This Peter Baker article in the New York Times is so historically strained and logically fallacious, one wonders about his sanity, comparing actual heroic characters from American democratic history with our current Orange Menace. Trump is barely fit to carry Teddy Roosevelt’s tent poles — more BS than Bull Moose
Baker goes for the difficult interpretation where the easy explanation is that Trump remains as he has always been, an autocrat. MSM really wants that yet unseen presidential moment.
Trump’s decision on the debt ceiling was simple and visceral — screw GOP leadership because they screwed him on Trumpcare among so many other personal slights prior to the appointment of Kelly as Chief-of-Staff.
None of which means that Mr. Trump has suddenly transformed himself into a center-hugging moderate. More situational than ideological — critics would say opportunist — Mr. Trump adjusts to the moment, and his temporary alignment with Democrats could easily unravel tomorrow. The deal he cut, after all, merely postponed a fight over spending and debt for three months. It did not resolve any substantive disagreements.
But it showed that Mr. Trump does not feel beholden to his party. “I never viewed Trump as a strict adherent to Republicanism,” said Ned Ryun, a Trump supporter and founder of American Majority, which trains political activists. “He gave Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell almost nine months to get something accomplished, and all they accomplished was to really remove all doubts about their legislative incompetence.”
MSM binary logic only sees left/right, liberal/conservative, with moderation reserved only as a means to define the extremes. Framing Trump as “independent” only increases clickbait supply.
Calling Trump an “Independent” resembles all that John McCain “maverick” labeling which was as with Trump a placeholder for character, or its absence. One person’s outsider is another’s sociopath.
It’s all crony capitalism and kleptocracy, only this time the organized crime elements are more obvious with #TrumpRussia. Trump just happens to be even more ideologically cynical than the average GOP caucus member.
From the perspective of these conservatives, Trump’s fealty to right-wing orthodoxy was decidedly inconvenient. The debt ceiling presented a rare opportunity for them to present Trump as the figure they cast him as all along: the New York Democrat posing as a conservative Republican. The fact that they had to wait seven and a half months to find an example of his ideological heresy — and that the case they found was the picayune issue of a three-month debt-ceiling increase versus a six-month debt-ceiling increase — itself disproves their point.