As he headed to Huntsville, Ala., in a last-ditch effort to lift the floundering campaign of Sen. Luther Strange, President Trump was fuming — feeling dragged along by GOP senators who had pleaded with him to go and increasingly unenthusiastic about Strange, whom he described to aides as loyal but “low energy.”

His agitation only worsened on the flight back last Friday. Trump bemoaned the headlines he expected to see once Strange was defeated — that he had stumbled and lost his grip on “my people,” as he calls his core voters. He also lamented the rally crowd’s tepid response to the 6-foot-9 incumbent he liked to call “Big Luther.”

“Trump was never fully behind Strange to begin with,” former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said Wednesday after Strange was trounced in Tuesday’s GOP primary in Alabama. “But the party coaxed and cajoled him to get on the Strange train, and he did.”

For Trump, the trip to Alabama marked the dispiriting start to one of the lowest and perhaps most damaging stretches of his already troubled presidency, leaving him further weakened and isolated with few ways out of the thicket of challenges he faces, according to a half dozen people close to him interviewed on Wednesday.

His political vitality within his party — counted upon by Republicans who fear primary challenges in next year’s midterm elections — suddenly stands in question, as neither his vocal campaigning nor millions of dollars from the Republican establishment could save Strange from defeat by insurgent challenger Roy Moore.

Trump’s legislative agenda lies in tatters, as Senate Republicans failed again this week to rally around legislation that would gut former president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. He is also increasingly under siege by members of both parties for his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria, which has left Puerto Rico devastated and begging for help from Washington.

By Wednesday, the downtrodden president tried to start anew by unveiling a tax plan at an event in Indiana — a proposal immediately met with withering attacks from the left as a deficit-busting giveaway to the rich and from the right as not aggressive enough in slashing tax rates. The Drudge Report, influential among conservatives, dubbed it “more betrayal.”

Trump also waded back into the health-care debate, falsely stating that the Republican legislation was held up by a hospitalized senator.

“We have the votes for health care. We have one senator that’s in the hospital. He can’t vote because he’s in the hospital,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday — an apparent reference to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), who turns 80 in December and has dealt with various health problems.

Cochran responded with a corrective tweet: “Thanks for the well-wishes. I’m not hospitalized, but am recuperating at home in Mississippi and look forward to returning to work soon.”

Trump’s loose, confident talk extended elsewhere on Wednesday. In Indiana, the president was full of bravado as he made his tax pitch — and if there was lingering frustration with Strange, he did not show it.

“These tax cuts are significant,” Trump said at the state fairgrounds. “There’s never been tax cuts like what we’re talking about.”

But Trump’s critics did not buy the president’s assurance and said the tax speech could not paper over his problems.

“In Alabama and with so many things, Trump has helped to light a fire he can’t control, and there’s no sign he knows how to get out of this situation,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who worked in George W. Bush’s White House. “It’s going to cause him to lash out more rather than less as he starts to feel like the walls are closing in.”

Several of Trump’s longtime friends and associates said he is doing what he always does in times of trouble: attempt to overwhelm with liveliness. But they acknowledged that Trump may not be enjoying the experience.

“I’m told he’s unhappy,” said veteran Republican consultant Roger Stone. “He’s surrounded by people who don’t understand politics and don’t understand why he won the presidency. Instead of sending a message in Alabama to get behind his policies, they sadly lost the opportunity.”

Said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg, “The president will think about what happened in Alabama and remember everybody who told him to go all in. If you sent him polls from the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce or the Senate Leadership Fund, the next polls you send will go in his trash can.”

Together, those groups, along with other mainstream GOP organizations, spent more than $10 million to boost Strange.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, stewed over their own fates, anxious that Moore, a former state Supreme Court judge, would become a national burden for the party because of the long list of incendiary comments he has made on race, religion and sexuality.

Hushed talk of retirements dominated conversations on Capitol Hill, one day after Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) announced that he would not seek reelection in 2018, with Republican lawmakers wondering whether they could survive a GOP political storm that only seems to be growing.

