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‘Trump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideas’
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Pelle Svanslos
Jun 25, 2017, 4:49:43 PM6/25/17
to
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald
Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump
only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously,
and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism
and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what
remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did
after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.
Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential
primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In
the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency
would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for
Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max
Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.” For two months
after Trump won, I couldn’t read any news about the election, and
considered abandoning political commentary permanently. It wasn’t just
that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so
stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.
Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the
inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican
Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his
branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling,
perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate
Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.
Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has
instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I
worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far
to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they
are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental
Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the
existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every
item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established
by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to
the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish
it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy
to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s
proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole
purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.
And if those policies weren’t enough, conservatives—who, after all,
believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the
government to its proper role—have plenty of reason to be upset by those
actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left
ideological divide. He’s voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but
outright hostility to it. He’s pulled America back from its role as an
international advocate for human rights. He’s attacked the notion of an
independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to
ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI
Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the
pressure he felt from Comey’s investigation. For those conservatives who
were tempted to embrace a “wait-and-see” approach to Trump, what they’ve
seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.
And yet as surprising as this all has been, it’s also the natural
outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common
denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political
party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and
simply pursues power for the sake of power.
In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, many conservatives concluded that
their philosophy was insufficiently well-grounded in the social sciences
and lacked an empirical foundation. ...
In the 1970s, the conservative movement became receptive to moderate
conservatives, called “neoconservatives,” such as Irving Kristol, who
had been turned off by the anti-intellectualism of movement conservatism
in the Goldwater era.
Irving Kristol established an important journal, The Public Interest,
which brought intellectual rigor and sophisticated policy analysis to
the conservative table. Politicians like my former boss, Representative
Jack Kemp, began reading it religiously. ... Eventually, this crowd
found a powerful leader in Reagan, who appointed important
neoconservatives like Stockman and Jeane Kirkpatrick to high-level
positions.
The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, was formed in part to
provide policy analysis that was conservative, deeply studied and
concisely digestible. When I worked there in the mid-1980s, it was a
genuine think tank, an intellectual institution that did
academic-quality research. We saw our job as putting policy flesh on the
bones of Reagan’s conservative rhetoric, helping plow the ground for
conservative initiatives too radical to be proposed by the
administration just yet. In this era, important work was done at
Heritage on reforming the tax system, welfare, Social Security and the
health system—work that has stood the test of time.
When I became active in the Republican Party in the mid-1970s, it was
the party of thoughtful men and women who were transforming America’s
domestic policies while strengthening its moral leadership on the global
stage.
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the
election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal
of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates
should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and
hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every
Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully
run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for
House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP
committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how
much money they could raise. Gone were the days when members were
incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise
(especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years). In
power, Republicans decided they didn’t need any more research or
analysis; they had their agenda, and just needed to get it enacted. Only
a Democratic president stood in their way, and so 100 percent of
Republicans’ efforts went into attempting to oust or weaken Bill Clinton
and, when that failed, elect a Republican president who would do nothing
but sign into law bills passed by the GOP Congress.
President George W. Bush didn’t realize he was supposed to just be a
passive bill-signing machine; he kept insisting that Republicans enact
his priorities, which, often, were not very conservative—No Child Left
Behind Act, steel tariffs, a tax cut with few supply-side elements. His
worst transgression, for me, was the budget-busting Medicare Part D
legislation, which massively expanded the welfare state and the national
debt, yet was enthusiastically supported by a great many House
conservatives, including Congressman Paul Ryan, who had claimed to hold
office for the purpose of abolishing entitlement programs. Republican
hypocrisy on the issue caused me to become estranged from my party.
In the 14 years since then, I have watched from the sidelines as
Republican policy analysis and research have virtually disappeared
altogether, replaced with sound bites and talking points. The Heritage
Foundation morphed into Heritage Action for America, ceasing to do any
real research and losing all its best policy experts as it transformed
from an august center whose focus was the study and development of
public policy into one devoted mainly to amplifying political campaign
slogans. Talk radio and Fox News, where no idea too complicated for a
mind with a sixth-grade education is ever heard, became the tail wagging
the conservative dog. Conservative magazines like National Review, which
once boasted world-class intellectuals such as James Burnham and Russell
Kirk among its columnists, jumped on the bandwagon, dumbing itself down
to appeal to the common man, who is deemed to be the font of all wisdom.
