The First 100 days

OK, now we are going to lose the House and perhaps the Senate. This is a bad move by Trump. The establishment has succeeded in greatly weakening his support from voters, IMO.

 

Good chance it will happen. I don't like it either but people are overreacting. All I hear from conservatives now is that they won't vote for Trump/Republicans again after this. These people are so damn stupid and short-sighted. Do these idiots realize what will happen if the House goes blue?

 

The adults take over? Sorry...was too easy. The D's have their own children too.

I'd be content with removing the adolescent from the oval office. Even his supporters are beginning to become weary of his act. Threat of veto for a bill he always intended to sign? Childish.

 

Wash, rinse, repeat. Until McConnell, McCain, Graham, Ryan and others are removed from office, the Republican Party will always return the majority back to the Dems. Disappointing day from Trump.

 

This "adolescent" is doing a better job than anybody from left can do by far. By all means let's go back to the 1-2 percent growth post QE after Trump is kicked out in 2020. Let's go back to pre-Trump where Kim threatens the West and won't go to the negotiation table. Let's go back to stagnant wages. Trump's "adolescent" antics are easier to deal with than Obama/Clinton incompetence. Sorry, but team blue has nothing good to offer.

 

Go team! Like I said...adults return.

 

The so-called adults return us back to accomplishing absolutely nothing. But, hey, we can pat ourselves on the back because Trump is out. Yay! Typical emotions over substance from the left.

 

You all do know that Trump was going to veto the bill because he thought it spent too little and didn't codify DACA, right? It wasn't for good reasons.

 

He was never going to veto the bill. That was 100% grandstanding.

 

I phrased that poorly. He attacked the bill and threatened to veto it for bad reasons.

 

I agree. It was "spend more money on the military" and I guess a dig at the Dems on why they didn't include DACA which of course is a tacit admission that he would have supported DACA. It seems Trump supporters don't know which way is up or down anymore. At least those on /r/the_donald acknowledged their real hero in this Omnibus saga was Rand Paul.

 

AC is none too happy

 

That is it exactly. Swamp won
Phook I hate these people

I get it that Reagan had to go through stuff like this.
But Trump had a Reagan-like alternative today too. A veto could have been a ‘defining moment’ in his presidency. It would have re-energized his base and sent a strong messages about the seriousness of draining the swamp/building the wall, .... This was a huge missed opportunity. Time will tell if it was fatal.

The thing that bugs me the most, I think, is that he ignored his own instincts. Those instincts had to be telling him this bill was both garbage and a trap. He got elected by following them, and abandons them now? This is where a leader shows himself Not by whining about how much he dislikes what he's going along with

 

It's just the height of irony that the same guy who demonized Marco Rubio and even Ted Cruz for being too soft on illegal immigrantion because they wouldn't promise to deport all illegal immigrants is now bellyaching that the spending bill didn't grant relief to Dreamers.

 

It's ironic but it's also where we are politically. I have no idea what Trump really believes about anything, so it's hard to say for sure, but my take has been that Trump knows perfectly well the Dems have no interest in DACA if it comes with strings or limitations. So he offered a proposal he knew the Dems wouldn't take because they cared more about keeping a midterm club in their hand than obtaining help for the people they claimed to care about. So it makes sense that he's going to try the same tactic and try to paint himself as the immigration "good guy."

 

The Tucker position




ps- was this the original Tucker?

 

My guess is that, for him, it was about priorities. He was determined to prioritize military pay raises, and other military spending. To get that, he was forced to sacrifice other parts of his agenda.

Reagan had to deal with much of the same stuff. Under Reagan, the Govt grew and spending increased. This was not Reagan's goal, but it's what he had to give up to Tip O'Neil to get his priorities through. And Reagan did get a lot of what he wanted, just not everything.

That's the biggest difference in this analogy. Trump is not dealing with Tip O'Neil. He is dealing with Paul Ryan. It should have gone better than this.

 

I think it was simply Trump was afraid of being blamed for shutting down the government.

He missed his biggest opportunity. All he had to do was point out that they gave themselves raises and increased their personal spending accounts. He would have energized his base and gathered more blue collar and rust belt democrats on his side. Instead, he effectively ended his presidency.

 

I don't think there's any doubt that he's doing what you suggest. He knows the Democrats are embracing open borders, and by appealing directly to Dreamers, he can exploit the party's radicalism on the issue, because they're willing to hose Dreamers to avoid major improvements in border security. However, what happens if someone were to challenge him from the Right on illegal immigration? He'd be exposed as a massive flip flopper.

 

I forgot to mention that a blue House will spend most of its time trying to impeach Trump. Very adultlike.

 

This is why I didn't vote for Trump. He is too much of a Democrat.

At this point, he should be primaried in 2020. He won't because Republicans aren't really Conservative. I think that should be clear by now. There are 2 big government parties fighting over what color (blue/red) or letter (R/D) they get to put beside the money being spent.

