At 6:33 a.m. on Friday, President Trump urged Senate Republicans to abolish a filibuster rule that allows Democrats to require that some pieces of legislation receive 60 votes. He warned that if Senate Republicans don’t do that, “few bills will be passed,” because “8 Dems control the Senate!”

If Senate Republicans don't get rid of the Filibuster Rule and go to a 51% majority, few bills will be passed. 8 Dems control the Senate! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2017

Trump made the same plea during his rally in Arizona earlier in the week, telling supporters, “We have to get rid of what’s called the filibuster rule. We have to… if we don’t the Republicans will never get anything passed.”


Republicans, however, have majority control of the Senate — Trump’s party holds 52 seats. And abolishing the filibuster wouldn’t have saved Trump’s signature legislative initiative so far — repealing Obamacare at the cost of tens of millions of people losing insurance — as that bill only required 50 votes. Republicans are taking the same 50-vote approach to the tax reform push they’re planning for the fall.

Not only is it unclear how abolishing the filibuster would help Trump, but the president is trying to boss around Senate Republicans at a time when he’s publicly feuding with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican senators like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake. McConnell has repeatedly said he’s not interested in changing the Senate’s rulers, telling reporters in May that “there is an overwhelming majority on a bipartisan basis not interested in changing the way the Senate operates on the legislative calendar.”

Eleven minutes after posting his tweet urging McConnell to do something he’s already said he won’t do—and that probably wouldn’t save Trump’s legislative agenda in the first place—the president reversed course entirely and posted another in which he claimed to have a historically productive first seven months in office.

Few, if any, Administrations have done more in just 7 months than the Trump A. Bills passed, regulations killed, border, military, ISIS, SC! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2017

So Trump would have you believe that while obstructionist Democrat tactics have prevented him from passing legislation, he’s been the most productive president.


Trump’s contradictory tweets come three days after he tried to rewrite history during a rally in Arizona. A large part of the Trump’s speech consisted of him reading previous statements he made about the white supremacist violence that recently left one woman dead and 19 others injured — his suggestion being that the media didn’t cover them fairly. But Trump omitted the most controversial parts of his statements, including that the violence was the responsibility of “many sides” and his comment that “very fine people” were among the white supremacists who assembled to defend a Confederate monument while chanting anti-Semitic slogans.

On Thursday morning, Trump posted two tweets that each featured glaring grammatical errors:

Those tweets were deleted and replaced with corrected ones.