One real-world result of the lobotomizing of conservative
intellectualism is that when forced to produce a replacement for
Obamacare—something Republican leaders had sworn they had in their
pocket for eight years—there was nothing. Not just no legislation—no
workable concept that adhered to the many promises Republicans had made,
like coverage for pre-existing conditions and the assurance that nobody
would lose their coverage. You’d think that House Speaker Ryan could
have found a staff slot for one person to be working on an actual
Obamacare replacement all these years, just in case.
With hindsight, it’s no surprise that the glorification of anti-elitism
and anti-intellectualism that has been rampant on the right at least
since the election of Barack Obama would give rise to someone like
Trump. Anyone who ever read Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,”
which imagined a fascist dictator taking power in 1930s America,
recognizes that Trump is the real-life embodiment of Senator Buzz
Windrip—a know-nothing populist who becomes president by promising
something for everyone, with no clue or concern for how to actually
accomplish it. Windrip was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar
easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic,” Lewis wrote.
“Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his
speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political
platforms were only the wings of a windmill.”
Conservatives are starting to accept that Trump is not the leader they
had hoped for and is more of a liability for their agenda than an asset.
They are also starting to recognize that their intellectual
infrastructure is badly damaged, in need of repair, and that the GOP and
intellectual conservatism are not interchangeable.
The implementation of long-term, successful policy change cannot be
short-circuited, it must be built on a solid foundation of thinking,
analysis and research by smart, well-educated people. Listening to the
common man rant about things he knows nothing about is a dead-end that
leads to Trump and failure because there is no “there” there, just
mindless rhetoric and frustration.
Having so badly miscalled the 2016 election, I’m not going out on a limb
here and predicting a 1974-style defeat for GOP members of Congress next
year, and I am fully aware that Democrats are always capable of seizing
defeat from the jaws of victory. But the preconditions are falling into
place for a political transformation between 2018 and 2020 that could
result in the type of defeat that I think is necessary for my old party
and the conservative movement to rebuild themselves from the ground up.
Ideally, I’d like to see an intellectual revival on the right such as we
saw after the Goldwater defeat and the Watergate debacle. Freed from the
stultifying strictures and kowtowing to know-nothing Trumpian
populists—perhaps building on new outlets and institutions that
celebrate intellectual rigor and reject shallow sound bites—a few
conservative thinkers can plow a path toward sane, responsible
conservative governance.
If the Republican Party and the conservative movement abandon populism,
mindless appeals to the electorate’s lowest common denominator, and the
pursuit of power for the sake of power and instead pursue a fully formed
policy agenda based on solid analysis and research, then I don’t think
it will take very long for a Republican revival. If it takes a Trump
debacle to make that happen, it will have been worth it.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/24/intellectual-conservatives-lost-republican-trump-215259
Started out well but then fell completely flat. The history account is
interesting but predicting a political transformation in two years looks
more like nonsense. Maybe the author forgot what he was doing.
Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump
only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously,
and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism
and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what
remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did
after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.
Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential
primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In
the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency
would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for
Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max
Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.” For two months
after Trump won, I couldn’t read any news about the election, and
considered abandoning political commentary permanently. It wasn’t just
that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so
stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.
Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the
inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican
Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his
branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling,
perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate
Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.
Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has
instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I
worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far
to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they
are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental
Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the
existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every
item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established
by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to
the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish
it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy
to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s
proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole
purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.
And if those policies weren’t enough, conservatives—who, after all,
believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the
government to its proper role—have plenty of reason to be upset by those
actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left
ideological divide. He’s voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but
outright hostility to it. He’s pulled America back from its role as an
international advocate for human rights. He’s attacked the notion of an
independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to
ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI
Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the
pressure he felt from Comey’s investigation. For those conservatives who
were tempted to embrace a “wait-and-see” approach to Trump, what they’ve
seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.
And yet as surprising as this all has been, it’s also the natural
outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common
denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political
party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and
simply pursues power for the sake of power.
In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, many conservatives concluded that
their philosophy was insufficiently well-grounded in the social sciences
and lacked an empirical foundation. ...
In the 1970s, the conservative movement became receptive to moderate
conservatives, called “neoconservatives,” such as Irving Kristol, who
had been turned off by the anti-intellectualism of movement conservatism
in the Goldwater era.
