Trump's worst week: A brief shining moment, quickly shrouded in defeat and discord

If you want to pick a peak moment in the Trump presidency, you could do worse than the feel-good White House announcement Wednesday that a huge foreign firm (Foxconn) wants to lead a manufacturing revival in a key Rust Belt battleground (Wisconsin).

It’s the perfect Trump bragging point.

If you want to pick a low moment, you could choose from nearly everything else about the president’s week:

His party’s epic health care defeat.

His strange campaign against his own attorney general.

Fratricidal warfare on his senior staff — ending in the sudden replacement of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus toward the end of the workday Friday.  

Brewing defiance from Republicans in Congress.

And a rebuke of the president from … the Boy Scouts!

This was all the melodrama of the Trump White House in microcosm: from its fondest aspirations (dealmaker president promoting Midwest factory jobs) to its deepest problems (discord, disarray, distraction, dysfunction).

The swing state of Wisconsin offered a handy backdrop for both story lines this week, as it has for much of the past two years.

It’s a state Trump lost badly in the GOP primaries but won surprisingly last fall.

It’s a state “very close to my heart,” Trump said at Wednesday’s announcement of a future Foxconn Technology Group factory there.

And it’s a state that has given us three big-name Republicans who have played rich and distinctive roles in the Trump saga (Priebus, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan).

When those three joined the president at the White House Wednesday, it was a reminder of their roller-coaster up and downs with Trump over the past two years.

There was Gov. Walker, ripped and routed by Trump in the GOP presidential race but now potentially the chief political beneficiary of the Foxconn deal (assuming it pans out as hoped). As Walker faces re-election, a giant new factory could give him his best answer to one of his biggest vulnerabilities, Wisconsin’s chronically subpar job growth.

There was Priebus, former chair of the state and national Republican parties, and now suddenly the former White House chief of staff. The Foxconn factory may be built in his home county, Kenosha.

“I can’t wait to see it happen for the people there,” he told me Wednesday.

But Trump didn’t even mention his name at the Foxconn ceremony. Rumors of his ouster had been relentless. The president hired a new communications chief, Anthony Scaramucci, who has embarked on a crazy public war of words against Priebus, culminating in a profane screed published by the New Yorker magazine Thursday in which Scaramucci called the chief of staff a “f—ing paranoid schizophrenic.” No apologies ensued, nor defenses of Priebus from the President. 

Then Trump announced on Twitter Friday a new chief of staff: current Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general.   

The Trump-Priebus relationship is Exhibit A for the chaos and conflict the president has cultivated in his top aides, to the astonishment of past White House officials.

"To have this kind of open warfare going on between the president, his staff, and his cabinet members is an absolute disgrace," Leon Panetta, chief of staff under President Clinton in the 1990s, told MSNBC.

Finally there’s Ryan, the House Speaker who clashed with Trump during the 2016 campaign but has tried to minimize his differences this year for a very obvious reason — his ambition to get his policy agenda enacted under Trump. (Added note: the Foxconn project will be in Ryan’s district).

Ryan’s House passed a health care bill while Mitch McConnell’s Senate failed. At a closed door meeting with members Friday, House GOP leaders reportedly offered up “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as a commentary on the Senate’s failure. The song describes the 1975 sinking of the massive freighter that was en route from Wisconsin to a steel mill near Detroit when it went down in a Lake Superior storm.

“Does any one know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?” goes one lyric.

But Ryan’s own House bill was deeply unpopular with the public, his own polling numbers have declined, and his House majority is threatened by congressional setbacks and Trump’s low approval.

Combined with the turmoil at the White House, the demise of the GOP’s years-long effort to repeal Obamacare has cast a pall over the party’s ability to govern, leading one Republican strategist to suggest that, “this presidency, legislatively, is effectively over.”

Ryan, Walker and Priebus have each been consumed in their own ways by Trump’s candidacy and presidency.

But together, they also offer a counterpoint to Trump. The twin political hallmarks of the Republican Party in Wisconsin since 2010 have been party unity and the ability to do just about whatever the party wants to while in power.

Trump’s GOP isn’t succeeding on either count.