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Trump: ‘I Said Roy Moore Will Not Be Able to Win’ in Alabama For Trump, a Moment of Defeat but Maybe Not Recalibration
(about 7 hours later)
White House aides were bracing for fallout from President Trump on Wednesday after the Republican candidate he vigorously backed over his aides’ objections lost a Deep South Senate seat to a Democrat. WASHINGTON — President Trump does not readily admit defeat. Knocked to the mat in Alabama with the stunning loss of a Senate seat, he got right back up on Wednesday and defiantly claimed that he had known his candidate would lose all along. He may have been humbled by voters, but Mr. Trump does not exactly do humble.
Aides acknowledged that Mr. Trump, who jumped in with a strong endorsement of Roy S. Moore without telling most of his advisers, rarely assumes responsibility for a misstep, and they anticipated him looking for someone to blame. Aides to the temperamental president reported being pleasantly surprised that he did not rage against the setback in private, as he is wont to do in moments of difficulty. But neither did he concede a mistake in backing the Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, despite sexual misconduct allegations, attributing the loss to Mr. Moore and the national party establishment that abandoned him.
By early Wednesday, the president was weighing in — and painting the loss as a sign of prescience. All but ignoring the political earthquake in Alabama in public appearances on Wednesday, Mr. Trump pushed forward with his drive for major tax cuts, giving little indication that he shared his party’s panic about potentially worse defeats to come in next year’s midterm congressional elections. While aides anticipate possible staff changes, Mr. Trump showed no signs of shifting from the strident, base-oriented politics that have animated his presidency.
Mr. Trump also discussed the election outcome and its potential impact on an expected vote in Congress on a sweeping tax measure. “I don’t think it’s going to affect it,” Mr. Trump said of the election’s impact on his agenda as he met with Republican lawmakers crafting the final version of his tax legislation. “I think we’re doing a lot. This is the biggest thing that we’ve worked on.”
“I think it’s very important for the country to get a vote next week,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “Not because we lost a seat. Wish we would have gotten the seat. A lot of Republicans feel differently; they’re very happy with the way it turned out.” Behind the scenes, some advisers hoped the loss would persuade Mr. Trump to stop listening to Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist who has vowed war against the Republican establishment. But Mr. Trump talked with Mr. Bannon for 15 minutes by phone on Tuesday, aides said, and seemed disinclined to cut the adviser from his circle.
In the White House, there was a sense of relief among some aides that they would not have to answer for Mr. Moore’s actions in the Senate. Nor was it clear that Mr. Trump was any more eager to reach across the aisle and build new coalitions with Democrats even as his party’s control of the Senate narrowed to a single seat. With Wednesday’s agreement on a final tax cut bill, Mr. Trump seems poised to push through his first major achievement after a year of legislative frustrations, but it remained uncertain how he would proceed after that.
But aides said that Mr. Trump might still fault others for the loss. The list of those who might be the targets of his ire include the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, whose advisers pressed the president to back Senator Luther Strange in the primary, only to see him lose. One of the advisers said that Mr. Trump would still nurse a grudge against Mr. McConnell, whose instincts the president does not trust, for leading him to the original endorsement. “I think he’s going to have a compelling story to make that ‘my agenda is making the country better,’” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. But he recommended that Mr. Trump recruit Democrats for legislation on criminal justice and infrastructure. “I think the president and the administration should look for allies outside of the leadership as well — not in opposition to leadership — but there are other voices that might lead to a different coalition of members that would support their agenda.”
Those advisers said the president was troubled watching a stream of Republicans step away from Mr. Moore over decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct with teenagers, and he did not want to join the stampede. Mr. Trump flirted with bipartisanship briefly during the fall when he cut a three-month spending deal with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leaders. But when he sought to extend that cooperation with an agreement to allow younger immigrants brought into the country illegally to stay, conservatives objected and he quickly retreated.
Instead, the president threw the full weight of his office and reputation behind Mr. Moore. Other presidents have been knocked off stride by special elections that ultimately presaged greater defeats. In 1991, George Bush was stunned when his attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, lost a special election for Senate against Harris Wofford, a little-known Democrat whose strategists went on to help Bill Clinton topple the incumbent president a year later.
White House aides were also bracing for the president’s reaction toward Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist who had publicly said Mr. Trump’s base was with Mr. Moore and suggested the movement would march on without the leader of the party. Mr. Bannon’s continuing sway over Mr. Trump has deeply bothered the advisers still on the government payroll, and they were optimistic that the outcome in Alabama would weaken his grip. In 2010, Barack Obama was likewise thrown by the election of Scott Brown, a Republican, to fill a vacant Senate seat in heavily Democratic Massachusetts. The election not only cost Democrats their filibuster-proof supermajority just as they were trying to pass health care legislation, but it also foreshadowed a Republican landslide in midterm elections later that year.
Mr. Trump’s first reaction to the Democratic Party’s win — which he absorbed while in the White House residence, alone for much of the evening, with the first lady out of town — was a demure Twitter post congratulating Doug Jones. “It becomes the chink in the armor of the person who just a year before or 18 months before was the most popular figure in the country,” recalled Jennifer Psaki, a veteran of Mr. Obama’s White House. “For us, it was certainly the case that you have a moment of depressed sulking. And then you have to pick yourself up and figure out how to move forward.”
