Has Trump Abandoned That Whole Populism Ploy That Won Him The Nomination And Then The Election?

This morning, David Brooks seemed genuinely surprised-- even shocked-- that the Trump Regime is turning into a standard Republican class warfare operation against working families. And he blamed it on the loss of clout that has befallen poor Steve Bannon. Did Brooks actually believe all the hollow Trump promises to turn things around for the unwashed (white) masses-- let alone the inner cities-- during the campaign? I had dinner the other other night with a close friend who's tight with Bannon. He told me Trump and Bannon plan to rebuild the inner cities entirely and thereby win the allegiance of "the blacks" and "the Hispanics" for for GOP for decades. Did I believe they would do it, he asked me. No, I replied, not a chance in a billion. It was maybe a passing fantasy when they were both high on Trump's Adderall. To begin with, neither of them even cares about the GOP. And it's the GOP (in Congress-- think Paul Ryan and Miss McConnell) who would have to come up with the trillions of dollars to do it. Yeah, that's going to happen-- not even in phase 103.

Brooks opined this morning that Trump's--meaning Bannon's-- "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 [which has] become a poisonous morass for the entire party, and a complete distraction from the populist project." Ryan is an even more unlikely populist than Trump and his-- and Pence's and Price's-- healthcare planned, dubbed TrumpCare, "punishes," in Brooks' words, "the very people Trump and Bannon had vowed to help. It would raise premiums by as much as 25 percent on people between 50 and 64, one core of the Trump voter base. It would completely hammer working-class voters whose incomes put them just above the Medicaid threshold." When confronted about this by Tucker Carlson on Fox the other day, Trump said everything is "just a negotiation." That phrase will be on his political tombstone. (Listen at around the 7 minute mark.)

[T]he Ryan health care plan punishes the very people Trump and Bannon had vowed to help. It would raise premiums by as much as 25 percent on people between 50 and 64, one core of the Trump voter base. It would completely hammer working-class voters whose incomes put them just above the Medicaid threshold.

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.

Why is Bannonism being abandoned? One possibility is that there just aren’t enough Trumpians in the world to staff an administration, so Trump and Bannon have filled their apparatus with old guard Republicans who continue to go about their jobs in old guard pseudo-libertarian ways.

The second possibility, raised by Rich Lowry in Politico, is that the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump won on populism, but congressional Republicans won on the standard cut-government script. The congressional Republicans are better prepared, and so their plans are crowding out anything Bannon might have contemplated.

The third possibility is that 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.

The Trump health care and budget plans will be harsh on the poor, which we expected. But they’ll also be harsh on the working class, which we didn’t.

We’re ending up with the worst of the new guard Trumpian populists and the old guard Republican libertarians. We’re building walls to close off the world while also shifting wealth from the poor to the rich.

When these two plans fail, which seems very likely, there’s going to be a holy war between the White House and Capitol Hill. I don’t have high hopes for what’s going to emerge from that war, but it would be nice if the people who voted for Trump got economic support, not punishment.

Trump thinks Paul Ryan is "on board with my presidency." It's like a mishmash of TV reality shows, like the really aggressively horrible ones: Southern Comfort and Princesses: Long Island (so unwatchable that it was actually cancelled after just one dreadful season) and, of course, Shahs of Sunset. But not as realistic as House of Cards, that's for sure.