TRUMP'S TURN-ABOUT DECISIONS ARE HURTING HIS BASE SUPPORTERS

…A Tomahawk missile headed to al Assad’s Syria

 

President Trump is being forced to adopt more normal positions on issues that he campaigned against.

 

When I use the word “Normalizing” and “Donald Trump” together, it’s not the idea that that Trump is going to start acting normal and that he will start to be honest with his supporters and the media.  God forbid that it’s even possible for Trump to make that much of a change.

 

The “normal” part is that whether he likes it or not, he is being forced to start adopting more normal positions on a number of issues that he campaigned against last year.

As some examples, early on Trump said NATO was “obsolete”, now he says it is “no longer obsolete”.

 

Per Trump in campaign mode, the Export/Import Bank was “bad”, President Trump now says the E-I Bank is “good”.

 

Trump had said that Syria was not an American problem, but now Syria’s behavior is America and Trump’s, “responsibility,” and Bashar al-Assad is a “butcher,”  and Trump sent Assad 59 Tomahawk missile bombs as a result.

 

Candidate Trump had said on the campaign trail that he would probably fire the Federal Reserve Chairperson, Janet Yellen.  Now he says he will probably keep her.

As one WaPo op-ed writer wrote: “Trump’s about-faces represent a Trump Tower-size version of the realities that confront any new president. Campaign trail proclamations always yield to Oval Office sobriety. That’s not only to be expected — it should, for the most part, also be welcomed.” Ain’t that the truth!

 

Candidate Bill Clinton said he would revoke trade agreements w/ China, but he eventually renewed China’s “most-favored nation status”.

 

The best example of this is that George W. Bush once promised to “stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions,” then along came wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Barack Obama criticized rival Hillary Clinton’s original health-care proposal because “it forces everyone to buy insurance,” then the Obama administration crafted a former Republican plan with an individual mandate to be paid by Americans.

President Obama underwent the same transformation as Trump on the Export-Import Bank, which as a candidate Obama had criticized as “little more than a fund for corporate welfare.”

 

But Trump’s learning curve is much, much steeper than other former presidents.  Trump’s flimsy attachment to any particular position is especially questionable because President Trump totally lacks a coherent worldview and his guiding ideology involves only the promotion of Donald J. Trump.

 

Trump’s mind, what there is of it, blows in all four directions, depending on who’s star is shining at the time.  Right now, son-in-law Jared Kushner is up, Stephen Bannon is down, but all that means is what policy prevails in a given week could immediately be upended with Trump’s next tweet.  Trump’s weather vane points in whatever mood he has at that moment.

 

This is the annual Tax day anniversary.  There were 200 demonstrations across the nation this weekend.  There were two focuses at each of these demonstrations and they became violent at hot-spot places such Berkeley, California, and the 25,000 that attended the one in Washington DC.  The two demonstration issues were: “Mr. President, you promised the people that voted for you that you would publish your tax returns,”  and “We are sick and tired of hearing billionaires bragging about how much in taxes they don’t have to pay.”

 

But while everyone is focused on the president’s moves, his new Attorney General Jeff Sessions was quietly busy reviving the misguided war on drugs, dismantling consent decrees with police departments and cruelly ramping up immigrant deportations of Hispanic and Asian mothers and their children.

 

The truth is that the functioning of the federal courts and the dysfunction of the legislative branch have been working to stymie much of the sick Trump agenda.

 

It has become so clear that an American president’s greatest powers, and his greatest threats, lie in the arena of foreign affairs. The good news is that Trump has chosen some excellent help with the Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and national security adviser H.R. McMaster.  They have emerged to present an effective brake on our super mercurial president, especially as the North Korea threat continues to loom. However, the vote is still out on the Secretary of State, Tillerson.  But for sure, a White House with Michael Flynn gone and Stephen Bannon somewhat neutered is a much better place.  The country is safer when these former military adults are in the situation room sitting next to the president.

 

I am probably trying to be more positive than I should be, but with the vast size of Trump’s policy ignorance, plus his distaste for trying to remedy that being a total embarrassment, he does seem to slowly be learning. He has moved from “I alone can fix it” to: “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” Both statements are B.S., but the second at least seems to show some level of rationality sinking in.

 

Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “And Korea actually used to be part of China. And after listening to Chinese President Xi Jinping for 10 minutes I realized that — it’s not so easy.”

 

A true statement.  Counter to what candidate Trump stated in that, “previous administrations were full of stupid people making bad deals.” They were instead staffed, for the most part, by smart people diligently navigating complex situations. If that is beginning to dawn on Trump, we should be relieved a bit. It is possible both to resist the new normal and to give thanks that, for now anyway, it is not far worse.

But the big, long-term issue is that on most of the issues that Trump has done his 180 degree turn, the results of those latest moves has been mostly against his base of those, white, under-educated American voters that put Trump in the highest office in the land.  The results of his failed approach to repeal the ACA, it would have hit the low-income earners the most.  His removing federal support for Planned Parenthood is devastating for those living in the Rust Belt, as 97% of that federal support went for low-income women’s and men’s health care.  His supporters are beginning to lose faith in their president as he had promised to release his tax returns, which he now refuses to do.  They are starting to ask, “Does he have something to hide about his saying that he donated millions to the military and his other charity giving?”  “Does he owe big money to other country’s banks or financial institutes?”  “Is he, or is he not the billionaire that he keeps saying he is?”

 

So far, Trump’s idea of tax reform, would be a much better deal for the super wealthy than the average working American. 

 

And his program that separates long-established illegal immigrant mothers from their legal American children, that move basically upsets whole families as they then deport these individual family members that have never been in trouble.  These families just continue to receive this very bad news, and what do they think will become of these young family members that are left behind without that parental supervision?  They will become great fodder for those growing immigrant street gangs.

 

If Trump can make it to 2020, it will be interesting to see how many people will be willing to stick with him for another four years.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017