President Trump may be trying to wind down his conflict with Iran, but he is escalating his war with Senate Republicans.
Mr. Trump blindsided his supposed allies in the Senate on Wednesday with a rocket of a social media post from across the Atlantic, tying together a host of his pet peeves about the Senate while yanking his new nominee for national intelligence director from his confirmation hearing just hours before it was to occur.
It was an extraordinary move from a president whose own party controls the chamber, but just the latest sign of a major rupture between Mr. Trump and G.O.P. senators as the midterm elections approach.
Mr. Trump’s abrupt announcement pulled the rug out from under the carefully laid plans of Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, who had been toiling to clean up yet another mess the president created for his party last week when he named his loyalist Bill Pulte to serve as the director of national intelligence.
Mr. Thune had been moving expeditiously to confirm Jay Clayton for the post to avoid an ugly confrontation over the temporary installation of Mr. Pulte, who is opposed by members of both parties.
Mr. Thune’s plan was working — Democrats who have almost uniformly opposed Mr. Trump’s nominees suggested they would cooperate with the rapid confirmation of Mr. Clayton — until the president stepped in.
On top of pulling back his nominee, Mr. Trump piled on even more stringent conditions. He demanded that Senate Republicans attach stalled legislation on voting restrictions to a critical surveillance bill, and insisted that he would not move forward with Mr. Clayton until his replacement as the U.S. attorney was confirmed — a process that would take weeks at a minimum and would face Democratic resistance.
Doing so would also likely require Senate Republicans to jettison both the chamber’s signature filibuster and the Judiciary Committee’s so-called blue slip tradition, which gives home-state senators veto power over Federal District Court judges, United States attorneys and federal marshals.
Mr. Thune has staked his reputation as a Senate leader on preserving the legislative filibuster, so in essence the president was demanding that Mr. Thune torch his own legacy for a voting measure that so far has not drawn sufficient support to pass.
The remarkable Senate tumult imperiled an expired intelligence law and shifted the political conversation away from the G.O.P.’s preferred midterm message on tax cuts and affordability.
But the tension has been rising for weeks, after Mr. Trump endorsed the primary opponents of two G.O.P. incumbents who subsequently lost. Those moves were seen by many Republicans as slaps at Mr. Thune and clear indications that the president was putting his personal political grievances and desires ahead of the interests of the party.
Senate Republicans have also raised objections to the president’s ballroom project, a proposed fund to pay damages to Jan. 6 defendants, the special protection from tax audits he was given by the Department of Justice, as well as the selection of Mr. Pulte. And many of them, including Mr. Thune, have declined to praise his cease-fire deal with Iran, noting that they had not been briefed on it.
Asked on Tuesday what he thought Mr. Trump was trying to achieve with his machinations, Mr. Thune had a brief response. “Good question,” he said.
Mr. Trump has shown dissatisfaction with Mr. Thune recently with public slights such as failing to give him advance knowledge of Mr. Clayton’s selection last week and being slow to share information with the Senate leadership about the emerging agreement with Iran.
Mr. Thune has also shown more willingness in recent days to push back against Mr. Trump no matter the fallout — a development that no doubt does not sit well with the president.
Senate Republicans privately suggested that Mr. Trump’s ire could have been fueled by Mr. Thune’s rush to join with Democrats to circumvent the possibility of Mr. Pulte’s serving even a day as national intelligence director — a direct challenge to Mr. Trump’s discretion to pick the top members of his team.
Whatever the reason, Senate Republicans said the discord was very unsettling.
“The president has put Leader Thune in a very difficult position,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Main. “When there are posts in the middle of the night asking for a total change in direction, it makes committees very chaotic.”
Asked to describe the dynamic between the White House and Senate Republicans at the moment, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, replied, “Less than optimal.”
“I think it’s a bad move,” Mr. Tillis said of the president’s decision to delay the confirmation hearing. He criticized Mr. Pulte as a “sycophant” and said Trump’s actions were “undermining our ability to produce the results that he wants.”
Mr. Trump has since his first term been aggravated by resistance in the Senate, which operates according to consensus rather than raw majority rule. Mr. Thune’s low-key pragmatism and efforts to preserve the Senate’s prerogatives in the face of the president’s demands have been particularly infuriating to Mr. Trump, standing in stark contrast to what he has encountered in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson takes pains to do whatever the president asks.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and Mr. Thune’s predecessor, flatly refused to consider weakening the filibuster as he and Mr. Trump diverged on issues after working together to confirm scores of conservative judges.
Mr. Thune has instead tried to explain the vote tallies and the workings of the Senate to the president as a way of justifying why he cannot always deliver what Mr. Trump wants, as he did during an interview on Tuesday night on Fox News.
“There are times when, for reasons of how the Senate functions, the answer isn’t always ‘yes’ to the things that he wants to do,” Mr. Thune said in the interview. “But we do everything we can to work constructively with him and his team to ensure that we are moving the country forward.”
Mr. Thune has also tried to impress upon Mr. Trump that Republican senators were disinclined to gut the filibuster or abandon the blue slip veto power because they fear that once Democrats regained power, they would then have the power to push through progressive legislation and judges that would be anathema to Republicans. The filibuster and the blue slip are also procedural weapons that empower individual senators, who are very reluctant to sacrifice such leverage.
“He’s passionate about it, and we are doing everything that we can,” Mr. Thune said on Fox about the president’s push for the voting restrictions. “But it is a function of math. I mean, we are bound by arithmetic in the United States Senate. The votes currently aren’t there.”
But those explanations have obviously not satisfied the president, who made his unhappiness known with his decision to add what he called “a slight bit of intrigue” and keep Mr. Clayton away from his hearing until all his other conditions were met.
To Mr. Trump, the issue is not a math problem; it is a Republican problem. And he expects Mr. Thune and his colleagues to fix it.
Robert Jimison and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.
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