We Won't Get Fooled Again... Or Will We?
Donald Trump is back and it's starting to feel like 2016
Donald Trump in 2016 convinced lots of people he was a different kind of Republican, not tethered to extreme elements of the party’s agenda.
The gambit worked, in part, because his rhetoric was all over the place. It was hard to pin down what he was really saying or promising, or what he really believed. Amid such chaos, Trump could be anything to anybody. And if you were inclined to support him for one reason or another, you could always dismiss statements you didn't like as irrelevant or unrepresentative.
But when Trump got into office, he outsourced policy to Republican leaders in Congress and their allies. That's why we got a big tax cut favoring corporations and the wealthy, and why we came *this* close to repeal of the Affordable Care Act. That's also why we got three conservative Supreme Court appointments, who have since — among other things — provided half the votes it took to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Now it's a new campaign and he's back at it. He's saying he will find a sensible, widely acceptable compromise on abortion. He's promising to stand up for the kind of workers now striking against the auto companies. And he's vowing to slash prices for prescription drugs.
How seriously should we take those promises? What does his record from last time tell us how he'd govern next time?
I took a crack at those questions in my latest HuffPost article, which you will find here.
Thanks for reading!