This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump Administration,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said. “Thank you, Mr. President, for all you are doing.” Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, added that passing the tax bill “could not have been done without exquisite Presidential leadership.” Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, spoke directly to Trump, saying, “You are one heckuva leader, and we’re all benefitting from it.” And Congresswoman Diane Black, of Tennessee, put it even more bluntly. “Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our President,” she said.
It is well known that Trump, his ego as fragile as an eggshell, demands constant flattery. But this was cravenness of a level rare even for Washington. Perhaps the Republican senators and representatives were taking their cue from Mike Pence. At an end-of-year Cabinet meeting that was held shortly before the celebration on the South Lawn, the Vice-President praised his boss fourteen times in three minutes—once every 12.5 seconds, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out—and after Pence had finished his obsequious speech, other Cabinet members chimed in with their own gushing tributes.
.. Not only do we have a chronically insecure President with Napoleonic pretensions. We also have Republican leadership that is happy to feed those pretensions in order to get its way. For much of 2017, many Trump antagonists, myself included, have taken consolation from the belief that he wasn’t achieving much.
.. The appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court received a lot of attention, of course. At least equally important, though, was the appointment of more than seventy conservative judges to lower courts. And right-wing zealots have also been parachuted into the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and other regulatory agencies, where they are busy stripping away many of the protections that previous Administrations put in place, such as clean-air regulations, workplace rules, and guarantees of net neutrality.
.. the introduction of tax breaks for private-school tuition fees. Ted Cruz wasn’t exaggerating when he described the latter provision, which he proposed, as potentially the biggest piece of federal school-choice legislation in history.
.. Paul Ryan has already signalled what that means: a renewed assault on Medicare and Medicaid.