Former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who backed Moore and introduced him at his victory party, encouraged conservative outsiders in Mississippi and other states to move closer to launching Senate bids, one person close to him said.

“There’s a big lesson here: Stick to the program,” Bannon said Wednesday on Breitbart News’s Sirius XM radio show. “There’s a lesson, stick to the program, your base will be there, and you’ll grow your base.”

Steele, however, said Strange’s defeat did not mean Trump had lost his political sway with Republican base voters.

“Voters in Alabama knew the whole endorsement for Strange was a wink and a nod. They got that Moore was a Trump guy,” Steele said. “So did he endorse the candidate who lost? Yes. But the reality is more nuanced than ‘Trump lost in Alabama.’ He lost, but his voters know why and still love him.”

In the West Wing, there was relative calm as officials plowed forward, hoping to leave behind the dramas of Alabama and Trump’s campaign against NFL players protesting police brutality during the national anthem. They agreed with Steele that while the GOP was fractured, Trump’s coalition remained.

“He knew what was coming in Alabama on Friday,” said one person close to Trump. “He knew how McConnell had become an issue there — and he said as much over dinner on Monday.” That evening, Trump had met with a group of prominent conservative leaders at the White House.

The person added, “What he wants to do is get back to taxes, make sure the Senate gets that done as soon as possible.”

Aides said that Trump knew that those who privately supported his endorsement of Strange, such as White House chief of staff John F. Kelly, were doing so because Trump at first was eager to do so and saw a chance to patch up relationships in Congress.

Trump was defensive in his remarks about the race to reporters on Wednesday, a few hours after he deleted a series of pro-Strange tweets. He also characterized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as a drag on Strange.

“I have to say, Luther came a long way from the time I endorsed him, and he ran a good race, but Roy ran a really great race,” Trump said, adding that Moore’s campaign used McConnell as a weapon against Strange.

The atmosphere of uncertainty and recriminations following the Alabama race prompted Republicans, even those close to Trump, to feel urgency to pass something — anything — that could somehow stabilize the party.

“If there was ever a time when Republicans feel pressure to perform, it’s now,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. “If big things don’t get done by Thanksgiving, there really won’t be enough spin to say Republicans here have done anything but fail.”

Republican leaders on Wednesday proposed slashing tax rates for the wealthy, the middle class and businesses while preserving popular tax deductions that encourage buying homes and giving to charity, hoping to unify the party behind a proposal to revamp the U.S. tax code.

But the nine-page framework they released to kick off negotiations left many key questions unanswered, including how they plan to avoid adding trillions of dollars to the government’s debt. The framework leaned heavily on limiting taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans, such as the alternative-minimum tax, and opposition to these changes from Democrats suggest it will be a battleground as negotiations intensify.

Republicans were also careful not to identify numerous tax breaks they might remove, focusing instead on promises to lower rates so much that President Trump estimated the effort would amount to the biggest tax cut of all time.

The “unified framework” was meant to serve as a starting point for negotiations on a tax deal, which lawmakers hope to complete by the end of the year. Republican leaders are now tasked with resolving controversial questions to unite their party — and possibly some Democrats — behind tax legislation, such as what corporate tax breaks to protect and how much revenue they are willing to lose in pursuit of new economic growth.

Trump has made rewriting the tax code a major part of his domestic agenda, and on Wednesday he urged his party on.

Which tax breaks are for you? View Graphic Which tax breaks are for you?

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and I guess it’s probably something you could say I’m very good at,” Trump said in Indiana. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that the nine-page framework would equate to a $2.2 trillion tax cut, with $5.8 trillion lost to lower rates and other changes, and another $3.6 trillion recouped by eliminating deductions.

There were few initial estimates of what the tax framework might mean for economic growth, an area that will likely divide Republicans supportive of the plan and Democrats who immediately complained that the changes would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

The White House and GOP leaders negotiated for months and agreed in large part only on the taxes they want to cut. They now face the more arduous task of agreeing on which tax deductions to take away, a process sure to pit party members against each other and put them under extreme pressure from outside lobby groups fighting to protect their favored tax breaks.

