Republicans are at a "boiling point" over tensions between President Donald Trump and Senate GOP leadership, Punchbowl News reported on Thursday morning.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has been "bearing the brunt of the fallout from Trump’s erratic behavior, expressing his frustrations with the president in an intentional but very reserved manner," said the report.
For the last week, the report noted, Thune "was being stiff-armed by a White House that was refusing his request for a briefing on the U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement" — then things kicked into high gear after Trump publicly blew up a hearing for one of his own critical nominees and triggered a standoff.
Things have gotten so tense that Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told reporters Trump is "taking shots" at Thune, and lamented, “Who doesn’t like John Thune? If you don’t like John Thune, you don’t like golden retrievers.”
Trump has been enraged at the Senate ever since he realized that they don't have the votes to scrap the filibuster rule for the sake of passing his SAVE America Act, a controversial bill that would add draconian new restrictions to voting rights and subject state voter rolls to review by the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans, for their part, are broadly fed up over not being able to move past the controversy.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is leaving office at the end of the year and is increasingly outspoken against the Trump administration, told Punchbowl News that “At some point, we’ve got to return ourselves to being a board of directors versus like a manufacturing facility that just creates whatever product the White House wants. It’s not the way you can manage the Senate agenda over time."
He went on to add that Thune "is an extraordinary leader ... but we’ve got to get some coordination here and end these unforced errors.”