Trump’s White House struggles to get out from under Russia controversy

By David Nakamura and Ashley Parker 

March 31, 2017

President Trump entered his 11th week in office Friday in crisis mode, his governing agenda at risk of being subsumed by escalating questions about the White House’s conduct in the Russia probe — which the president called a “witch hunt.”

Trump and his senior aides spent much of the day on the defensive, parrying the latest reports that senior administration officials had potentially acted improperly in the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Moscow’s meddling in the U.S. elections and possible links between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer defended the actions of three senior White House aides who, according to media reports, helped facilitate the visit of the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), to the White House grounds last week to view classified intelligence documents.

“What he did, what he saw, who he met with was 100 percent proper,” Spicer said of Nunes.

The chairman later briefed the president on the information and declared publicly that the documents showed Trump campaign aides were swept up in U.S. intelligence surveillance of foreign nationals. That prompted the president to say he felt “somewhat” vindicated in his unsubstantiated allegations that President Barack Obama had ordered a wiretap on him.

Trump, meanwhile, weighed in again Friday via Twitter by suggesting that he supported a request by his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for immunity from prosecution in exchange for offering to testify in the probe.

“This is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems,” Trump wrote.

Spicer said the White House was not concerned that Flynn might reveal damaging information, even though Trump fired him in February over revelations Flynn misled senior officials, including Vice President Pence, over his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

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But Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, called it a “grave and momentous step” for a national security official to seek immunity.

Schiff said the investigation “grows in severity and magnitude by the day,” and he said the committee has “much work and many more witnesses and documents” to review before any witness can be considered for immunity.

For the White House, it was another chaotic day in which its attempt to regain control of the political conversation — this time through two executive orders on trade — was relegated to an afterthought in Washington.

Trump aides have expressed growing frustration at their inability to gain control of Washington’s narrative, just over two months into the president’s tenure. And amid mounting attention on Trump’s frequent weekend jaunts to his winter retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., and attendant golf-course outings, aides said the president would remain in Washington this weekend holding meetings at the White House.

Trump has a lot to prepare for, with three world leaders — Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Chinese President Xi Jinping — due to meet with the president next week.

In many ways, the first weeks of the Trump White House have resembled a chaotic tech start-up. Inside the West Wing, according to White House officials, each new crisis and mishap, including the botched rollout of the president’s travel ban and the failure on the GOP health-care bill, has been viewed as a learning opportunity, to better understand what works and what doesn’t, as well as which staffers can perform under pressure — and, perhaps more importantly, which can’t.

On Thursday, the administration announced its first major staff adjustment, with Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh leaving to oversee an outside political group that supports the president’s agenda.

The official explanation was that after the health-care bill’s collapse, Walsh realized she could be of more value to the White House from the outside, helping guide a pro-Trump group that has provided almost no air cover for the president or his agenda.

But Walsh, one of the few top women in the West Wing, was never a likely fit in the Trump administration. A longtime confidante of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who had served as the Republican National Committee chairman, Walsh viewed Trump with skepticism throughout much of the campaign. And, in return, she was treated with suspicion by Trump loyalists who distrusted her background in mainstream Republican Party politics and thought she leaked information to the press, according to several administration officials.

The White House took the unusual move of having several aides gather a small group of reporters to insist, on background, that Walsh was not being fired and was simply leaving on her own accord.

By Thursday, senior aides were trying to beat back vaguely sourced reports on social media that Rick Dearborn, a deputy chief of staff who oversees legislative affairs, might also be on his way out. David Urban — who served as chief of staff to Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and helped run Trump’s campaign team in that state — was cited as a possible replacement. Urban’s name is often mentioned during times of turmoil, and he was previously floated as a possible replacement for Priebus.

Three White House officials insisted that Dearborn’s job was safe, and Cliff Sims, a Trump communications aide, lashed out at reporters on Twitter.

“Get a grip . . . And better ‘sources,’ ” Sims wrote.

But it was the Russia probe that continued to dominate the conversation in Washington, forcing the White House into a reactive posture for another day.

As the disclosures have mounted over communications between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials during the campaign and transition, the White House has sought to distance itself from the conduct of some members of the president’s campaign team.

But the revelations that three senior White House aides, including the top lawyer for the National Security Council, were involved in the handling of the files that were shared with Nunes has raised new questions about the conduct of the president’s staff.