“I hope that people will have the intestinal fortitude it’s going to take to do it right,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said late Tuesday. “People say the health care was hard — you have no idea. You have no idea how this is going to be.”

[The GOP tax plan, explained in simplest possible terms]

In Indiana, Trump threatened to try to oust Democrats who don’t vote to help push the tax cuts into law. He singled out Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), who is up for reelection next year, as a Democrat who would be targeted if he didn’t sign onto the GOP plan.

“We will come here, we will campaign against him like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump said.

Democratic leaders will try to keep their party united in opposition, and on Wednesday they charged the GOP with proposing a huge tax cut to the wealthy but offering little for anyone else.

They said there was little evidence the tax plan provided any tax relief for low-income Americans, and it couldn’t be learned how much the middle class would benefit, either. Republicans didn’t specify what tax rates would apply to certain income levels, making it also hard to determine the framework’s impact.

“Republicans’ tax framework is not tax reform,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “It is a framework that gives away the store to the wealthiest while sticking the middle class with the bill.”

Without Democratic support, Republicans would need near-universal backing from their own party to move a tax bill through Congress, especially in the Senate, where they hold a slim majority.

In their blueprint, Republican proposals include cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and making it much easier for multinational companies to bring money earned overseas into the United States. This is roughly in line with a long-standing House Republican goal, though Trump has consistently pushed for the corporate rate to be lowered to 15 percent.

They also propose collapsing the seven individual income-tax brackets into three and allowing more people to qualify for the Child Tax Credit, designed to help low-income working families.

The framework would roughly double the standard deduction that married families and individuals use to reduce their taxable income, a change that Republicans hope will simplify the filing system. But it would also eliminate the “personal exemption” taxpayers can claim, blunting much of the new benefit and potentially leading some middle class households with multiple family members to pay more taxes than they currently do.

[Some tax breaks are for the rich. Others for the poor. Which are for you?]

Republicans also are holding out the possibility of imposing a new, higher tax rate on the wealthy to ensure that the tax changes do not disadvantage the middle class, though the White House and GOP leaders have not agreed on how that would work.

Many of the tax changes would benefit upper-income Americans. The Republicans propose eliminating the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. They also proposed lowering taxes on investment income. The tax framework does not mention Trump’s long-standing promise of raising taxes for hedge fund managers, suggesting that differences on this point have not been resolved.

While the blueprint preserves tax breaks for mortgage interest and charitable contributions, it proposes changing the tax benefits for retirement and education. It is unclear how those changes might work.

The next step for congressional Republicans is to pass a budget resolution that would allow a tax bill to pass the Senate with a 51-vote majority. Senate bills often need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, but the budget resolution would allow Republicans to use the process known as “reconciliation” to avoid that higher threshold.

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) said Wednesday the Senate Budget Committee is expected to send a draft budget to the Senate floor next week.

The House Freedom Caucus, a key holdout bloc of conservative lawmakers, endorsed the tax framework Wednesday, setting up a floor vote on the House budget as soon as next week. That would set up a conference between the chambers, with senior Republicans expecting the final, consensus budget resolution to closely resemble the Senate version.

Once the budget resolution passes both chambers, the tax-writing committees — Senate Finance and House Ways and Means — would begin drafting and amending tax legislation, where the politically thorny work of identifying revenue offsets would take place.

Toomey acknowledged that hard trade-offs are ahead, saying that lawmakers will have to identify offsets of about $3 trillion over 10 years to align the plan with the budget resolution.

The framework released Wednesday calls for eliminating many business tax credits and individual income deductions, while specifically naming only a few that should be spared.

“We’ve definitely identified the items that can get us there,” Toomey said. “The question is: Will we have the political will to do it?”

To raise revenue to offset the cuts, Republicans are likely to consider limiting or eliminating the deductibility of state and local taxes, a proposal that is generating opposition from lawmakers in states with high tax burdens. They will also consider limits on how much businesses can deduct for interest payments, a tax provision frequently used by financial and real estate firms.

