President Donald Trump’s commitment to stacking the judiciary with conservative jurists may be his top selling point among traditional Republicans who find him distasteful in other ways. | Tasos Katopodis-Pool via Getty Images Kavanaugh Confirmation Kavanaugh crisis bonds Trump with wary GOP The president has often crossed signals and outright clashed with congressional Republicans and conservative activists, but the fight to save his Supreme Court nominee has them working in unusual unison.

The scramble to save the Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is the first real test of whether President Donald Trump can work in lockstep with Republican members of Congress and conservative activists under crisis conditions.

Trump’s commitment to stacking the judiciary with conservative jurists may be his top selling point among traditional Republicans who find him distasteful in other ways, and who now share his determination to rescue Kavanaugh from a charge of teenaged sexual assault.


That task may have become easier Tuesday night, with the revelation that Kavanaugh’s accuser is likely to back out of a planned Senate appearance next week, arguing that the FBI must first investigate her claim before she testifies. But a cloud still hangs over Trump’s nominee, whose fate could remain a pitched partisan and social battle for days if not weeks or more.

Sustaining a save-Kavanaugh campaign won’t be easy for the president and his allies, who have feuded on a range of issues — including trade, immigration, health care and Russia policy.

A half-dozen sources in the White House and on Capitol Hill acknowledged that developing a coherent strategy will test a Trump team not known for Swiss precision, or for close coordination with Congress — especially when the president can always upend careful plans with a tweet. Some are consoled, however, by what they call Trump’s relatively hands off approach towards Supreme Court nomination politics.

And they say that if anything can produce a crack all-hands effort, it is a nomination that could push the Supreme Court to the right for decades to come. Many conservatives who blanch at Trump’s personal behavior cite judicial picks as the top reason for turning a blind eye to his flaws. Confirming originalist judges is a decades-long project that has been a cornerstone of the conservative movement.

“They’ve got a massive cavalry of folks who all want to be helpful and all want to either push back on the allegations or push Kavanaugh forward,” said a Republican close to the White House. “The challenge is to have everybody marching in the same direction and playing off the same play sheet.”

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The White House and Republican lawmakers were still hashing out their responses late Tuesday to news that Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, will no longer testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday.

But until that news broke, Trump, Republicans in Congress and conservative activists had been largely unified around a two-pronged message: First, they are defending Kavanaugh as an exemplary husband, father and judge. At the same time, they are attacking not Ford, but rather the Democrats whom Trump and his allies accuse of unfairly trying to sabotage Kavanaugh’s nomination at the eleventh hour.

The White House is aligning the defense with Senators and outside groups like the Judicial Crisis Network, which on Monday announced a $1.5 million ad campaign supporting Kavanaugh.

“Coordinating the messages and surrogates between all the players such as the White House, Capitol Hill and the outside groups is vital and these guys are taking it seriously,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former congressional aide who helped the Trump team secure Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination last year.

The messaging unity was on display Tuesday, when the president showed unusual discipline in two separate exchanges with reporters and echoed Senate Republicans by slamming the way Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) handled Ford’s accusations — and avoiding explicit attacks on Ford herself.

Trump fixated on the fact that Feinstein had received a letter outlining Ford’s accusation by the time she met privately with Kavanaugh over the summer, but did not make it public or ask the conservative judge to respond.

“When Senator Feinstein had Judge Kavanaugh in her office for a long time, she never even mentioned this…So why wouldn’t you bring this up, when he is sitting in her office for a pretty extended period of time?” Trump said Tuesday during a news conference with Polish president Andrzej Duda.

Those remarks were in tune with those of Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who blamed the political fiasco on Democrats.

“That this process has played out with so little order and so little sensitivity lies solely at the feet of Senate Democrats who saw a political advantage in leaking this to the press instead of vetting through proper channels,” McConnell said Tuesday.

Some of Trump’s prominent defenders in the media have adopted a similar line. “We haven’t attacked the accuser,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted on his show Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Trump on Tuesday signaled his confidence in Republican Senators with whom he has often clashed — while even hinting he considers it wise that he keep some distance from the controversy.

“I haven’t wanted to speak to Judge Kavanaugh,” he told reporters at the White House. “Specifically, because I thought it was not a good idea…. I think, politically speaking, the senators will do a very good job.”

Trump and congressional Republicans also share opposition to Democratic calls for the FBI to investigate Ford’s allegations prior to a Senate vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination. “I don’t think the FBI should be involved because they don’t want to be involved,” Trump said.

Republicans said the big factor working in their favor is an elephant not in the room: from the outset of his presidency, Trump has taken a hands-off approach to Supreme Court nominations, vowing during the campaign to make his selections from a short list drafted by the conservative Federalist Society. As a result, two White House aides said he is as a result less likely to play a counterproductive role in the Kavanaugh drama.

“Supreme Court nominations is one where the formula for success … has been one of, ‘Leave this to the lawyers, leave this to the Federalist Society, leave this to the Congress, and you’re going to have a big success,’” said a former White House official.

On a host of other key issues in Trump’s administration, the opposite has been the case.

An effort to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a GOP health care plan collapsed last year after constant arguments between the White House and congressional leaders and presidential tweets that confused even his allies. The same dynamic has played out more recently when it comes to Trump’s imposition of tariffs on countries like Canada and China, and Republican leaders have been exasperated by what they call constant Trump-fueled distractions from the strong economy which could cost the GOP at the ballot box in November.

When it comes to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, the president has defied the advice of lawyers, aides, and Republican lawmakers and publicly taken on Mueller. His denunciations of the special counsel’s probe as a “Rigged Witch Hunt” run by “17 angry Democrats” and his talk of firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation have disturbed several GOP senators.

But when it comes to Kavanaugh, aides have so far persuaded the president not to tweet about Ford’s accusation. And in spoken remarks, Trump has kept his rhetoric unusually tame. “We’re looking to get this done as soon as possible,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “It’s a process, speaking for all of the Republicans, we want to give everybody a chance to say what they want to say.”

The closest analogue may be the party’s successful push last year to pass tax reform legislation, when House and Senate leaders worked in lockstep — and beseeched White House aides to keep the president at arm’s length. As with the tax bill, Republicans lawmakers and outside groups have been happy to do the work and let Trump take the credit. House Speaker Paul Ryan praised the “exquisite presidential leadership” that helped the tax legislation become law.

A Capitol Hill Republican working on the nomination said that the party’s internal and external messaging is laser-focused on placating Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Jeff Flake of Arizona. The three undecided senators’ votes will determine Kavanaugh’s fate, assuming he faces a vote in the full senate.

While Trump and his allies have found more common ground on Kavanaugh than they have on many other issues, some leading Republicans said they are still craving a higher level of explicit behind-the-scenes coordination.

“We communicate but they’ve got their job to do and we’ve got ours,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Tex.) told POLITICO.

“No one is telling me what to do,” added another Republican senator. “It’s not coordinated or orchestrated. It probably should be.”