“It’s shocking,” said Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration. “I used to work at the White House. I used to work at the NSC. . . . I never, ever briefed a U.S. congressman on anything in that capacity, and I’m not aware of anyone who did when I was there.”

Spicer dismissed suggestions that Nunes was granted carte blanche access to the White House’s 18-acre grounds, which includes the NSC headquarters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.

“Yes, it is appropriate for a member of Congress to contact someone who contacted him,” Spicer said, referring to reports that Nunes had chosen to meet his source for the information at the White House to view the documents in a secure location. “As Chairman Nunes said himself, he was not hiding or roaming. He was asked to come over here by an individual. He came over, which happens daily.”

U.S. diplomats reportedly told to avoid ‘eye contact’ with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson

BY CHRIS SOMMERFELDT

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

March 31, 2017

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has gained a reputation for being rather reclusive in his role as the nation's new top diplomat — and a report suggests he might even have trouble looking people in the eye.

The former Exxon Mobil executive has mostly remained below the radar since Inauguration Day, making few public appearances and drawing ire for choosing to travel without a press pool.

Tillerson's lone wolf behavior apparently extends to his own staff, with career diplomats at the State Department telling the Washington Post on Thursday that they have yet to meet their boss.

The same diplomats have also been instructed to not speak to Tillerson directly — "or even make eye contact," according to The Post.

Last week, Tillerson revealed to the only reporter allowed on his flight to China that he actually "didn't want this job."

"I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids," the Texas native said, adding that his wife talked him into taking the post.

Tillerson conceded to the reporter, Erin McPike of the right-wing Independent Journal Review, that he's not used to the spotlight.

"I'm not a big media press access person," he said. "I personally don't need it."

American Jobs Are Headed to Mexico Once Again

by Thomas Black

March 31, 2017, 

After Donald Trump’s election, the flow of manufacturers setting up shop south of the border dwindled to a trickle. Ford Motor Co. and Carrier Corp., caught in Trump’s Twitter crosshairs, scrapped plans to move jobs to Mexico in two very public examples of the slowdown.

But now the pace is picking back up. Illinois Tool Works Inc. will close an auto-parts plant in Mazon, Illinois, this month and head to Ciudad Juarez. Triumph Group Inc. is reducing the Spokane, Washington, workforce that makes fiber-composite parts for Boeing Co. aircraft and moving production to Zacatecas and Baja California. TE Connectivity Ltd. is shuttering a pressure-sensor plant in Pennsauken, New Jersey, in favor of a facility in Hermosillo.

While Trump hasn’t stopped pounding his America First bully pulpit, and the future of Nafta remains uncertain, “there’s cautious optimism and a hopeful attitude that cooler heads will prevail in Washington,” said Ross Baldwin, chief executive officer of Tacna Services Inc., which facilitates relocations.

Baldwin has seen the evidence: After business ground to a halt back in November, he’s now juggling two Mexico-bound clients. San Diego-based Tacna helps manage 4,500 workers in Mexico, where factory wages are about a fifth of those in the U.S. That may explain why Mexican manufacturing jobs rose 3.2 percent in January from a year ago as they dropped 0.3 percent in the U.S.

The renewed exodus shows how difficult it will be for Trump to turn the macroeconomic tide just by jawboning alone. This week, he trumpeted a Ford investment in Michigan plants with a cap-lock fanfare: “JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!” The $1.2 billion will create or retain only 130 positions, though. (While Ford canceled plans in November for a new $1.6 billion facility in Mexico, winning Trump’s praise, it employs more than 7,000 workers in that country.)

Trump’s plans to renegotiate Nafta and talk of punitive tariffs can’t erase the need to manufacture in lower-cost countries, said Alan Russell, CEO of El Paso, Texas-based Tecma Group., which also helps open and operate factories in Mexico. European companies tap the Czech Republic for low wages and Asia has Vietnam, and the U.S. needs Mexico to remain competitive with labor-intensive products, he said.

“This isn’t about taking jobs from the U.S. -- It’s about saving companies.”

Russell helped Firstronic LLC open a factory in Juarez in 2014 to make circuit boards for customers including Audi and Tesla Inc. Workers, sporting maroon lab coats and wearing rubber straps on their shoes to ward off static electricity, make about $10 a day running computer-driven machines that insert capacitors and resistors onto green boards and solder them into place. 

