He's already backed out of going after Hillary. Next there will be no wall. It's just getting started.
In a sense, Trump’s supporters are going to face the same realization that many progressives did when Obama didn’t end racism or bring comity to Congress or usher in a new liberal golden age. Americans elect not only a president, but also over 2,000 members of a political coalition to policy-making positions across a sprawling government. Anyone who pins their hopes on an individual savior—like the people of Clay County, Kentucky—is guaranteed to be sorely disappointed. But in Trump’s case, the disappointment will be more profound, both because he promised more and because his party will likely have unified control of government for his entire first term and will own all of the pain he causes.
As Politico’s Ben White put it, “a populist candidate who railed against shady financial interests on the campaign trail is now putting together an administration that looks like an investment banker’s dream.” Trump’s not going to make coal cheaper than natural gas and bring back a bunch of mining jobs. He might be able to negotiate some new riders for NAFTA, but they’ll be guided by the same corporate lobbyists who effectively wrote it in the first place, and won’t do anything to bring back jobs that have been sent overseas. There will be no 35 percent tariff on imports from Mexico or China.
It is these very voters—less educated, struggling to get by on low incomes—who will bear the brunt of unified Republican government under Trump. The GOP Congress may give Trump his “infrastructure plan,” but that looks like it will consist of a bunch of tax cuts for investors to sink into toll bridges and toll roads. It will definitely give him the rest of his huge tax cuts, but those are skewed toward those at the top and won’t bring much relief to the “forgotten men and women of this country,” as he promised when campaigning.
If the GOP repeals the Affordable Care Act, as it’s vowed to do since it was enacted, many of these voters will lose their subsidized health insurance. Block-granting Medicaid and privatizing Medicare will dramatically increase these their economic insecurity. They’ll lose food stamps and Head Start slots. They’ll lose access to reproductive health care. They can forget about a hike in the federal minimum wage. According to one estimate, 20 million Trump voters will lose out on a big raise when Republicans kill Obama’s overtime rule. And if the GOP doesn’t get rid of it entirely, they’ll at least hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which reined in the kind of predatory lending schemes that often indenture the working poor. It’ll be death by a thousand cuts.https://www.thenation.com/article/st...uyers-remorse/
