President Donald Trump on Friday made his most stark appeal yet for Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster rule and allow simple majority votes to prevail on the shutdown and for most legislation, saying it would mean the GOP would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” for the foreseeable future.
Speaking in the Cabinet Room during a bilateral meeting and lunch with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban — a leader who has spent years eroding his country’s democratic guardrails to make it nearly impossible for his Fidesz to lose power — Trump was deep into a meandering soliloquy about how Democratic victories in Tuesday’s off-year elections were the result of “lying” about his record on “affordability” when he was pressed on how to end what is now the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. In response, he told the assembled press that the “way to do it” was for Senate Republicans to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” to ditch the upper chamber’s filibuster rule.
