Well, that was quick. Along with President Donald Trump’s preliminary budget proposal, Trumpism as a radical new governing philosophy is dead on arrival.
Trump was elected in part by voters who preferred Obama to Romney in 2012. They saw in Trump a different kind of Republican from the green-eyeshades accountants whose passion is cutting government spending on the middle class and the poor. During the campaign, Trump sounded more like a New Deal Democrat, promising a trillion dollars in infrastructure investment, the revitalization of manufacturing, and a less aggressive foreign policy.
That Trump, it seems, is being held hostage in Mar-a-Lago, while the Trump impersonator who used to pose with photographers in front of Washington, D.C.’s new Trump Hotel has taken up residence in the White House. The administration’s first proposed budget is not Trumpism but warmed-over Reaganism, the kind of thing President Ted Cruz or another orthodox conservative might have proposed.
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