The Juarez expansion -- and joint ventures in the Czech Republic and China -- was a factor in Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Firstronic winning larger contracts from producers of auto parts and medical supplies, said CEO John Sammut. His sales are surging at a 30 percent annual clip.

Grow and Thrive

In Spokane, Triumph Group dismissed almost 80 production workers in January and plans to eliminate another 30 jobs by August as it moves work to Mexican plants, said Steve Warren, a local official of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

“They are being pressured to supply parts as low cost as possible,” he said.

Tapping cheap labor sometimes isn’t just about lowering costs, but accelerating growth. Large purchasers, including Kongsberg Automotive and Dura Automotive Systems, prefer to deal with a few global suppliers rather than a myriad of local companies.

“If we were only producing in the U.S., we would lose out on the vast majority of the contract opportunities,” Sammut said. With the increase in business, Firstronic has added revenue and jobs in Grand Rapids, he said.

Businesses haven’t dismissed a Nafta renegotiation or policies being considered in Washington that might prove costly. A plan by House Republicans to implement a 20 percent border adjustment tax has raised concerns, especially among retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that import many of their wares. The tax would be applied to sales of imported goods to reduce the U.S. trade deficit, which reached $734 billion in 2016.

Trump repeated to a joint session of Congress last month his refrain that that he will make it “much, much harder for companies to leave our country.” But his recent stumbles -- travel bans blocked by courts and a health-care bill scuttled by his own party -- underscore the limitations on presidential power and the difficulty he may have punishing companies or overhauling Nafta.

At a February conference in El Paso to discuss how Trump’s policies may affect trade, most in the room of plant managers, supply-chain officers and suppliers predicted Nafta would likely be changed but not discarded, and that the changes might not be harmful.

Whatever happens, Russell said his business fostering Mexican manufacturing will grow this year. The pressure to reduce costs is that relentless.

“When you dissect the worst-case scenarios, it still makes sense to go forward with their business plans,” he said. “It’s a competitive world.”

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Freedom Caucus now they feel like suckers, Trump used them, played them. Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice shame on me.

Their principles thrown out of the window by Trump. Now jobs are heading to Mexico approved by the fake president Trump, Freedom Caucus feel sore.

Three White House officials tied to files shared with House intelligence chairman

By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung 

March 30, 2017

At least three senior White House officials, including the top lawyer for the National Security Council, were involved in the handling of intelligence files that were shared with the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and showed that Trump campaign officials were swept up in U.S. surveillance of foreign nationals, according to U.S. officials.

The White House role in the matter contradicts assertions by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and adds to mounting concerns that the Trump administration is collaborating with the leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Though White House officials have refused to answer questions about the documents shared with Nunes, the White House said in a letter to the House committee Thursday that it had “discovered documents” that might show whether information collection on U.S. persons was mishandled and was prepared to show them to lawmakers.

One of those involved in procuring the documents cited by Nunes has close ties to former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The official, Ezra Cohen, survived a recent attempt to oust him from his White House job by appealing to Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, the officials said.

The materials unearthed by Nunes have been used to defend President Trump’s baseless claims on Twitter that he had been wiretapped at Trump Tower under a surveillance operation ordered by then-President Barack Obama. FBI Director James B. Comey and others have said that claim is false.

Nunes reviewed the material during a surreptitious visit to the White House grounds last week. He then returned the next day in a visit he said was arranged so that he could brief Trump on what Nunes depicted as potential abuses­ by U.S. spy agencies brought to his attention by an unnamed source.

Nunes and White House press secretary Sean Spicer have repeatedly refused to answer questions about the identities of those involved in unearthing the intelligence reports or arranging for Nunes to review them at the White House complex — although Nunes at one point said his source was not a member of the White House staff.

That assertion is under new scrutiny after U.S. officials confirmed that three senior officials at the National Security Council — considered part of the White House — played roles in the collection and handling of information shared with Nunes.

The officials said that the classified files were gathered by Cohen, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council.

After assembling reports that showed that Trump campaign officials were mentioned or inadvertently monitored by U.S. spy agencies targeting foreign individuals, Cohen took the matter to the top lawyer for the National Security Council, John Eisenberg.

The third White House official involved was identified as Michael Ellis, a lawyer who previously worked with Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee but joined the Trump administration as an attorney who reports to Eisenberg. Ellis and Eisenberg report to the White House counsel, Donald McGahn.