 

No Dem alive would have ever nominated Gorsuch for the the SCOTUS. This single act alone makes him light years better than HRC

I have been reading today some suggestion that Trump may have actually secured border wall funding through the military budget. Some budgetary trickeration to end run the Dems. We will see if this is true.

"We're going to be starting work literally on Monday," Trump said during an event Friday at the White House. "We have a lot of money coming to the border."​

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...border-wall-construction-will-start-on-monday

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/...&gwh=7A0F1E4015E08DFDEDB3BABF5395F69A&gwt=pay

 

The GOP is very conservative - when the Dems are in power. When they are in power...not so much

 

I have believed in everything Trump has done until now. He was heading toward being one of the best Presidents (policy wise) and any reasonable person couldn't argue that. I'm very disappointed in him signing the spending bill. Over spending is what started the Tea Party movement. The establishment's original argument for the tax cut is that we wouldn't be able to pay for our spending. Trumps argument was the economy would be stimulated and it would cover, which I agreed with. So the establishment then advocated for much more spending so that Trumps claim the stimulated tax cut would cover it probably won't hold true. They are probably going to be right about that now. He should have stuck to his guns no matter what and veto that spending bill. I will never understand why he thought it was a good idea to sign off on it as he was trashing it. I feel he would have got what he wanted if he would have played hardball like Obama did against the GOP when he was running all over them on spending.

Meanwhile Planned Parenthood is fully funded. Then Planned Parenthood co-funds the kid march this past weekend which really a protest against the Republicans. So the GOP approved to give them money to pay for a protest against our the republicans. Something just doesn't seem right about that.

 

Serious question: What in Trump's background led anyone to believe that he was interested in controlling spending?

 

He's a businessman.

He should have made them override his veto of the bill, however. The government is more than happy to spend other peoples' money. Buying votes is not cheap.

 

Your overall assessment is accurate, but I think it's more of an issue of priorities than degrees of conservatism. I think McConnell and Ryan are philosophically conservative, but they don't have the votes to do whatever they want. Their Senate majority is slim. It only takes two defectors to effectively lose control of the chamber on a given issue, and that's not even considering the filibuster problem. And of course, with the hard Left firmly in charge of the Democratic Party (and therefore real risks of primary challenges from the Left), there will be very few, if any, Democratic defectors, even among those who might philosophically be inclined to work with the GOP on some issues.

This means they have to prioritize issues. It's pretty obvious that tax cuts and defense hikes are by far their top priorities. They'll make whatever concessions are necessary to make those things happen. On tax cuts, that means playing budget shell games in the reconciliation process. On the defense hikes, that means making deals with Democrats to get to 60 votes, which means increases in non-defense discretionary spending and protecting Democrats' social priorities. And for McConnell and Ryan, what's the downside of giving in on those priorities? Nobody particularly cares, and it's not where the big money is. The big money is in entitlements.

Paul Ryan is a believer in entitlement reform. (I don't think McConnell particularly cares.) However, two things get in the way of that. First, the entitlement state consists of the biggest legislative achievements (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc.) Democrats have enacted in the last 90 years. There's no concession the GOP leadership could make to Democrats that would secure the votes to end a filibuster on any significant entitlement reform. Second (and perhaps more significantly), since Paul Ryan got elected to Congress, the GOP has undergone a political realignment. Its core constituency has shifted from educated professionals and suburbanites (who are more receptive to entitlement reform) to rural people and the elderly. They're largely hostile to entitlement reform and vote in big numbers. If the GOP couldn't get entitlement reform passed in the early 2000s, they sure as hell aren't going to pass it now. Furthermore, Trump actively campaigned against it. It's not gonna happen.

Of course, young voters should be rabid supporters of entitlement reform (since the entitlement state robs them far more than college tuition or anything else), but they're too distracted by stupid socially liberal causes like anti-gun rallies, pot legalization, and social justice horse crap to focus on it. And let's be honest. Most of them don't have the reasoning, math, literacy skills, or attention span to figure it out. If it doesn't involve weed or porn, they just can't focus on anything for very long. That's why they can focus on catchy anti-gun slogans but can't focus on something that matters like tax or entitlement reform.

Trump's big grievance with the bill is that he wanted his immigration priorities funded, but Ryan and McConnell are traditional pro-business Republicans. Their support for any kind of restrictions on immigration is going to be tepid at best, and of course, their contributors hate that sort of thing. They may not actively fight restrictions because they don't want to get primaried, but they're not going to lift a finger to do any of it.

And of course, what's missing in this equation? The budget deficit and fiscal responsibility. Nobody cares about that. In principle, they might but not anywhere near enough to give up or mitigate the tax cuts or spending priorities for either party.

 

That is so profoundly foul that I'm pretty much speechless.

 

The Atlantic is calling it an Obama budget. Obviously, they like the bill because they're Left-leaning, but their analysis is pretty much correct. Link.

 

And as a businessman, he's used to working within a budget where a company doesn't get to print its own currency. What made you think that he believed that government spending was important to control? Lots of successful businessmen are all for boosting government spending.