Sunday, February 5, 2017

Trump Short Circuits Washington


"Congress is doing its best to live up to the public's dismal opinion of it. Democrats on Capitol Hill are behaving erratically, hysterically, boycotting committee meetings to approve Cabinet officials, threatening to filibuster a qualified and highly regarded Supreme Court pick because Mitch McConnell won a wager with President Obama, and insisting they will impeach President Trump over policy differences. The Republicans on Capitol Hill seem as disoriented by Trump's victory as the Democrats. Congress has been in session for a month. What, besides repealing a mining regulation, has it done? Why is Mitch McConnell not playing hardball with Chuck Schumer on executive branch appointments and Judge Gorsuch? I know, I know: "Things take time." But time is the enemy. This is something Democrats and other members of the self-described "resistance" understand but Republicans do not. Or perhaps the Republicans understand all too well, and want inertia and entropy to bring us a less populist and more conventionally Republican Trump."


"Not only are there two Americas. There are two governments: one elected and one not, one that alternates between Republicans and Democrats and one that remains, decade after decade, stubbornly liberal, and resistant to change. It is this second government and its allies in the media and the Democratic Party that are after President Trump, that want him driven from office before his term is complete. You think I exaggerate. But consider this: When a former Defense official who teaches at Georgetown Law School takes to Foreign Policy to propose "3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020," and when one of those ways is "a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders," we are in unknown and extremely unsettling territory."

"So unlikely did the election of Donald Trump seem to Washington and its denizens that the reality of it still has not sunk in. All of the city's worst traits—the self-regard, the group think, the obsessions with trivia, the worship of credentials, the virtue signaling, the imperiousness, the ignorance of perspectives and people from outside major metropolitan centers and college towns—not only persist. They have been magnified with Trump's arrival. There is so much negative energy coursing through the city that circuits are overloaded. That the president still draws support from the coalition that brought him to office, that a fair number of people see his policies as commonsensical, seems not to affect any of Trump's critics in the least. They will press on until Trump behaves like they want him to behave."

* Excerpts from an essay by Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon.
Read more Here.