““WIN BACK HOUSE, but throw Massie out of Republican Party!” Trump wrote on Twitter.”
Pretty stupid comment by Trump. He does sometimes get wrapped around the axle in petty squabbles.
He needs to save his ire for the real enemy.
Not going to win back the House by going after conservatives, that’s how they lost the House.
Maybe there’s more to it than we know.
I give Trump full credit for being smarter than the average bear. This tweet tells doesn't tell us that Massie was in any way wrong with what he did. Only that that Massie doesn't belong in a party that clearly doesn't think the way the Congressman does. Trump gets (and we should, too) that, for all their talk about the Constitution, the Republican Party is not (or no longer) a party whose pribciples and actuons are guided and bound by the Constitution.
The Democrats have not been for decades and are clearly unfettered by it. Republicans of the sort that make it past a few years on Capitol Hill make the mistake that it does matter (because that's how they were elected) but it hobbles their effectiveness because they also know that's no longer how Congress works.
We elected Trump to fight--and he is fighting. But we also elected Trump knowing he is no Conservative (or Constitutionalist, we know now) and we're pretty fortunate that Trump's actions to date have been closely aligned to our desires.
Trump's tweet signals, whether he really meant it or not, that our notions of winning back the country along the lines of the Founding Father's constitutional republic are naive at best and an obstruction to his work at worst. Because elected Republicans (as a body) at the national level don't believe it, either, because that's not how they operate. And again: despite their talk to the base back home.
Here is where Trump erred, unforced, in this: his name is on the law he passed. Trump gave a pass to everyone involved in the voice-vote to deny they voted for it (and they will if it serves them to say so down the road) while good or bad, and the Dems will only see the bad, Trump is tied to it. He didn't have to. Politically, Massie was doing Trump a huge favor by getting the weasels to put their names to this monstrosity they passed! He should've thanked him instead of castigating him.