“A win is a win,” Mr. Trump wrote, adding that Republicans would have another chance at the seat — vacated by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general — soon enough. It was a surprisingly gracious tweet from a president who had excoriated Democrats, attacked Mr. Jones and insisted Republicans needed the vote from Alabama in a string of statements over the past week. For Mr. Obama, the special election forced a strategic re-evaluation. Some aides advised him to trim his ambitions for health care and seek a narrower bill. But Mr. Obama opted to push for his original, more sweeping legislation. Ultimately, he pushed it through without Republican backing, but it never developed bipartisan support and remains a target of efforts to repeal it.
The president’s aides spun the loss as belonging squarely to Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore had been accused of sexual assault and child molestation by a number of women, one of whom said she was just 14 at the time he made sexual contact with her. Mr. Moore was a weak candidate, White House officials argued, and Mr. Trump could not drag someone that weak over the finish line against a crush of outside spending and a bipartisan message from Mr. Jones. For Mr. Trump, who has already endured off-year Republican election defeats in New Jersey and Virginia, Alabama has now delivered not one but two humiliating defeats in a state that he won by 28 percentage points just a year ago. In a Republican primary to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, Mr. Trump first endorsed Luther Strange, the choice of the party establishment, only to watch him lose to Mr. Moore, who was backed by Mr. Bannon.
In private conversations, several West Wing advisers noted that the vote for a tax code revamp was expected to take place before Mr. Jones is sworn in. A victory on the tax bill would provide the president with a quick opportunity to change the subject. Undeterred by allegations that Mr. Moore sought sexual contact with teenagers as young as 14, Mr. Trump endorsed him against the advice of White House advisers. But as he sat watching the results in the White House residence on Tuesday, alone for much of the evening with the first lady out of town, Mr. Trump once again saw his preferred candidate defeated, in this case by Doug Jones, a Democrat in a state that had rebuffed Democrats for decades.
But in the search for scapegoats, Bill Stepien, the White House political director who has been under fire from some of his colleagues, could also be a target. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, is a political neophyte who relies on others, and he has told people the political staff needs beefing up. Mr. Trump called Mr. Jones on Wednesday to congratulate him, but he also sought to justify himself. “The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. “I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”
Some of the president’s aides had told him the polling in Alabama was unreliable, and it was hard to know who would actually show up to vote. For the rest of the day, Mr. Trump solicited the opinion of almost every adviser he encountered, asking what they thought of his tweet or whether he had made a mistake supporting Mr. Moore. In private conversations, the president said he had been left with several bad options, aides said — he had backed Mr. Strange, but he had said he would back the Republican nominee.
But Mr. Bannon’s words rolled round the president’s mind for several days before his endorsement. The president was also enraged when his daughter Ivanka Trump got ahead of him by declaring there was a “special place in hell” for people who harm children. Some White House aides hoped that Mr. Trump would write off Mr. Bannon after the loss. But Mr. Bannon has served as a kind of seeing-eye dog for the president. Mr. Trump is a reactive politician who relies on the sights and sounds of his rallies. With fewer such events these days, he is left more reliant on the reconnaissance of others. Mr. Trump is also relieved that Mr. Bannon serves as something of a human shield, absorbing criticism that otherwise might be directed at him, according to two advisers.
Mr. Bannon jabbed at Ms. Trump on Monday night at a rally in Alabama for that line. s.
One White House adviser said that Mr. Trump was unlikely to blame his daughter. But he would almost certainly blame someone. The defeat may prompt or at least coincide with staff changes. Even as votes were counted in Alabama on Tuesday night, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison, resigned after criticism that the office had not done enough to build coalitions.
Still, the embarrassing loss showed the limits of the president’s power to persuade voters and to lead his party. Another aide who came in for finger-pointing primarily from outside the White House on Wednesday was Bill Stepien, the president’s political director. Mr. Trump has appeared more open to the need for change, two advisers said, and they anticipated that Mr. Stepien’s influence might be diminished by the addition of other aides.
But, as he so often does, Mr. Trump quickly moved to try to redefine the outcome in a more favorable light. Mr. Stepien, who worked for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and was a figure in the bridge-closing scandal, is well liked by most of the White House employees and seen by some as an unfair straw man for larger problems.
The president had placed his credibility and the weight of his office behind Mr. Moore, a deeply flawed Senate candidate who had been rejected by a clear majority of Republican elected officials, but had been propped up by the endorsement of Mr. Trump and the backing of Mr. Bannon. Mr. Trump made no public mention of staff on Wednesday. But ever ready for a fight, he seemed to hark back to last year’s election by referring to an insulting term that Hillary Clinton once used for some of his supporters.
Mr. Moore lost in a state that Mr. Trump had won by 28 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016, a state where the Democratic Party had been essentially moribund for decades. The president endorsed Mr. Moore against the advice of some of the White House and nearly every Republican member of Congress. He stumped for him at a rally in nearby Pensacola, Fla., last week, and recorded telephone messages sent to thousands of Alabama voters. “Somebody else called me and everybody else the ‘deplorables,’” he said at a White House event with families he said would benefit from his tax plan. “Have you ever heard that term? Right? We’re proud to be the deplorables and we’re doing well.”