The involvement of Ellis and Cohen was first reported Thursday by the New York Times.

A spokesman for the NSC declined to comment. Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, said the chairman “will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity.” Langer also said that Nunes “will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources,” despite Nunes’s insisting on the anonymity of his own source.

Nunes, who served as an adviser to the Trump transition team, said the files he reviewed had made him concerned that U.S. intelligence agencies had mishandled information on members of the Trump campaign, although Nunes acknowledged that he saw no evidence of illegality.

He appeared to be referring to cases ­ of “incidental” collection on U.S. persons, which generally occur when foreign officials being monitored by U.S. spy agencies either mention an American or communicate with one. The identities of those Americans are supposed to be masked in any intelligence reports disseminated in the U.S. government.

Nunes said that most names were masked in the files he reviewed but that he could still identify Trump campaign officials from context.

Cohen gathered the cases ­ of incidental collection on Trump campaign operatives after arriving at the NSC. One official said Cohen did so as part of research unrelated to Trump’s wiretapping tweet. Instead, the official said, Cohen was assembling materials out of concern that intelligence information on U.S. persons was being shared too widely and that unmasking rules were being abused.

The U.S. official said Cohen was not involved in showing the material to Nunes, didn’t clear Nunes onto the White House grounds, didn’t review the material with Nunes and wasn’t even aware that the material was going to be shared with the committee chairman.

Even so, White House officials appear to have recognized the value of Cohen’s material in defending Trump from criticism for his false accusation that he had been wiretapped by Obama.

U.S. officials declined to say who had contacted Nunes or arranged his White House visits, except to note that Cohen had brought his findings to the attention of Eisenberg and that Ellis works for Eisenberg.

Cohen was brought into the administration by Flynn, a former Defense Intelligence Agency director who was fired after it was exposed that he had misled Vice President Pence and others about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

During a preliminary meeting this month to discuss the possibility of Flynn testifying before Congress, Flynn’s attorney said he wanted to explore the possibility of his client receiving full immunity in exchange for his participation.

Intelligence committee lawyers responded to the attorney by saying that immunity request, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was premature. “That’s not on the table,” an official said. “We aren’t entertaining immunity for anybody.”

Flynn frequently battled with the CIA, which mounted a failed effort to have Cohen removed from his job.

After Flynn was replaced by H.R. McMaster, some in the CIA made it known to him that the agency would prefer someone else in Cohen’s job. Early this month, McMaster interviewed the agency’s suggested candidate, senior CIA analyst Linda Weissgold, and informed Cohen that he was being moved to another position.

Cohen consulted Kushner and Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist. After Kushner and Bannon spoke with Trump over the March 11-12 weekend, Cohen was back in place.

Within days, a CIA detailee to the NSC working under Cohen was told without explanation to clear out his desk and return to the agency. The agent, a former and future covert operative whose name is being withheld by The Washington Post at the request of the CIA, was on a standard two-year rotation to the White House.

In its letter to the committee, the White House repeated calls for it to investigate leaks that have led to media reports about contacts by Trump associates with Russian operatives. In particular, it referred to a March 2 MSNBC interview with former Obama Defense Department official Evelyn Farkas, which has suddenly become a leading element in White House pushback against the Russia allegations and evidence of Trump’s claim that the Obama administration has actively sought to undermine his presidency.

The interview took place after the New York Times reported that the Obama White House, fearing the new administration would sweep it under the rug, had spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election. Farkas said, “I was urging my former colleagues and . . . the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

“That’s why there were so many leaks,” said Farkas, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

While her comments were widely ignored when initially broadcast four weeks ago, the MSNBC clip suddenly appeared Tuesday on conservative websites and subsequently on Fox News and other television outlets. In a Hugh Hewitt radio interview Wednesday evening, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said that its relevance to “surveillance of Trump transition team members is something that we need to figure out.”

Spicer, referring to the Obama administration, said the Farkas comment constituted an admission “on the record that this was their goal, to leak stuff.”

Farkas, in an interview with The Post, said she “didn’t give anybody anything except advice,” was not a source for any stories and had nothing to leak. Noting that she left government in October 2015, she said, “I was just watching like anybody else, like a regular spectator” as initial reports of Russia contacts began to surface after the election.

As a former staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a former Defense official involved with Russian affairs, she said she “got worried” that the Obama White House was not briefing Congress on what it knew. “I know how the Russians operate,” she said, and called former colleagues to make sure Congress was being informed.

