US President Trump meets, from left, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office. Credit:AP By contrast, a statement released by the White House merely listed the fate of the dreamers as one of several issues that were discussed. All the issues listed in the White House statement have featured in speculation on how Trump intends to leapfrog Republican Party policy conflicts by dealing directly with the Democrats – tax reform, border security, the dreamers, infrastructure and trade. It was the second such meeting between Trump and the Democrats' House and Senate leaders in as many weeks. As unpredictable as Donald Trump is, these meetings are in keeping with an emerging alignment in his conduct. He is contemptuous of his GOP Congressional colleagues and all lubby-dubby with his best new friends "Chuck and Nancy," as he refers to them. Also in alignment is a raft of new polling data that, perhaps prematurely, are seen as raising questions about the longevity of the Republican Party itself. This just in from the Pew Research Centre: there's been a sharp fall-off in the number of Republican-leaning independent voters who say the term "Republican" describes them well, down from 49 per cent in 2016 to just 33 per cent this week.

And this from polling by Connecticut's Quinnipiac University on the Republican Party as a political brand: only 22 to 25 per cent of Americans see it favourably, a four-year low, as more Republicans check the "unfavourable" box in the university's recurring polling. There's a slew of other polling: Trump's base voters seem to be turning on local Republican lawmakers deemed to be giving him a hard time – by as much as 60 per cent in the case of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a vocal critic of the President. And in Nevada, Republican Senator Dean Heller is close to scraping the bottom of the barrel, with just 22 per cent of Trump voters supporting him. Nationally, 53 per cent of Republican voters in Republican-held electorates say the lawmaker they elected doesn't give enough support to the President. Sure, the data is limited – sort-of reeds in the breeze stuff – but the more it's replicated, the more Republicans in Congress are likely to think twice about standing up to Trump. So the party rank and file is restless, but what about the man himself: Trump? What are his options? As he demonstrated during the 2016 fight for the Republican nomination, he has no roots in the Republican Party. As recently as the presidency of George W. Bush, Trump was a paid-up member of the Democratic Party. When he first conjured with running for the White House in 2000, it was with the Reform Party, by then a fringe-dweller in US politics.

The New York Times last week billed Trump, a political outsider who has switched parties at least five times, as "the first independent to hold the presidency since … around the time of the Civil War". A Republican consultant last week described the party as a "flag of convenience" for Trump; others describe his as a "hostile take-over". It's hardly surprising that he goes after Republicans, especially in Congress – because of who he is as much as who they are. Frustrated by their failure to deliver on the "repeal and replace" of Obamacare and girding for fights on his signature policy commitments such as immigration and tax reform, Trump recently accused Republicans, as though he was not one of them, of having a "death wish". In other tweets, he has abused McConnell for "failing" on Obamacare; and accused House Speaker Paul Ryan of making "a mess" of the debt-ceiling issue. Last week, he humiliated the Republican Congressional leadership, pulling the mat from under McConnell and Ryan by siding with "Chuck and Nancy" on a short-term fix for government funding and the debt ceiling – even as McConnell and Ryan looked on, dumbfounded, from the other side of the couches in the Oval Office.

Even before Wednesday's dinner meeting, Trump reportedly was working on bipartisan deals with Schumer and Pelosi on a long-term fix for the debt ceiling, on immigration and tax reform. Possibly because this is the summer "silly season", when the political classes desert Washington for the beach, and there's little else to report apart from hurricanes, there's much speculation on the fate of the Republican Party and Trump's relationship with it, after Trump seemingly placed his bet on legislative success with the Democrats. "The truth is that he is a political independent, and he obviously won the nomination and the presidency by disrupting a lot of norms that Republicans had assumed about their own party and their own voters," Ben Domenech, publisher of the conservative Federalist website told The New York Times. "[Last] week was the first time he struck out and did something completely at odds with what the Republican leadership and establishment would want him to do in this position." George W. Bush speechwriter-turned-commentator Michael Gerson drills down in an op-ed in The Washington Post: "Those Republicans who believe that Trump is being cynical, disloyal or politically calculating continue to misunderstand the man. The President has no discernible political philosophy or strong policy views to betray. "His leadership consists mainly of instincts, reflexes and prejudices, which often have nothing to do with self-interest. He has a genius for fame, which usually involves attention-attracting unpredictability and transgressiveness.

"Trump reads events moment by moment, making him a cork on the waves of cable coverage. Any choice he makes is correct by definition, because he has made it. And any person – on his staff or on Capitol Hill – who does not precisely mimic his political gyrations is disloyal and should be punished." That's a timely reminder of all that Trump brought to winning the Republican nomination in the face of seeming wall-to-wall opposition and scepticism. But would he take his chances, marching off with a Republican rump and making his 2020 re-election run as an independent? Down the years there have been a handful of third-party candidates, but a new party has not won the White House since Abraham Lincoln, who as a candidate for the new Republican Party outran the Whigs and Democrats in 1860. Some, like Florida-based Republican consultant and Trump critic Rick Wilson see a third-party candidacy by Trump as inevitable. Others cite a host of problems – split the Republican vote and the Democrats would run away with the White House; would enough of the Republican Party's moneybags donors go with him? Maybe a third of Republican voters would remain loyal to either Trump or to the party. But how much of that other third might Trump pull to his new party? Would genuinely conservative voters still see him as a conservative without the fig-leaf cover he acquired by winning the party's 2016 nomination?

An end note. Perhaps most revealing on the state of the Republican Party was that comment by Federalist publisher Domenech, on Trump's deal with the Democrats on government funding and debt ceiling being "the first time" this President had broken with what congressional Republicans want him to do. That suggests questions on the Republican Party's longevity should perhaps focus more on the party than on the President. Consider all that Trump has done and all that has been revealed about him – his sacking of FBI director James Comey, his assault on Muslims, the leg-up he's given to neo-Nazis, the infamous "grab them by the pussy" video and on and on and on. In light of all that, is his talking to the Democrats the first time he's gone off the Republican reservation?