The election of Donald Trump has created hysteria on the left. It has also met increasing resistance on the right which seems unwilling to keep election promises made when Obama was president and could veto any symbolic legislation, which he did in 2015.
By voting to nullify Obamacare — the signature domestic accomplishment of the Obama administration — GOP congressional leaders fulfilled a longtime pledge to voters and rank-and-file members to get a repeal to President Barack Obama’s desk, even though he will veto it.
It was, of course, an empty gesture but it was also a promise of what could happen if a Republican president was elected in 2016. Of course, Hillary Clinton was expected by almost everyone to win.
That remains our outlook today in our final forecast of the year. Clinton is a 71 percent favorite to win the election according to our polls-only model and a 72 percent favorite according to our polls-plus model. (The models are essentially the same at this point, so they show about the same forecast.) This reflects a meaningful improvement for Clinton in the past 48 hours as the news cycle has taken a final half-twist in her favor. Her chances have increased from about 65 percent.
But she didn’t and now we have President Trump.
What has Congress done ? It voted down an Obamacare repeal.
Now, the Deep State is pushing back and threatens to overthrow the elected President.
Since the election there has been an unprecedented attempt to unwind the election result. Events have accelerated on several fronts lately with attempts from outside and within to paralyze the Trump administration.
What started as a collective media freakout on Election Night 2016 quickly progressed to an unprecedented attempt to intimidate Electors into changing their votes. Some Democrats announced, even before Trump took office, plans to impeach him, and Democrat politicians fed media-driven Russia collusion conspiracy theories for which they knew there was no evidence.
Chuck Schumer, for example, used the alleged fact of Donald Trump being under FBI investigation as an argument against confirming Neal Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, even though Schumer (but not the public) knew from intelligence briefings that Trump was not personally under investigation.
All the while, the permanent bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence community, started an unending and almost daily series of leaks meant to paralyze the administration.
It has not been content to complain and leak secrets. Now it is actively defying the President.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, pointed to news reports about upset employees, social media campaigns and “civil disobedience” training for staffers looking to push back against the White House.
GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak, a contributor to The Hill, attributed the blowback to a host of factors, from the political make-up of civil servants to the use of holdover officials in government offices that are still waiting for the Senate to confirm Trump political appointees.
He said there is also a “real industry now behind recruiting whistleblowers inside the resistance movement,” and creating public outcry about the administration.
The Democrats have contributed by delaying confirmation of Trump appointees. Many of the defiant government employees are Civil Service and cannot be fired. The resistance has not been limited to the left. Charles Krauthammer, an alleged stalwart of the right, is encouraging resistance, and few recall his history.
In 1978, Krauthammer moved to Washington, D.C. to direct planning in psychiatric research under the Carter administration.[1] He began contributing articles about politics to The New Republic and, in 1980, served as a speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale.
His shift to the right came in foreign policy, not domestic affairs. He is a “neocon,” a term used for Democrats who became “hawks” on foreign policy matters but, like Bill Kristol, another neocon, he is virulently anti-Trump. Now that is OK in primary season but the election is OVER!
Kristol has long had a heated relationship with Trump. After a failed attempt to court either Sen. Ben Sasse or Mitt Romney to kamikaze Trump’s presidential campaign as a third party candidate, the conservative editor recently proposed launching a new political movement called “The New Republicans.”
Seeing as how some of these people were formerly Democrats, or like his father, supported the New Deal, they are not very conservative.
Unlike liberals, for example, neo-conservatives rejected most of the Great Society programs sponsored by Lyndon Johnson; and unlike traditional conservatives, they supported the more limited welfare state instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Some conservatives thought the New Deal was the beginning of the end of American democracy. A lot of us prefer Calvin Coolidge to Roosevelt.