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Ezra Cohen gathered the classified files, leaked them, showed them to Nunes (no one can walk into the white house without getting prior permission, or pass - then get access to the secret sensitive computer) even the old ladies riding in the bus know that.

Nunes lying to federal agents where he got the information - English is waiting for him in the Alcatraz.

It has been reported Ezra Cohen is a 30 years old, has a bachelor degree has less than four years of service DIA under Flynn. H.R. McMaster, a four star general knows that Ezra Cohen is a snitch and he does not want him - now how the four star feel.

Once Reince Priebus spreads fake news guess subsequent outlets run with ‘the bus’ in the bus you hear a lot of stories.

Flynn may desire immunity - Wolf is waiting for him in the Alcatraz. 

Trump threatens hard-liners as part of escalating Republican civil war

By John Wagner, Mike DeBonis and Robert Costa 

March 30, 2017 

President Trump threatened Thursday to try to knock off members of the House Freedom Caucus in next year’s elections if they don’t fall in line — an extraordinary move that laid bare an escalating civil war within a Republican Party struggling to enact an ambitious agenda.

In a series of tweets that began in the morning, the president warned that the powerful group of hard-line conservatives who helped block the party’s health-care bill last week would “hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast.”

The president vowed to “fight them” as well as Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections, a warning that his allies said was intended in the short term to make members of the Freedom Caucus think twice about crossing him again. But Trump’s pledge was met with defiance by many in the bloc, including some members who accused him of succumbing to the establishment in Washington that he had campaigned against.

Later in the day, Trump singled out three of the group’s members in another tweet, saying that if Reps. Mark Meadows (N.C.), Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Raúl R. Labrador (Idaho) got on board, “we would have both great healthcare and massive tax cuts & reform.”

Most of the roughly three dozen Freedom Caucus members were elected from safe Republican districts, and many of them faced no primary opposition. To make good on his threat, Trump would have to recruit GOP candidates to make the case that the Republican incumbent they face was unhelpful to an un­or­tho­dox, populist president.

Trump’s frustrations with the Freedom Caucus also reflect only part of his challenge in moving legislation, even in a Congress where his party controls both chambers. If Trump does too much to mollify members of the hard-line group, he risks alienating a similar number of more moderate Republicans in districts won or narrowly lost by last year’s Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

And on many pieces of Trump’s congressional agenda, he’ll need the support of at least some Democrats, particularly in the Senate, an uncertain prospect given the toxic partisan environment on the Hill.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters a few hours after Trump’s first tweet on Thursday that he sympathized with him.

“I understand the president’s frustration,” Ryan said. “About 90 percent of our conference is for this bill to repeal and replace Obamacare and about 10 percent are not. And that’s not enough to pass a bill.”

Ryan said he had no immediate plans to bring the bill back to the House floor, saying it was “too big of an issue to not get right.”

Trump and his White House advisers have been particularly frustrated by the intransigence of several prominent Freedom Caucus members, led by Meadows.

In White House meetings, Trump lobbied them intensively, only to see the bill collapse last Friday after Meadows and some of his allies said they would not vote for it. The bill also faced strong opposition from a group of moderate Republicans who were concerned it went too far in cutting Medicaid and leaving millions more people without insurance.

“This has been brewing for a while,” a White House official said of Trump’s decision to pressure and possibly target Freedom Caucus members.

“Our view is: There’s nothing as clarifying as the smell of Air Force One jet fuel. So if he needs to bring in the plane and do a rally, he’s going to think about doing that,” said the official, who requested anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

The official added that Trump and White House aides are “sick and tired” of seeing Freedom Caucus members on television in recent days.

Trump’s threat comes as Republican leaders are bracing for a month of potential GOP infighting over spending priorities. Congress must pass a spending bill by April 28 to avert a government shutdown.

Beyond that, the same divide that derailed the health-care legislation could imperil the next marquee legislation that Trump wants to tackle: tax reform.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday that Trump remains committed to “a bold and robust agenda,” adding: “He’s going to get the votes from wherever he can.”

Since Friday’s debacle, Trump and his aides have increasingly talked up the possibility of working with Democrats on a reboot of the health-care bill and other priorities — but that prospect has also divided Republicans on Capitol Hill.

