Cracks are showing between President Donald Trump’s base and GOP officials, who are rattled by his Syria exit and the ensuing resignation of his Defense Secretary, James Mattis. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images White House Trump sees dangerous cracks in Hill GOP support A series of recent events is alienating congressional allies Trump would need in an impeachment fight.

President Donald Trump faces a dangerous erosion of support among rank-and-file Republicans thanks to a series of jarring recent moves that have alienated even some close GOP allies.

From his defense of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince over the murder of a dissident journalist to his abrupt decision to pull American troops out of Syria to his demand for a government shutdown, Trump has been angering friendly lawmakers, leading some who typically kept their disagreements to themselves to speak up.


The trend could prove perilous for the president after Democrats assume control of the House in January. Should the House vote to impeach Trump, he will have to rely on an increasingly exasperated Senate GOP conference to prevent him from being thrown out of office.

Trump has always focused on pleasing his political base, governing with an eye more toward unifying Republicans rather than the country as a whole. For much of his presidency, the strategy worked: Both his core supporters and Republicans in general supported his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, ditching the Iran nuclear deal, and confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, to howls of protest from Democrats.

More recently, however, cracks are showing between Trump’s base and GOP officials, who are rattled by his Syria exit and the ensuing resignation of his Defense secretary, Jim Mattis.

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“Going to the base of the base means that Republican senators are going to start disagreeing with you, because that’s not their party," said Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the conservative Washington Free Beacon.

One Republican senator said his colleagues feel like they’ve been increasingly hijacked by Trump. The senator described the president as increasingly intent on pleasing the hard-line House Freedom Caucus and media allies like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Some Republicans find the juxtaposition between what they consider a reckless foreign policy and a reckless border wall fight to be infuriating.

“Syria is crumbling. And we’re talking about a fucking wall,” this senator said.

Also aggravating Republicans is Trump’s sheer unpredictability, which was evident from his unclear and shifting positions on the budget talks. Earlier this week Trump seemed prepared to accept a short-term spending bill from Congress that did not include billions for a border wall, allowing for holiday vacations to begin as planned. By Thursday, he had abruptly shifted back to a hard-line position, saying he would rather see the government shut down than surrender on the border wall.

“Usually out of the president it’s better to have a steady course. You want to be able to draw a bead on where your leader is going to be in a week or two or three. This has not been a steady course. We need a steady course,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

Trump is still a long way from seeing the Senate GOP turn on him in numbers that could lead to his impeachment and expulsion from office. Republicans will have a 53-47 Senate majority in 2019, and it requires 67 Senate votes to convict a president who has been impeached in the House. That means roughly 20 senators — many of them representing states in which Trump is highly popular — would need to turn on him.

But some Republicans say they’ve seen a subtle shift in tone of late. Early signs of trouble appeared this past fall, when Trump refused to condemn Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for the murder of the activist and journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Several Republican lawmakers broke from Trump in saying they were convinced, as the CIA assessed, that Salman had ordered the murder. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who rarely disagrees openly with the president, joined Trump nemesis Sen. Bob Corker (R.-Tenn.) to introduce a resolution condemning the crown prince for the murder.

The latest indication of Trump’s fracturing Republican coalition came over Syria. Trump’s announcement that all 2,000 currently deployed U.S. troops would be leaving the country delighted his #MAGA supporters at outlets like Breitbart and Fox News, where the prime-time host Tucker Carlson argued that Trump was simply fulfilling a campaign promise.

“Just to be clear, many of us are cheered by the departure of Tillerson and now Mattis. Neither could ever seem to grasp that Trump won the presidency nor the dangers of the swamp," American Conservative Union president Matt Schlapp tweeted on Friday. Schlapp is the husband of Trump strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp, and both have been intensely loyal to the president since the campaign.

It was a different story among some congressional Republicans. In a letter sent to the president Wednesday, six senators called his decision to pull out of Syria “a premature and costly mistake” that “threatens the safety and security of the United States.” Four Republican senators signed the letter: Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, and Lindsey Graham. Cotton, Ernst and Graham have all been close Trump allies during his first two years in office. (The conservative Maine independent Sen. Angus King also signed.)

“We’re very concerned” about Syria, Ernst told POLITICO. “I just think it’s significant. The actions are significant. And I would just love the president to listen to those military advisers and make sure that we’re taking the fight to terrorists overseas, not allowing them to come here.”

In a closed-door meeting with Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday, Senate Republicans unleashed their fury, with one GOP senator telling the vice president that while withdrawing from Syria may cheer the president’s base now, it will hurt him politically when “an American is burned in a cage” at the hands of ISIS, according to a senior GOP aide.

The resignation on Thursday of Defense Secretary James Mattis, who said he was leaving his post because of disagreements with the president over “treating allies with respect” and “being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors,” exacerbated those concerns.

It also earned Trump another rare rebuke from McConnell, who said in a pointed statement Thursday that he was “distressed” by Mattis’ resignation and urged the Trump administration to “maintain a clear-eyed understanding of our friends and foes."

“I’m getting emails from my Republican colleagues with phrases like: ‘The wheels have come off.’ Like: ‘Going places we didn’t think it will go.’" said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). "One of them said: ‘This is a bridge too far.’ It would be nice if somebody would say it besides Bob Corker.”

Several conservatives close to the White House have echoed those concerns, saying that they’re beginning to worry the president may not make it to 2020. Corker, a retiring GOP senator from Tennessee who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seethed on Friday that the country had degenerated into a "tyranny of radio talk show hosts.”

That said, the president maintains the loyalty of some members of the Senate Republican Conference, who dismissed the concerns of their colleagues and said the week’s events shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody.

“I don’t see it as chaos,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I don’t think the president’s strong feelings about a border wall and border security are surprising to anyone. I’m a big Gen. Mattis fan. I hate to see him go. But presidential advisers come and go.”

James Arkin contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Sen. Claire McCaskill's name.