For most of the year, party infighting and President Donald Trump’s personal peccadilloes have kept the GOP from reaping the benefits expected when they took control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress in January.

That changed on Wednesday, when the Republican Congress passed the most sweeping tax bill in a generation.


New presidents normally use the so-called honeymoon period after taking office to push through significant legislation — President Barack Obama passed an $800 billion stimulus bill a month after taking office — but Trump suffered a series of major setbacks before reaching a period of productivity.

In the past three months of 2017, Trump has quietly racked up a series of policy victories that Republicans have eyed for years, securing the passage not only of the tax overhaul, but also reversing the contours of Obama-era foreign policy and confirming a spate of judges to the federal bench.

Over the past week, even Republicans have appeared surprised at their own successes. “Did you believe we'd ever be at this day, with this bill, on this floor, with the outcome that we know is going to happen?” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy asked reporters just before a first House vote on the tax bill. (The House voted a second time, on Wednesday, to resolve procedural concerns.)

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Republican leaders, whose relationship with Trump has been strained since he took office by temperamental and ideological differences, heaped praise on him at a White House ceremony on Wednesday marking the passage of the tax legislation. “This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. House Speaker Paul Ryan noted that Republicans could not have reached this moment “without exquisite presidential leadership.”

Trump — who spent a good portion of the year seething at McConnell over his failure to roll back Obamacare, the administration’s first big agenda item — was feeling the love, too. “I look at these people, it’s like we’re warriors together,” Trump said. “We had fun, didn’t we have a good time?”

It may have taken a year, but Republicans are starting to have fun. Indeed, despite the menace posed by the special counsel investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign, they are starting to realize that they have something to show for all the pain and discomfort they have endured at the president’s hands.

“It’s huge. Huge,” said Larry Kudlow, an economic analyst who serves as an informal adviser to the president and lobbies for the tax bill. “Politically, it is very powerful for Trump and the GOP Congress, so they can now show that they’ve gotten this big thing done.”

The GOP’s high-profile failure to repeal Obamacare “created a perception that there was some deeper problem with the Trump administration or some deeper problem with Speaker Ryan’s leadership of the House,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Then they went ahead and tried the same strategy with the tax bill, and it turned out that worked, and they’re looking like the smartest guys in town. So results matter. This is a major win.”

Conservatives, even those who have been critical of the president, are starting to take notice. The passage of the tax bill, wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry, heralded “a discernible shift of American government to the right” while acknowledging that “for much of the year, Trump’s presidency had seemed to be sound and fury signifying not much besides the welcome ascension of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which in March assailed the president for clinging to his claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower “like a drunk to an empty gin bottle” on Wednesday praised the tax bill as “the most pro-growth tax policy since the Reagan reforms of 1981 and 1986.”

Republican stalwarts are also taking stock of smaller but no less significant victories, all notched since October, from the repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate and the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, both included in the tax bill, to the confirmation of a dozen federal judges, the decertification of the Iran nuclear deal and the announcement of a plan to relocate the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“Thanks to your nominees, we’ve put 12 circuit court judges in place, the most since the system was established in 1897 — you hold the record,” McConnell said at the White House on Wednesday.

Even supporters of the tax bill, however, warned Republicans not to celebrate too soon, because the party’s unpopularity with voters is threatening to undermine the major legislative achievement of the Trump era.

Over half of Americans say they oppose the bill, but, according to GOP pollster David Winston, who has served as an adviser to House and Senate leadership, “The electorate’s view of this is probably more a reflection of the Republican brand than of the bill.” As a result, Winston said, Republicans must engage in a “sustained, six-month effort of engaging people about what this really means to them on an individual basis.”

Others said the fate of Trump — and the GOP— depends on the whether the sort of sustained economic boom Republicans have predicted will result from a major tax reform comes to pass. “This one’s gonna depend on the outcome of the economic effect of the tax cut,” Kudlow said. “If the results come in, [Trump’s] going to be very popular. If the results don’t come in, he’s going to be very unpopular.”

“Reagan wasn’t Reagan until the boom started in 1983,” he added.

In that context, the president concluded his remarks to fellow Republicans on Wednesday on a fitting note. “I don’t know if we’ll have bigger moments,” Trump said, “but we hope to. We’re gonna try.”