In in a CBS News interview that aired Thursday morning, Ryan said he does not want to see Trump have to work with Democrats on revamping the Affordable Care Act — drawing flak from some members of his own party, including Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who said Trump’s bipartisan overtures should be encouraged.

“He’s irritated,” anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist said in explaining Trump’s decision to lash out at Freedom Caucus members. “During the health-care discussions, the Freedom Caucus would say they’d support him if they got one thing, then they’d want another thing. If you’re Trump, you wonder, ‘Why are these people meeting with me if they’re always going to be a ‘no’ vote?’”

If Trump gets involved in Republican primaries, Norquist said he thinks it’s possible he could “get some scalps.”

Though Trump’s national job approval numbers are historically low for a new president, he remains popular in many of the districts where Freedom Caucus members were elected. At the same time, most of those members won a larger percentage of the vote in their districts than Trump did.

On Capitol Hill, Trump’s tweet was met with a range of reactions: Some members said it could prove counterproductive while others praised him for using the power of his office in a way he hasn’t to this point.

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), who has called for health-insurance reform to work its way through Congress more slowly, said that with Trump’s tweet on Thursday, the president was taking exactly the wrong approach.

“The idea of threatening your way to legislative success may not be the wisest of strategies,” Sanford said Thursday. “His message yesterday was that he wanted to work with Democrats; I guess the message today is, ‘We need to fight against Freedom Caucus members and Democrats.’ . . . It’s a case of shooting messengers who were, rightfully, pointing out problems in a bill that the American public has not shown a proclivity toward.”

Jordan, another Freedom Caucus member, said the break with Trump was based on real policy differences, not a lack of loyalty.

“The president can say what he wants and that’s fine. But we’re focused on the legislation,” Jordan said.

Some of the harshest responses to Trump came via Twitter, his preferred means of provocative communication. Those included a tweet from Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who said that Trump’s support of the health-care bill signaled he was now part of the Washington elite.

“It didn’t take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump,” said Amash, a member of the Freedom Caucus and one of Trump’s frequent GOP critics. “No shame, Mr. President. Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. Establishment.”

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), a Trump ally, said the president’s focus on the Freedom Caucus was well placed as the White House attempts to steady itself and rethink its congressional coalitions.

Collins, a member of the Tuesday Group, a group of moderate House Republicans, rejected the notion — put forth this week by members of both groups — that there could be an accommodation between them on the health-care bill.

“The Tuesday Group will never meet with the Freedom Caucus, with a capital N-E-V-E-R,” Collins said, spelling out the last word.

Some Republicans said they see potential for Trump forging a governing coalition that includes some Democrats.

“Trump is a New York-type bargainer who wants to get something done,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.). “That approach will give him a lot of room to maneuver on taxes and infrastructure. Once you break the barrier that every bill has to have total Republican support, you can be more creative.”

Michael Steel, who was a senior aide to former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), said there is potential in some districts for Trump to dislodge Freedom Caucus members.

“If the president chooses to support primary challengers to House members who’ve been unhelpful, it wouldn’t necessarily be an ideological challenge,” Steel said. “It would be based on loyalty to the president, or lack thereof.”

But Steel added: “You don’t necessarily have to wait for 2018 for this to have an effect.”

There is precedent for Republican leaders taking aim at Freedom Caucus members. A spate of 2015 ads purchased by the American Action Network, a nonprofit issue advocacy group with ties to House GOP leaders, targeted Jordan and two other hard-liners for opposing a Department of Homeland Security funding bill.

Those ads infuriated members of the caucus, then only months old, and spawned a confrontational relationship that culminated in Boehner’s resignation six months later.

One open question is whether the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP’s House campaign arm, would intervene on behalf of incumbents targeted by Trump.

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the NRCC’s chairman, chuckled Thursday after a reporter read him Trump’s tweet.

“I want to be very clear: We have a policy of helping out incumbents that pay their dues,” Stivers said, referring to the hundreds of thousands of dollars GOP lawmakers are expected to raise for the committee each election cycle. “As long as they pay their dues, we’re gonna be there for them. . . If I was them, I’d take a look and see how I’m doing on my dues.”

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Trump is playing with fire (Freedom Caucus).

Freedom Caucus members are principled conservatives, Trump ran on their ideas, promised them that he will adhere to their ideas. That is how they voted for him. Now, the Freedom Caucus realizes they were hoodwinked by Trump.