Irving Kristol established an important journal, The Public Interest,
which brought intellectual rigor and sophisticated policy analysis to
the conservative table. Politicians like my former boss, Representative
Jack Kemp, began reading it religiously. ... Eventually, this crowd
found a powerful leader in Reagan, who appointed important
neoconservatives like Stockman and Jeane Kirkpatrick to high-level
positions.
The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, was formed in part to
provide policy analysis that was conservative, deeply studied and
concisely digestible. When I worked there in the mid-1980s, it was a
genuine think tank, an intellectual institution that did
academic-quality research. We saw our job as putting policy flesh on the
bones of Reagan’s conservative rhetoric, helping plow the ground for
conservative initiatives too radical to be proposed by the
administration just yet. In this era, important work was done at
Heritage on reforming the tax system, welfare, Social Security and the
health system—work that has stood the test of time.
When I became active in the Republican Party in the mid-1970s, it was
the party of thoughtful men and women who were transforming America’s
domestic policies while strengthening its moral leadership on the global
stage.
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the
election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal
of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates
should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and
hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every
Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully
run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for
House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP
committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how
much money they could raise. Gone were the days when members were
incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise
(especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years). In
power, Republicans decided they didn’t need any more research or
analysis; they had their agenda, and just needed to get it enacted. Only
a Democratic president stood in their way, and so 100 percent of
Republicans’ efforts went into attempting to oust or weaken Bill Clinton
and, when that failed, elect a Republican president who would do nothing
but sign into law bills passed by the GOP Congress.
President George W. Bush didn’t realize he was supposed to just be a
passive bill-signing machine; he kept insisting that Republicans enact
his priorities, which, often, were not very conservative—No Child Left
Behind Act, steel tariffs, a tax cut with few supply-side elements. His
worst transgression, for me, was the budget-busting Medicare Part D
legislation, which massively expanded the welfare state and the national
debt, yet was enthusiastically supported by a great many House
conservatives, including Congressman Paul Ryan, who had claimed to hold
office for the purpose of abolishing entitlement programs. Republican
hypocrisy on the issue caused me to become estranged from my party.
In the 14 years since then, I have watched from the sidelines as
Republican policy analysis and research have virtually disappeared
altogether, replaced with sound bites and talking points. The Heritage
Foundation morphed into Heritage Action for America, ceasing to do any
real research and losing all its best policy experts as it transformed
from an august center whose focus was the study and development of
public policy into one devoted mainly to amplifying political campaign
slogans. Talk radio and Fox News, where no idea too complicated for a
mind with a sixth-grade education is ever heard, became the tail wagging
the conservative dog. Conservative magazines like National Review, which
once boasted world-class intellectuals such as James Burnham and Russell
Kirk among its columnists, jumped on the bandwagon, dumbing itself down
to appeal to the common man, who is deemed to be the font of all wisdom.
One real-world result of the lobotomizing of conservative
intellectualism is that when forced to produce a replacement for
Obamacare—something Republican leaders had sworn they had in their
pocket for eight years—there was nothing. Not just no legislation—no
workable concept that adhered to the many promises Republicans had made,
like coverage for pre-existing conditions and the assurance that nobody
would lose their coverage. You’d think that House Speaker Ryan could
have found a staff slot for one person to be working on an actual
Obamacare replacement all these years, just in case.
With hindsight, it’s no surprise that the glorification of anti-elitism
and anti-intellectualism that has been rampant on the right at least
since the election of Barack Obama would give rise to someone like
Trump. Anyone who ever read Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,”
which imagined a fascist dictator taking power in 1930s America,
recognizes that Trump is the real-life embodiment of Senator Buzz
Windrip—a know-nothing populist who becomes president by promising
something for everyone, with no clue or concern for how to actually
accomplish it. Windrip was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar
easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic,” Lewis wrote.
“Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his
speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political
platforms were only the wings of a windmill.”
Conservatives are starting to accept that Trump is not the leader they
had hoped for and is more of a liability for their agenda than an asset.
They are also starting to recognize that their intellectual
infrastructure is badly damaged, in need of repair, and that the GOP and
intellectual conservatism are not interchangeable.
The implementation of long-term, successful policy change cannot be
short-circuited, it must be built on a solid foundation of thinking,
analysis and research by smart, well-educated people. Listening to the
common man rant about things he knows nothing about is a dead-end that
leads to Trump and failure because there is no “there” there, just
mindless rhetoric and frustration.
