Judging Trump’s actions vs his tweets
Rich Lowry from National Review writes:
The president of the United States wakes up some mornings seemingly determined to convince as many people as possible that he’s unsuited to high office.
Fortunately for him, he has a Twitter account allowing him to act on this impulse immediately and without any filter.
Yep. So many terrible tweets. But maybe it is a deliberate strategy to distract people? Because every time he does it it then dominates headlines for days.
He followed up with a tweet calling for the firing of “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on the basis of a noxious conspiracy theory. (A woman with a heart condition died in Scarborough’s district office when he was a congressman. Ever since, a kooky fringe has accused him of murder.)
It’s difficult to exaggerate how mind-blowing these tweets are.
If a friend on Facebook shared the fake Muslim video, you’d hesitate to credit any of his opinions going forward, let alone bestow on him the biggest megaphone on Planet Earth.
Yep.
Yet Trump’s presidency operates on a largely separate track than his Twitter feed and his other off-script interjections and pronouncements. His domestic policy is so conventional that it could have been cooked up by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell—and, in fact, it was. He’s pursued a largely status quo foreign policy, except more cautious than Barack Obama’s and, especially, George W. Bush’s. …
The defining feature of Neil Gorsuch and Trump’s other judicial nominees is a firm commitment to interpreting the Constitution and the laws as written. Trump has rolled back Obama administrative actions on immigration (DACA), the environment (the Clean Power Plan) and health care (the so-called CSR payments) that at best pushed the envelope of executive authority and at worst were frankly unconstitutional. Just this week, Trump won a court fight confirming that, no matter what his critics might hope, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is indeed an executive agency whose director is to be appointed by the president in the event of a vacancy.
It is difficult to see how Ted Cruz would have governed any differently on any of these issues. …
On the legislative front, even as Trump outdoes himself with outlandish tweets, he is getting closer to his first major victory, in pursuit of a stereotypical Republican policy goal. If there is a safe assumption to make about any GOP president, it is that he will seek deficit-financed tax cuts. Trump is reliably conforming to the pattern.
I’m all for tax cuts but they need to be matched by spending cuts. They should not be financed by borrowing, but by surpluses.