Donald Trump headed for the splendid isolation of his Camp David presidential retreat on Friday after the bombshell book that rocked his administration hit shops across the US.
Trump will hope to leave behind the acrimony of Washington laid bare in journalist Michael Wolff’s account and concentrate on policy and looming elections in talks with congressional Republican leaders.
Wolff’s devastating story of infighting, incompetence and farce at the White House – first reported by the Guardian – has dominated the first week of 2018 and exposed fresh divisions in an already fractious Republican party. At the centre of the storm is Steve Bannon, the hardline nationalist who helped put Trump in the White House only to turn against him in candid interviews with Wolff.
Trump also launched a late-night attack on Wolff, questioning the author’s credibility in a tweet: “I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve [Bannon]!”
Wolff responded in a TV interview on Friday, insisting that he stood by his reporting on how White House staff questioned the president’s mental stability. “I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common,” he said.
“They all say, ‘He is like a child,’ and what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him. He just has to be satisfied in the moment.”
The president will strive to steady the ship when he holds talks with the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, at the rustic Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain this weekend. Trump’s takedown of Bannon in recent days is likely to be welcomed by McConnell, a longtime nemesis. Soon after Trump issued a statement this week saying Bannon had “lost his mind”, the Kentucky senator’s team tweeted a gif of him smiling.
With a hint of glee, McConnell told reporters on Thursday: “I’d like to associate myself with what the president had to say about Steve Bannon yesterday.”
But while Ryan is likely to share that sentiment, the Republican leaders could also clash. Ryan is eager to scale back the nation’s entitlement programmes, such as food stamps and housing subsidies, a move likely to prove popular with conservative campaign donors. Trump has said he wants to tackle welfare reform but McConnell is wary of the idea, saying publicly that it is unlikely to be taken up this year.
In a chamber that he controls just 51-49, McConnell would need nine Democratic votes – a highly improbable scenario. Democrats have condemned welfare reform as an attempt to pay for recent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
An alternative priority is Trump’s much-talked about $1tn infrastructure plan, which has potential for bipartisan support that could be useful in an election year. But Democrats have shown little enthusiasm for Republican ideas of financing it by cutting other programmes.
The difficult climate for Republicans in the midterm elections is also likely to be on the agenda, with the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, House majority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and Senate majority whip, John Cornyn of Texas, also reportedly in attendance.
The Camp David summit also takes place against the backdrop of a new year hangover in Congress – unfinished business from 2017 that includes thorny agenda items such as spending and immigration.
Congressional leaders and the White House are currently locked into high stakes negotiations over a budget deal that should have been resolved last spring and will probably consume Washington until the 19 January deadline to avert a partial government shutdown. Multiple lawmakers described a meeting earlier this week with the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, as “positive”.
McConnell told reporters on Thursday: “Nobody wants to shut the government down on either side and I’m optimistic we’ll get a resolution to many of those issues before January 19.”
Emboldened by the passage of a $1.5tn tax overhaul last month, Republicans are demanding increased spending on defence and border security while Democrats, whose votes are needed to pass a spending measure, want similar spending hikes on social programmes and action on legislation to shield young people brought to the country illegally as children from deportation.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: “We intend to be reasonable but we don’t intend to abandon our priorities just as our Republican friends don’t want to abandon theirs.”
Schumer insisted that Democrats have “leverage” to demand a budget agreement that raises spending limits “with parity” between defence and domestic programmes and includes disaster relief funding, a healthcare package and a commitment to enshrine into law the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), the Obama-era programme that shielded young undocumented immigrants from deportation. The Trump administration rescinded the program earlier this year, giving Congress until March 2018 to find a solution.
Republicans want action on Daca to proceed separately from the budget talks while Democrats insist on tangling the two, as the negotiations represent a rare moment of leverage for the minority party. The spending measure requires 60 votes to pass, which means at least nine Democrats must approve if all Republicans support the bill.
Lawmakers also need to agree on billions in relief funding for areas ravaged by hurricanes last year, lifting the debt ceiling, extending a children’s health insurance programme which provides care for nearly 9 million low-income children and renewing a foreign intelligence gathering programme.
