On one side of the debate, a rather old-fashioned brand of centrist liberals advocate a sort of operatic pity towards his disproportionately white and male supporters who were sold a working-class agenda on which Trump will never deliver. On the other side, many angry liberals openly celebrate Trump-supporting coal miners potentially losing their health insurance under the GOP’s ill-fated American Health Care Act. Serves ’em right, the thinking goes.
.. The thought that poor whites are poor because of their bad decisions has a brother: that poor blacks are poor for the same reason, as Williamson has also argued.
.. Or, one could weave some sympathy for poor whites into a stark moral condemnation of white racism precisely because “prejudice and blindness” has put poor whites “into the position of supporting your oppressor,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.
.. Lack of uncomfortable talk about more taxes also helped with fundraising and a general party strategy of rolling up votes in wealthy suburbs. Her advertisements had the least policy content of any presidential campaign going back until 2000 at least, and by far. All that implicitly allowed Trump to own the issue of trade and jobs.
Let Bannon Be Bannon!
He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies.
.. the 21st-century political debate is not big versus small government, it’s open versus closed.
.. Many of us wouldn’t have liked that agenda — the trade and immigration parts — but at least it would have helped the people who are being pummeled by this economy.
.. Bannonesque populism is being abandoned. The infrastructure and jobs plan is being put off until next year (which is to say never). Meanwhile, the Trump administration has agreed with Paul Ryan’s crazy plan to do health care first.
.. The Trump budget is an even more devastating assault on Bannon-style populism. It eliminates or cuts organizations like the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative that are important to people from Tennessee and West Virginia up through Ohio and Michigan. It cuts job-training and road-building programs. It does almost nothing to help expand opportunity for the working class and almost everything to serve defense contractors and the national security state.
.. Donald Trump doesn’t really care about domestic policy; he mostly cares about testosterone.
He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health.
But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs.
Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy. It lavishes attention on every aspect of hard power and slashes away at anything that isn’t.
.. When these two plans fail, which seems very likely, there’s going to be a holy war between the White House and Capitol Hill.
Acting Attorney Generals Can’t Overrule Presidents on Enforcement of Legal Orders.
Like most Democrats, [now-fired Acting Attorney General Sally] Yates objects to the president’s executive order. Fair enough. But she is not a political operative, she was a Justice Department official — thehighest such official. If her opposition to the president’s policy was as deeply held as she says, her choice was clear: enforce the president’s policy or quit.
Instead, she chose insubordination: Knowing she would be out the moment Senator Sessions is confirmed, she announced on Monday night that the Justice Department would not enforce the president’s order. She did not issue this statement on the grounds that the order is illegal. She declined to take a definitive position on that question. She rested her decision, rather, on her disagreement with the justice of the order. Now, she’ll be a left-wing hero, influential beyond her heretofore status as a nameless bureaucrat. But she had to go.
That’s what struck me about Yates’ letter. She says theexecutive order is not “lawful” but never specifies what law it breaks. That’s the sort of thing you would expect the attorney general of the United States to mention.
.. The work of the committee aides began during the transition period after the election and before Donald Trump was sworn in. The staffers signed nondisclosure agreements, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Trump’s transition operation forced its staff to sign these agreements, but it would be unusual to extend that requirement to congressional employees. Rexrode declined to comment on the nondisclosure pacts.
.. Rowe offered his familiar but no less accurate assessment that society will continue to have a skills gap as long as any job that involves working with your hands is seen as second-class or inferior to white-collar work.
“We right now have 5.8 million jobs that exist that nobody can fill right now,” Mike Rowe told theassembled Koch donors. “About 75 percent do not require four year degree. We have in our heads this idea that the best path for everybody is a four-year degree. We have ‘higher education’ and — we’re not crass enough to call it ‘lower’ education — we’ll call it ‘alternative’ education. Implicit in the language that we choose is the judgment and the ultimate outcome. It’s a reflection of the kinds of jobs we’ve rewarded, and the perception that these jobs are vocational consolation prizes. We’ve absolutely created a hierarchy in work.”
Trump Tries to Build a ‘Different Party’
The Democrats have no playbook for dealing with a Republican who’s a populist.
.. the central assertion of President Trump’s inaugural address: I am a populist independent, allied not with the two major parties but with the working men and women of America.
.. But those orders — even though their use makes the presidency more imperial, even though it’s no way to govern, even though Mr. Obama did it, too — will likely not be unpopular in the country. It actually looked as if someone was doing something.
.. More important still — the most important moment of the first week — was the meeting with union leaders. Mr. Trump gave them almost an hour and a half. “The president treated us with respect, not only our organization but our members,” said Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, by telephone. Liuna had not endorsed Trump in the campaign, but Mr. O’Sullivan saw the meeting’s timing as an expression of respect: “He’s inaugurated on Friday and we’re invited in Monday to have a substantial conversation.” The entire Trump top staff was there, including the vice president: “His whole team — we were very impressed.” They talked infrastructure, trade and energy. “The whole meeting was about middle class jobs, how do we create more?” Mr. O’Sullivan believes the Keystone pipeline will eventually generate more than 40,000 jobs. Mr. O’Sullivan said he hopes fixing “our crumbling transportation infrastructure” will be “the largest jobs program in the country.”
.. The Trump White House was showing the Democratic Party that one of its traditional constituent groups is up for grabs and happy to do business with a new friend. It was also telling those Republicans too stupid to twig onto it yet that the GOP is going to be something it’s actually been within living memory: the party of working men and women, a friend of those who feel besieged.
.. It’s a mistake for observers in Washington and New York to fixate on Mr. Trump’s daily faux pas at the expense of the political meaning of what he’s doing. He’s changing the face of the GOP.
.. Mr. Trump suggested to Mr. Green his stands were not as ad hoc and ideologically jumbled as they seemed, that they were in fact intentional. He was creating “a worker’s party,” a “party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.” “Five, 10 years from now — different party,” he said of the GOP.
.. And here is the important political point: Democrats don’t have a playbook for this. They have a playbook to use against normal Republicans: You’re cold, greedy, racist, sexist elitists who hate the little guy.
.. They don’t have a playbook to use against a political figure like Mr. Trump yet, because he jumbles all the categories. Democrats will wobble around, see what works. For now they’ll stick with saying he’s scary, unstable, right-wing.
It’s going to take them a while to develop a playbook against an independent populist, some of whose advisers hate Republicans more than they do.