Having so badly miscalled the 2016 election, I’m not going out on a limb
here and predicting a 1974-style defeat for GOP members of Congress next
year, and I am fully aware that Democrats are always capable of seizing
defeat from the jaws of victory. But the preconditions are falling into
place for a political transformation between 2018 and 2020 that could
result in the type of defeat that I think is necessary for my old party
and the conservative movement to rebuild themselves from the ground up.
Ideally, I’d like to see an intellectual revival on the right such as we
saw after the Goldwater defeat and the Watergate debacle. Freed from the
stultifying strictures and kowtowing to know-nothing Trumpian
populists—perhaps building on new outlets and institutions that
celebrate intellectual rigor and reject shallow sound bites—a few
conservative thinkers can plow a path toward sane, responsible
conservative governance.
If the Republican Party and the conservative movement abandon populism,
mindless appeals to the electorate’s lowest common denominator, and the
pursuit of power for the sake of power and instead pursue a fully formed
policy agenda based on solid analysis and research, then I don’t think
it will take very long for a Republican revival. If it takes a Trump
debacle to make that happen, it will have been worth it.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/24/intellectual-conservatives-lost-republican-trump-215259
Started out well but then fell completely flat. The history account is
interesting but predicting a political transformation in two years looks
more like nonsense. Maybe the author forgot what he was doing.
TT
Jun 25, 2017, 4:56:48 PM6/25/17
to
Pelle Svanslos kirjoitti 25.6.2017 klo 23:49:
> Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max
> Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.”
Nice parallel with The Producers.
> Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max
> Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.”
Other...
All the king's men
Manchurian Candidate
Nixon
Gerrit 't Hart
Jun 25, 2017, 9:44:53 PM6/25/17
to
Guypers
Jun 25, 2017, 9:51:36 PM6/25/17
to
The Iceberg
Jun 26, 2017, 6:37:35 AM6/26/17
to
So this guy is also bitter with sour grapes that he backed the wrong side, he must preferred the Saudi-backed Syria, Libya, Iraq destroying Hillary.
The Iceberg
Jun 26, 2017, 6:38:42 AM6/26/17
to
You mean the Hillary fan fake money stealing worst recount ever done liar Stein?
bob
Jun 27, 2017, 8:56:41 PM6/27/17
to
On Mon, 26 Jun 2017 09:44:46 +0800, Gerrit 't Hart <s...@for.you>
wrote:
>Maybe Trump is what happens when something like Hillary happened!
very observant.
bob
wrote:
>Maybe Trump is what happens when something like Hillary happened!
bob
bob
Jun 27, 2017, 9:36:15 PM6/27/17
to
On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 23:49:39 +0300, Pelle Svanslos <pe...@svans.los>
wrote:
>Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald
>Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump
>only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously,
>and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism
>and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what
>remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did
>after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.
>
>Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential
>primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In
>the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency
>would fix much of what ails our country.
? how would hillary fix anything? crooked hillary.
> On November 8, I voted for
>Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
>
>Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max
>Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.” For two months
>after Trump won, I couldn’t read any news about the election, and
>considered abandoning political commentary permanently.
wish you would have.
> It wasn’t just
>that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so
>stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.
>
>Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the
>inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican
>Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his
>branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling,
>perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate
>Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.
>
>Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has
>instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I
>worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far
>to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they
>are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental
>Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the
>existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every
>item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established
>by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to
>the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish
>it.
is public education succeeding? fair question.
the media and democratic party had no problem when obama was a
dictator. he opened the door for trump. now have to live with it.
bob
wrote:
>Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald
>Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump
>only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously,
>and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism
>and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what
>remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did
>after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.
>
>Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential
>primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In
>the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency
>would fix much of what ails our country.
> On November 8, I voted for
>Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
>
>Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max
>Bialystock was by the success of “Springtime for Hitler.” For two months
>after Trump won, I couldn’t read any news about the election, and
>considered abandoning political commentary permanently.
> It wasn’t just
>that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so
>stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.
>
>Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the
>inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican
>Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his
>branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling,
>perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate
>Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.
>
>Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has
>instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I
>worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far
>to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they
>are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental
>Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the
>existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every
>item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established
>by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to
>the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish
>it.
dictator. he opened the door for trump. now have to live with it.
bob
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