Trump deepens divisions in 'totally fractured' Republican Party

President Donald J. Trump and his putative Republican allies are involved in a range war that has few precedents – and none in recent time, perhaps even including the dissension among Democrats in the mid-1960s against Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policies.

These fresh 21st-century divisions flared into view again this week as Mr. Trump marked the beginning of his eighth month in office – a fraught period, full of frustration on both sides.

The view of life and the political process from Capitol Hill, on one side of Pennsylvania Avenue, now differs so dramatically from the view at the White House 16 blocks away that sometimes it seems as if they are looking at, representing, and seeking to lead entirely different countries.

"The party is totally fractured," former governor Jeb Bush of Florida – who was a special target of Mr. Trump's attacks during last year's struggle for the GOP presidential nomination – said in an interview. "There were fractures before, but now Trump has made those fractures deeper."

These divisions grew even more Thursday morning, when the President issued a fusillade of tweets targeting House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who, in ordinary times, would be the chief Republican allies of a Republican president. This came just after the President roiled congressional waters by suggesting that he would shut the government down if Congress didn't take steps to build a wall on the Mexican border, one of his signature campaign themes and promises.

"Tempers are getting a little thin and at some point folks are going to have to come together," said Kenneth Khachigian, who was a top aide to former presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. "There needs to be a realization that the Republican congressional majority is going to be at risk very substantially if this trend continues."

These sorts of divisions between the legislative and executive branches of the same American political parties are exceedingly rare.

The divide between President John Tyler and his fellow Whigs in 1842 and the tensions that split the William Howard Taft Republicans from the Theodore Roosevelt Republicans in 1912 occurred in a different time, when the United States was far less influential in global affairs and when the world took little notice.

Besides the rift between the hawkish President Johnson and the more skeptical congressional Democrats on Vietnam, there were substantial cultural differences between House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O'Neill Jr. and President Jimmy Carter.

One was a neighbourhood politician, the other an engineer. One boasted about being a big government spender, the other was frugal and wary of government expenditure. One expected to be served breakfast when he was invited to the White House, the other thought such niceties were frivolous. One liked a drink in the late afternoon, the other preferred lemonade. The relationship was strained – and Mr. O'Neill publicly ridiculed the President and his band of Georgia aides.

The tensions within the Republican Party that have flared exactly 40 years after the strains between Mr. Carter and Mr. O'Neill frisson began long before Mr. Trump's inauguration.

A onetime Democrat who courted Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump won the GOP presidential nomination by belittling Republican leaders, traditions and folkways. Only seconds into his inaugural address, customarily a set-piece speech of vision wrapped in the rhetoric of reconciliation, the new President attacked what he called "a small group in our nation's Capital [that] has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost"– in short, the very members of Congress who were sitting only feet from him and whose support he would need to put his policy priorities into law.

Mr. Trump has sparred often with Speaker Ryan, but last week opened a major split with Mr. Ryan's Senate counterpart, Mr. McConnell, that was so wide and so widely noticed that it has been fodder for the national conversation for days. This provided discomfort all around, especially for Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who is Mr. McConnell's wife and who sits at the cabinet table with her patron, Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has had little success with Congress, which has not been able to redeem his promise to overthrow or even overhaul the Obamacare health plan and remains divided over the President's next priority, a comprehensive overhaul of the American tax code.

"There is great dysfunction," Mr. Bush said. "The Republican Party for seven years advocated the repeal of Obamacare, but did very little to forge a consensus for an alternative."

This week, Mr. Trump broadened his attacks on fellow Republicans, and when he ventured into Arizona, he produced an astonishing daily double, assailing both Republican senators from the state: John McCain, who provided the decisive vote against the health-care plan that Mr. Trump advocated, and Jeff Flake, who has written a book saying the GOP's embrace of Mr. Trump was a "Faustian bargain."

"Nobody knows who the hell he is," Mr. Trump said of Mr. Flake, who is facing a tough re-election battle made even tougher by Mr. Trump's support of a primary challenger. Tellingly, Mr. McConnell and Mr. McCain stand foursquare behind Mr. Flake, who joined the Senate in 2013 after a decade in the House of Representatives.

But it was Mr. Trump's reaction to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., that caused the biggest fissure yet.

His remarks alienated the small group of black Republicans who had stuck by him; angered business executives so dramatically that the White House was forced to disband three advisory counsels; and, perhaps most astonishing of all, even prompted former Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, by consensus the most mild-mannered lawmaker of the past generation, to wonder out loud whether the GOP House and Senate should go its own way without heeding the President's calls.

What is most remarkable about the situation in the capital is the length, and extent, of the Republicans' internal struggle, which in some ways can be traced to 1964, when the political hero of both Mr. Flake and Mr. McCain, Barry Goldwater, won the Republican presidential nomination and turned the party rightward.

Mr. Goldwater lost in a landslide. The party's next nominee, Mr. Nixon, was a classic polarizing politician and was chased from office, in large measure by Republican grandees who steeled themselves in the middle of the Watergate episode to tell the 37th President that he could no longer govern the country.

"At the end of Watergate," said Mr. Khachigian, the onetime Nixon aide, "we couldn't hold the Republicans."

The party had a spell of peace under Mr. Reagan, who himself had to overcome the anxieties of the party establishment, but fell into squabbling again under pressures from religious conservatives and from devout conservatives who believed Mr. Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, was insufficiently committed to the new muscular conservatism personified by Newt Gingrich, who became the party's first House Speaker in four decades.

And so it went – a party that on the surface was the vanguard of the American establishment found that its own party establishment was constantly under fire.

All this makes the Carter years seem relatively serene in comparison, though three years into the Georgian's presidency, he faced a nomination challenge from the left from Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Mr. Carter defeated Mr. Kennedy, but lost the 1980 election to Mr. Reagan.

"For all these minor distractions, President Carter and Tip O'Neill ended up getting along pretty well, and Carter's legislative record was relatively successful," said Richard Moe, who worked in the Carter White House as chief of staff to Mr. Carter's vice-president, Walter Mondale. "The two of them came from different places in the Democratic Party – there's no question about that. But they basically wanted to go in the same direction. You don't see that now."