If Republicans are surprised that Trump betrayed them, they haven't been paying attention

This was entirely predictable

President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts)

This was just the betrayal Republicans feared. President Trump, unmoored from ideological and partisan commitments, would one day toss them aside, sell them out, turn his back on them in order to make a deal with those diabolical Democrats. And so it has come to pass, in a dramatic White House meeting in which Trump decided to sign on with a proposal by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to increase the debt ceiling for three months, instead of the 18 months Republicans wanted, paired with an aid package to repair the devastation of Hurricane Harvey and a temporary government spending bill to hold off a shutdown. His decision apparently came as a shock not only to the Republican congressional leaders in the room, but even to his own aides.

The cries of anguish and rage reverberated throughout the land. "He f---ed us," said one anonymous Republican official. "It's just a betrayal of everything we've been talking about for years as Republicans," said former Sen. Jim DeMint, who until recently led the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We are going to need a supplemental spending bill to lease more buses for Trump to throw us under," said a Capitol Hill Republican. Oh, the humanity!

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.