have been easy at the time, if Trump had simply appeared interested.
“I was an easy pickup. Very easy pickup,” Manchin explained. “And a couple, two, three other Democrats would have been easy pickups, if they had just made an effort.”
Trump won his state with overwhelmingly with 67.9 percent of the vote. Still, Manchin doesn't care.
“I’m not worried at all,” Manchin said. “Not one iota am I worried.”
He's not alone. None of the conservative Democrats in states Trump carried have caved to the White House or the GOP leadership. Trump may have tried to do rallies or trips back to the states to poke Democrats up for re-election in 2018, but it has never worked. Their ire at the politics from the right and Washington dysfunction has only emboldened them.
When the Republicans held the first vote to pass the tax bill with amendments handwritten in the margins, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) filmed a video shouting at the GOP. The video quickly went viral with Tester talking about how the GOP handed the actual bill to senators merely 25 minutes before the vote. The complaint harkened back to a claim Republicans made after Obamacare, saying they never got an opportunity to read the bill. In the GOP's case, no hearings were held on the tax bill and the text was as hastily cobbled together as the notes scribbled in the margins. It infuriated Tester.
Mancin hasn't had problems going after Democrats, but he was also happy to confront Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) on the Senate floor in October after a GOP PAC ran an ad about his daughter working for a pharmaceutical company.
“I said, ‘Be a man enough to go after me. Don’t be chicken sh*t.’ And that’s what they are. I said, ‘Cory, that’s not you,’ I said—Cory’s a good guy; I like him,” Manchin said. “No different than the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee], too, they all do it. I despise that. Their name’s not on the ballot; my name’s on the ballot. OK. If you want to go after somebody, go after me, not after my family.”
When it comes to the GOP's policies, Manchin thinks his constituents will see through the Washington spin and understand the reality of tax cuts for the rich while exploding the deficit.
“Whenever you are upside down and you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and you can’t find Peter anymore,” he said. Manchin recalled his grandfather, the owner of a small grocery store: “‘Joe,’ he says, ‘indebtedness—which is basically uncontrolled debt, unmanaged debt—will make a coward out of the decisions. You’ll be cowardly in your decisions.’ He was exactly right, and we’re doing it now.”
DSCC chair Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said that he's thinks such a message will resonate with Democrats in red states. In places where they're trying to pickup Democratic seats. In states like Mississippi and Utah, Democrats have never been competitive, but in wake of Alabama electing Doug Jones, anything seems possible.
Where once Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) was seen as an endangered incumbent, the GOP's tax plan may have just killed the GOP's shot at a win.
“Trump promised an economic populism during his campaign, but his proposals have been all about big Republican donors," Van Hollen said. "They’ve been all about giveaways to big corporations and the very wealthiest in this country. And that is not what Trump voters bargained for.”
“When [Trump] says he’s not a politician, I agree. I understand that,” Manchin said. “But he’s allowing politicians to set an agenda that he ought to let his gut set. He is more comfortable wanting to do a bipartisan deal than he is wanting to do a partisan deal, I can tell you. I can feel it, OK? But he gets pushed right into this partisan rhetoric: ‘Democrats are all bad.’”
Mancin recalled talking to Trump just after he was elected. At that point, Trump was still making campaign promises and the GOP leadership hadn't taken control.
“‘Hey, Joe, I want you to know this is not going to be a tax cut for the wealthy and rich like me. This is going to be for the working people that got left behind,’” Manchin recalled Trump telling him during a meeting a few months ago. “I said, ‘Mr. President, that’s perfect. That’s a wonderful starting point. That’s where we should be.’”
The actual bill has been anything but.
“It shows you where their values are. Their choices were that the corporations get the greatest cuts, the wealthiest get the greatest benefits, and on top of that, theirs is all permanent. The people that get the least amount and the unknown is, the people that get the temporary are the people that needed it the most,” Manchin said. “So I said, “Guys, wait a minute. Aren’t we off-base a little bit here?’”