“Those are two big ones that have to be on the table,” Toomey said.

Business groups, who have already been leaning heavily on lawmakers to protect their favored tax breaks, had mixed reactions to the plan. Many cheered the general direction of the plan but made clear they were watching how Congress approached key unresolved details.

“Now, we are entering into a crucial new phase of the effort to overhaul the tax code, and the hardest work is just beginning,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas J. Donohue said in a statement. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) will visit the Chamber on Thursday to discuss the plan.

Koch Industries sent an open letter to Congress, praising members for moving forward on the tax changes but encouraging lawmakers to cut as many business-specific tax breaks as possible.

“We encourage policymakers to remove corporate welfare provisions from the code. Wherever possible, loopholes, deductions, exemptions and other handouts should disappear. We maintain that cutting rates is the most reliable pathway to growth,” wrote Philip Ellender, president of government and public affairs at Koch Companies Public Sector.

Other industry groups outlined specific concerns.

The National Association of Realtors denounced the blueprint, saying in a statement Wednesday that the proposal to double the standard deduction would “all but nullify the incentive to purchase a home” for most taxpayers. With the standard deduction doubling, more homeowners would probably use that deduction when they filed their tax returns, rather than taking advantage of the lucrative mortgage interest deduction.

“This proposal recommends a backdoor elimination of the mortgage interest deduction for all but the top 5 percent who would still itemize their deductions,” William E. Brown, president of the National Association of Realtors, said in a statement. “Plummeting home values are a poor housewarming gift for recent homebuyers and a tremendous blow to older Americans who depend on their home to provide a nest egg for retirement.”

Jim Tobin, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Home Builders, said his organization was encouraged to see many of its top priorities included, including access to interest deductions and the preservation of the low-income housing credit.

He said his organization, like that of the Realtors, was concerned about doubling the standard deduction and about losing the deduction for state and local taxes.

“We also recognize we’re in the opening stages of what is going to be a long fight, a long journey, to realize tax reform — so as the opening play in this, we feel good about continuing to move forward,” Tobin said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell lost just about every way possible on Tuesday.

The Kentucky Republican had to abandon, again, an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act amid an uprising from the more moderate wing of the GOP caucus. Then he learned that one of his most influential Republican chairman would not run for reelection next year, setting up a potentially divisive race to succeed the senator.

Finally, before 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, McConnell suffered the final indignity: His preferred candidate in Alabama, Sen. Luther Strange (R), lost the GOP nomination in embarrassing fashion to a conservative insurgent who vowed that his victory would send a message that McConnell and his allies should “run scared for a while.”

While no stranger to defeat in the past — he spent eight years as minority leader — McConnell’s string of losses in such a short timespan Tuesday punctured much of his well crafted image as the consummate insider who could deliver.

Each blow had its own unusual circumstances, with President Trump’s own erratic performance playing a role, but McConnell’s failures came in nearly every facet of congressional leadership.

Roy Moore’s resounding win in the Alabama special election, after McConnell’s allies spent more than $10 million on Strange’s behalf, served as the first time Senate Republicans suffered a major defeat from a right-flank challenger in more than five years. Coupled with the retirement announcement of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), it means that GOP incumbents will face more challenges next year and that McConnell’s promise to help them fend off insurgents will not carry the same weight.

On the legislative front, where McConnell was considered a master of the Senate, the leader could not herd his Republican colleagues or craft a parliamentary process to meet their competing needs. The result was an embarrassing failure to do what they promised voters they would for seven years: Repeal and replace former president Obama’s signature health care law.

Everything is on the line for McConnell in Tuesday’s Alabama Senate primary

It left some hard-charging conservatives furious about the outcome.

“There is a complete lack of congressional leadership and no accountability to get results,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), first elected in 2014 and a critic of senior GOP senators for abandoning the repeal effort. “From the get go, three Republican Senate chairmen failed to support our efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare as we have all promised to do.”

