Playbook Audio Briefing is sponsored by Google Search in 2017.

Good morning. I'm Jake Sherman. This is your political playbook audio briefing. I'm here with Anna Palmer.

Let's talk about Congress. Let's talk about Congress in 2017, Congress in 2018, and where the dynamics are.

It's been, I feel like I'm drowning. I have so much to talk about.

But let's talk about the

President of the United States and his relationship with his own party on Capitol Hill.

Yeah, it's so different. It's unlike anything I think either of us have ever seen in modern history

where you have a president of a party, the Republican Party, who doesn't have longstanding ties to these members,

right? He hasn't grown up in the political system. He hasn't contributed to them. In fact,

he's mostly contributed to Democrats before he became a presidential candidate. And so you have this

kind of fraught relationship where he has his own ideology. It's Trump politics. It's not always

where the Republican Party wants to be. And that has caused a lot of tension, not only with

leadership, but in particular with a lot of members. Yeah, it has. And the president doesn't

act in a typical way with members of Congress. In some ways, you know, he's on the phone with Paul Ryan

and Mitch McConnell nearly every day. There are other low-level people who he talks to. There's

Mark Meadows who's known to be close to him and some of the conservatives in Congress who he's

pretty simpatico with. And that's a change because, you know, Barack Obama and George Bush weren't exactly

dialing people every night to get their pulse. So Trump in this way is a lot more like Bill Clinton.

Yeah, I mean, the other thing I would just say is he's also really attacked members of his own party in a way

that's completely unprecedented, whether it's Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee or Jeff Flake of Arizona or even John McCain of Arizona.

He has had no qualms about really going after these Republican senators who he needs on a lot of issues and is going to need going into 2018.

Yeah, and I think also let's talk about the big dynamic here, Doug Jones, who's just elected

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