Trump declared war on his own party when he tweeted, "The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team & fast. We must fight them & Dems!” Trump apparently has a shit list, and not just as a decoration on Steve Bannon’s “war room” wall, because Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) is on it and Amash is far from the only person being targeted and harassed by Trump and his minions. Amash was asked by the Daily Beast last week if he was at all concerned about potentially making the White House “shit list” for his staunch opposition from the beginning to the AHCA. Amash just smiled, laughed, and asked, “What do you think? More from Daily Beast:
An aide [Dan Scovino] to President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that Michigan GOP Rep. Justin Amash should be defeated in a primary for his role in helping to sink the Republican alternative to Obamacare, which was pulled from the House floor when it did not have enough votes. “[Trump] is bringing auto plants & jobs back to Michigan. [Amash] is a big liability. #TrumpTrain, defeat him in primary,” Scavino wrote on Twitter, alarming ethics experts over a potential violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from engaging in politics. Amash, who is prolific on Twitter himself, responded: “Trump admin & Establishment have merged into #Trumpstablishment. Same old agenda: Attack conservatives, libertarians & independent thinkers.” Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, said Scavino’s tweet is a “firing offense.” Trump has gone on the attack against the Freedom Caucus ever since the health care bill was defeated, accusing them of “saving” Planned Parenthood and Obamacare and calling out specific representatives.
Another person on the shit list is Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC). Sanford told the Charleston Post & Courier last week how Trump sent his budget director Mick Mulvaney to threaten him with being primaried if he refused to back the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. According to Sanford, Mulvaney said, “The president asked me to look you square in the eyes and to say that he hoped that you voted ‘no’ on this bill so he could run against you in 2018,” the congressman recalled being told. Mulvaney said that he did not want to deliver the message but did so at the president's insistence. Sanford explained to the Post & Courier: “I’ve never had anyone, over my time in politics, put it to me as directly as that.” These open attacks are probably going to become more common in days to come because Trump ostensibly is in “a vengeful mood” where the Freedom Caucus is concerned, according to White House insiders, as reported in the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast also said this:
Over the weekend, Trump accused the conservative caucus of helping the Democrats “save” Obamacare and Planned Parenthood. The continuing Twitter salvos against the Freedom Caucus come from a president who had vowed to move on strategically—to tax reform and infrastructure, for instance—but who cannot seem to do so emotionally.
“It’s constructive in 5th grade—it may allow a child to get his way, but that’s not how our government works,” congressman Justin Amash, a Freedom Caucus stalwart, said on Capitol Hill Thursday morning, responding to Trump’s tweet.
"The idea of threatening your way to legislative success may not be the wisest of strategies," Amash’s colleague Rep. Mark Sanford frankly told The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel.
Either Trump or Bannon should be able to figure out by this time that certain members of the House Freedom Caucus are in a position to resist pressure from Republican leadership or the White House. A number of Representatives in the caucus sit almost uniformly in super-safe districts and the threat of being primaried is specious at best. After the ACA repeal bill failed, some of them upon returning home were greeted as liberators, not traitors. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) is a sterling example. Trump had previously called out Mark Meadows, personally. "I'm coming after you, Mark." Meadows was quoted in The Hill as saying that he wasn't worried about being primaried and apparently he's right. When Meadows returned home to North Carolina he was hailed as a hero for his efforts in defeating the ACA repeal bill, even though the Republicans, in the main, have spent the past seven years declaiming that they would tear down Obamacare first chance they got.
The 45,000 constituents in Meadows' western North Carolina district were for the most part covered by Obamacare in 2016 and they had no desire to lose their health insurance. That, by the way, is a feeling common to more than just Meadows' constituency and Trump and Bannon need to wake up to that fact. Whether their sweeping reforms in the areas of taxation and infrastructure will be met with any greater enthusiasm than repealing Obamacare remains to be seen.
And it should be duly noted that the Freedom Caucus so far is not easily rattled. "Anonymous threats from the White House, and ones from the president, won't keep conservatives from doing [our] jobs," one House Republican aide said. "If last week should have taught [the White House and leadership] anything it's that we don't scare easy.”