Anyone who doesn’t “get” Trump’s appeal is said to live in a “bubble.” This means that a substantial majority of Americans are bubble dwellers, because Trump’s disapproval ratings have been hovering between 54 and 60 percent in Gallup’s most recent surveys.
.. The cost of all this is very high. Our political discussion is being brought down by Trump’s self-involvement, his apparent belief that he can only win if he identifies an enemy to attack, and his refusal to make extended and carefully thought-through arguments about anything of substance. Spectacle drives out problem-solving. Our national attention span, never one of our strongest suits, follows Trump down to a level that, in fairness to children, cannot even be called childlike.
The health-care debate is the obvious example. The Republican Congress spotlights “repealing Obamacare.” But this is simply a slogan. What Trump and his party said they’d create was a better health-care system — “something great,” he enthused.
.. A functioning democracy would grapple in a bipartisan way with how to cover everyone more cost-effectively.
.. Trump will declare anything the GOP pushes through — no matter how many of the people who voted for him lose insurance — a “win.” That is all that matters to him.
.. If there was anything useful about the Trump campaign, it was the extent to which it forced Americans who live in thriving parts of the country to notice how badly other regions are doing and how angry many of the people who live in those beleaguered communities are.
.. But where are the practical remedies to help those workers find better-paying jobs? What they get from Trump are mostly symbols
.. Trump announced that thanks to his intervention, a Carrier plant in Indiana would keep at least 1,100 jobs in the United States. But last month, Carrier announced it was cutting 632 jobs from an Indianapolis factory and moving them to Mexico. It’s not clear what Trump accomplished — or if he cares.
.. employment in the nation’s auto plants is down from a peak of 211,000 last year to 206,000.
.. his budget cuts could cost more than 5 million American workers access to job training, job-search assistance and career-development programs.
.. Nothing should be more important to Trump’s presidency than keeping his commitments to workers in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. But these don’t fascinate the president nearly as much as his vendettas and his role as a cable-news critic.
Ultrafiltered Milk Sparks a U.S.-Canada Trade Battle
The dispute over the protein product, used primarily for making cheese, could have ripple effects in global dairy markets
U.S. dairy farmers and processors in Wisconsin, New York and Minnesota have been hurt by a newly adopted Canadian pricing policy that encourages Canadian dairies to buy certain types of milk products domestically. The specific product in the trade dispute is a milk-protein concentrate called ultrafiltered milk that is used primarily in cheese-making to increase yields.
In 2016, the U.S. exported $102 million in ultrafiltered milk to Canada, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. But industry observers estimate that exports have dropped to near zero since February, when Canada created a nationwide dairy classification that lowered the price of Canadian milk used to make ultrafiltered milk.
.. “If you take Nafta away, all of a sudden it gets more expensive to sell U.S. agriculture products,”.. Nafta has been very good for U.S. farmers, Mr. Newton says, and pulling out could have all kinds of negative effects, such as Mexico shifting corn purchases from the U.S. to South America, or losing an important market for rice... Because Canada has relatively strict dairy policies and a supply-management system that controls the amount of milk that reaches market, experts say U.S. milk tends to be cheaper than Canadian milk... the demand from Canadian cheesemakers for U.S. milk proteins like ultrafiltered milk, a relatively new milk protein that was developed well after Nafta was put in place.There are no explicit terms in the treaty for dealing with ultrafiltered milk, since it doesn’t fit into any of the dairy chapters that existed when Nafta was signed... “We have been producing more and more milk in the upper Midwest, and we’ve reached a point where other processors are full to the gills,”.. “For the industry, there is not going to be much of an impact,” Mr. Gould says. “But for individual farmers, it will be devastating.”
Donald Trump Starts Wisconsin Bid in Ryan’s Hometown
Wisconsin’s middle class, Mr. Trump said, has been hit “very, very hard due to loss of manufacturing jobs,” and he warned that Mr. Cruz’s and Mr. Kasich’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement signed this year among a dozen Pacific Rim countries, would make things worse.
.. Mr. Ryan urged Republicans to embrace civility and high-minded policy ideas, rather than the “ugliness” that he said had consumed the 2016 presidential race so far.
Shortly after that speech, Mr. Trump, a self-styled counterpuncher, responded by scheduling his first Wisconsin rally before the primary in Mr. Ryan’s hometown.
The Destruction of Progressive Wisconsin
Last month, Mr. Walker signed a bill that allowed corporations to donate directly to political parties. On the same day, he signed a law that replaced the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, a body that is responsible for election oversight and enforcing ethics codes, with two commissions made up of partisan appointees
.. In 1905, Wisconsin became the third state to enact Civil Service reform, helping establish it as a national model for clean government. The reforms were one of the many achievements of Gov. Robert M. La Follette Sr., who later founded the Progressive Party and ran for president on its ticket. But Mr. Walker’s new Civil Service bill replaces anonymous exams with résumés, opening the door to political or racial bias that would prove almost impossible to detect because personnel files are not part of the public record.
.. it centralizes hiring within the Department of Administration, the most politicized agency in the state’s government. Incoming résumés would be judged by one of the governor’s appointees.
.. By adding the Civil Service bill, Mr. Walker brings Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal “at-will employment.”
.. In 2011, Mr. Walker assured state workers that they did not need their unions because of Wisconsin’s Civil Service rules. “In Wisconsin, the rights that most workers have have been set through the Civil Service system, which predates collective bargaining by several generations,” he said. “That doesn’t change. All the Civil Service protections — the strongest Civil Service system in the country — still strongly remains intact.”
.. In December, Senator Cruz encouraged his supporters to relieve Mr. Walker of his campaign debt, generating speculation that he might become the vice-presidential choice for the like-minded Mr. Cruz.