Trump Doubles Down On Roy Moore, Castigates Ivanka For Supporting Victims

On Sunday morning, Donald Trump doubled down (or is this quadrupled down by now?) on his support for Alabama Senate hopeful Roy Moore, tweeting the following:

The last thing we need in Alabama and the U.S. Senate is a Schumer/Pelosi puppet who is WEAK on Crime, WEAK on the Border, Bad for our Military and our great Vets, Bad for our 2nd Amendment, AND WANTS TO RAISES TAXES TO THE SKY. Jones would be a disaster!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017

Apparently realizing that someone would likely point out that he did not in fact back Roy Moore, but rather Moore’s opponent Luther Strange in the September party primary, Trump made sure to remind you that Strange got a boost from the batshit crazy rally the President held in Huntsville (that would be the same rally that started the whole NFL feud).

I endorsed Luther Strange in the Alabama Primary. He shot way up in the polls but it wasn’t enough. Can’t let Schumer/Pelosi win this race. Liberal Jones would be BAD!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017

Make no mistake, this is a bad idea. There is no question that the allegations against Moore have at least some merit and even if they didn’t, Roy is a guy who has no business holding public office for a laundry list of reasons, some of which are outlined in detail here.

The problem for Trump is that his endorsement of “Big Luther” ran counter to Steve Bannon’s endorsement of Moore. When Moore won, it was widely seen as a testament to the idea that voters are still sympathetic to the populist message that got Trump elected – that would be the same message Steve Bannon is still pushing. So to Trump, there’s a sense in which Moore’s victory was “proof” that abandoning Bannon’s populism for mainstream Republican politics is not a good idea.

Of course once the allegations against Moore starting piling up, it became clear that Bannon had made an egregious miscalculation. The Washington Post story about Moore came just a day after Bannon called for Mitch McConnell to step aside, and as the furor grew over Moore’s alleged misdeeds, so did the backlash against the Führer’s “war” to replace GOP incumbents with “outsiders.” Bannon stood by Moore, but people close to the Breitbart boss would later reveal that he has his misgivings.

For Trump, this is and has always been a lose-lose proposition. Backing Strange was a way to curry favor with the mainstream Republicans Trump needs to push his agenda forward, but not backing Moore was seen as a move away from the populism that helped win Trump the election.

You’d think, given the allegations against Moore, that this would be an easy call for the President. But it’s not. Because Trump has already thrown Roy under the bus once by endorsing Strange. To throw him under the bus again would be to effectively double down on the same kind of mainstream Republican politics that his base despises and that Bannon spends every waking hour railing against. So what does Trump do? Well, he decides to roll the dice with Moore.

Here’s the New York Times:

Mr. Trump’s decision to reject every long-shot plan to save the Senate seat reflects the imperative that an unpopular president faces to retain his political base, a determination that he should follow his own instincts after having felt steered into a disastrous earlier endorsement in the Alabama race, and even his insistence that he himself has been the victim of false accusations of sexual misconduct.

But in tying himself to Mr. Moore even as congressional leaders have abandoned the candidate en masse, the president has reignited hostilities with his own party just as Senate Republicans are rushing to pass a politically crucial tax overhaul. Mr. McConnell and his allies have been particularly infuriated as Mr. Trump has reacted with indifference to a series of ideas they have floated to try to block Mr. Moore.

For his part, Lindsey Graham is cautious. “I was surprised, and I think it’s a high-risk move,” he said this week.

Apparently, Trump went so far as to defend Moore during a meeting with Senators on tax reform last week. According to multiple people in attendance, Trump told lawmakers that the allegations were based on things that happened “40 years ago” and Bannon is said to have “aggressively” lobbied Trump on behalf of Moore.

Meanwhile, another deeply disturbing anecdote has emerged from the West Wing. Earlier this month, Ivanka gave an interview to the Associate Press and weighed in on Moore as follows:

There’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children. I’ve yet to see a valid explanation and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts.

According to three staffers, Trump was “annoyed” by his daughter’s condemnation of Moore. Referring to the AP interview, the President reportedly looked to several aides in the Oval Office, and asked: “Do you believe this?”

Nothing further.