McConnell’s inner circle did not even try to sugarcoat the failures and what they meant for Republicans heading into the 2018 midterm elections. Moore’s victory, according to the leader’s advisers, is a direct result of congressional Republican’s failure to repeal a health law they vowed to replace for seven years, nor deliver any other tangible legislative victory in the first eight months of Trump’s presidency.

“It should be a wake-up call to every Republican. The deep dissatisfaction among the base with the pace of the Trump agenda is very real,” Josh Holmes, McConnell’s 2014 campaign manager and still close adviser, said Tuesday. Holmes said the entire party must now unify and deliver on their vow to overhaul the tax code so voters will see more money in their pockets.

In a late night statement, McConnell fully endorsed Moore and called for party unity.

“He ran a spirited campaign centered around a dissatisfaction with the progress made in Washington,” he said. “I share that frustration and believe that enacting the agenda the American people voted for last November requires us all to work together.”

[After Alabama, GOP anti-establishment wing declares all-out war in 2018]

What made the Alabama race potentially a sign of things to come, was the degree to which Moore and his supporters tried to turn McConnell into a boogeyman within his own party.

On Tuesday, before the election results were official, most Senate Republicans remained staunchly behind McConnell — who, next June, is slated to become the longest serving GOP leader in Senate history. He has won eight straight leadership elections by acclamation, with no challenger, and none appears on the horizon in the near term.

His colleagues say McConnell is willing to absorb the criticism that conservative activists fire at him, particularly if it keeps the friendly fire away from rank-and-file Republicans.

“Being the spear-catcher for the conference is part of the responsibility of being in leadership, and Senator McConnell, as he likes to point out, is a big boy,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the majority whip. “He can take it.”

But one thing that could hamper McConnell’s long-term standing would be if he became a real albatross to his own incumbents in primary elections ahead. Two years ago this week John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) announced his resignation as House speaker because even close supporters feared voting for him because conservative activists had grown to despise Boehner.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) saw McConnell as a tangential issue to Alabama voters, who know Moore well from his controversial record as a staunch social conservative on the state Supreme Court.

“I don’t think McConnell is the only issue there. Roy Moore is a unique individual,” said Shelby, who used McConnell’s campaign team to beat back a primary challenge last year.

Internal Alabama politics also played a key role, because Strange received the appointment to succeed Attorney General Jeff Sessions from then-Gov. Robert J. Bentley, who resigned amid scandal a few weeks later.

This is not how Mitch McConnell wanted to head into recess

Acting Gov. Kay Ivey, bowing to local political pressure from GOP rivals who did not like Strange, called a snap special election rather than give Strange until 2018 to find his footing. “They need as much time as they can get to get on their feet, so to speak, and build a base, and four or five months is not a long time to do that,” Shelby said.

Still, as he has done with other incumbents, McConnell went all in for Strange with his constellation of super PACs and Washington-based organizations flooding Alabama airwaves for weeks with anti-Moore ads.

Nothing broke through, and once Stephen K. Bannon left his White House post advising Trump, he returned to run Breitbart News and raced to Alabama to throw in with Moore and vow more primary challengers to McConnell’s incumbents.

Trump’s support for Strange was meant to shore up relations with Senate Republicans after their caustic August shouting match carried out through the media and Twitter. Corker, in a meeting with Trump recently, pleaded for the president to go to Alabama on Strange’s behalf. Trump did so, but in a rambling 90-minute speech Friday night, the president suggested “maybe I made a mistake” in supporting the appointed senator.

It did not even matter that Moore spent the final week voicing his opposition to the very health care repeal legislation that Trump was touting.

Alabama Republicans chose the candidate they believed was “more interested in breaking” Washington rather than one who would loyally back Trump, Holmes said.

That’s the message McConnell is taking away from this week — one he will carry with him in the months ahead, particularly on the tax-cut effort.

“They’ve got to reunify,” Holmes said.

If not, McConnell will face more weeks like this one over the next year.

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