Joe Manchins high-wire act: Working with Trump and criticizing both parties

Joe Manchin’s high-wire act: Working with Trump — and criticizing both parties

By David Weigel April 1 at 9:58 AM


MATEWAN, W.Va. — On Thursday, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin III became the first Democratic senator to support President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

On Friday, he came to this town of 484 people to explain why.

The United Mine Workers of America was hosting Manchin for an ask-anything town hall meeting, and one of the first skeptical questions focused on what “working people” could expect from Judge Neil Gorsuch.

“He’s been portrayed as not being for the working person,” said Manchin. “Well, I talked to Merrick Garland” — former president Barack Obama’s nominee for the same court vacancy, whom Republicans blocked last year. “I thought he was a good man. He never ruled in favor of anybody but the agencies, which were killing us. And I said, ‘Judge Garland, how come the agencies always win with you? How come the average person never does, not once?’?”

In two acrobatic minutes, Manchin managed to jump completely clear of a question about Trump and aim his frustrations instead at fellow Democrats. He stated his problems with the Obama administration (“the agencies” was code for the Environmental Protection Agency, the least popular federal bureaucracy in coal country), blamed Democrats for the impending showdown in the Senate over the Gorsuch nomination (“Harry Reid started this”) and — most importantly — described the access he’d earned by dealing with Trump.

Perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Democrat of the 25 up for reelection in 2018, Manchin is testing whether voters in a state that overwhelmingly supported Trump will also continue to back him. He pulls no punches with his own party, which voters from his state and others along the Appalachians abandoned overwhelmingly as they looked for someone to blame for the collapse of the coal industry and their way of life.



But Manchin is an enthusiastic critic of Trump’s party too. His message is complicated: He tells West Virginians why Republicans are tools for the wealthy, is trying to work with the president his state elected, and remains firmly wedded to a party that is increasingly environmentalist and focused on winning a diversifying, suburban electorate.

“For me to be a Republican, I would have to put the bottom line before I would a human being,” Manchin told The Washington Post last month.

It’s a high-wire act, with Republicans hoping for a stumble.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/joe-manchins-high-wire-act-working-with-trump--and-criticizing-both-parties/2017/04/01/1527d2c6-164e-11e7-833c-503e1f6394c9_story.html?utm_term=.7cdb95400d0a