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Krazychic

One year on from the election: Donald Trump’s most important accomplishment

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HAPPY Trumpiversary!

That’s right, it has already been a whole year since Donald Trump won the US election. Time really flies when you’re living in constant fear of a nuclear apocalypse.

 

Spoiler

But I suspect it has dragged on a bit for Mr Trump himself, who has been under siege from the media, his political opponents, an investigation into his campaign and, worst of all, leakers inside his own administration.

 

Mr Trump has enjoyed some victories. Soon after taking office, he followed through on his pledge to appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court, vindicating the faith of many Republican voters who reluctantly supported his candidacy for that reason alone.

 

He also withdrew America from the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international trade deal hated by the more populist wing of his party. And as promised, America’s economic growth has been strong.

 

Beyond that, however, the first 10 months of Mr Trump’s presidency have delivered one frustrating defeat after another, as he has struggled to fulfil his promises.

 

Multiple attempts to scrap Barack Obama’s polarising healthcare law, Obamacare, failed in Congress, even with Republicans controlling a majority in both the Senate and the House.

 

Tax reform has stalled and is unlikely to pass anytime soon.

 

The courts have repeatedly blocked Mr Trump’s travel ban, foiling his efforts to crack down on immigration from Muslim nations.

 

He has ditched his pledge to confront China for manipulating its currency, instead cosying up to the Asian superpower.

 

And remember that border wall Mexico was going to pay for? It hasn’t even been started, let alone funded.

 

All of this falls against the backdrop of Mr Trump’s worrying unpopularity. He is the only modern president, in 70 years of polling, to have a negative approval rating a year after the election — the second worst rating on record is Bill Clinton’s positive 11 per cent.

 

Unless you are the type of person who judges a president’s success by the number of Twitter feuds he starts, Mr Trump’s tenure has been mixed at best so far.

 

But that’s OK. He has three more years to deliver on his promises before facing voters again.

 

And the truth is, whether you like it or not, Mr Trump has already accomplished something far more consequential than fiddling with tax rates or building a glorified fence.

 

He has completely transformed one side of American politics.

 

Last year’s election wasn’t just about who would sit in the Oval Office for four years. The fight between Republicans and Democrats was less important than the one between Republicans and other Republicans.

 

It was the culmination of a civil war for the soul of the conservative movement in the United States.

 

Think of previous Republican presidents, and even presidential nominees — Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney, to name the most recent. As men, they were nothing like the braggadocious Mr Trump.

 

More importantly, conservatives supported them for very different reasons.

 

Those candidates all fit snugly into what has come to be known, particularly among Mr Trump’s fans, as the “establishment” wing of the party. Yes, even Mr Reagan. He was an insurgent candidate to begin with, but during his presidency, his political philosophy became the default Republican position.

 

Small government. Low taxes. Free trade. Social conservatism. Peace through strength. American leadership in the world. The Republican presidential nominees who followed Mr Reagan tinkered around the edges, but never really deviated from that tradition, presenting the same basic ideas to voters at every election.

 

Until Mr Trump. The president himself is as close as you can get to a non-ideological politician — he mainly just cares about making himself look good — but the movement he so savvily tapped into has a clear philosophy of its own.

 

Low immigration. Anti-trade. Isolationist. Nationalist. America first. There are still elements of the party’s old platform on issues like taxes, guns and abortion, but populist Trumpism is radically different from the past 35 years of American conservatism.

 

Mr Trump faced a bunch of Reaganites in the Republican primaries last year, in a duel of these two incompatible conservative visions. For a long time, pundits assumed voters would eventually unify behind Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or John Kasich — anyone, really, to stop Mr Trump from becoming the nominee.

 

It never happened. And once it was a choice between Mr Trump and Hillary Clinton, most of the Republican voters with doubts about Mr Trump fell in line behind him.

 

Which brings me back to the true significance of that election day. If Mr Trump had suffered the heavy defeat so many people expected, it would have been a brutal repudiation of his politics — and with the Trump experiment a failure, Republicans probably would have written off 2016 as an anomaly and returned to something resembling “establishment” conservatism.

 

Instead, Mr Trump was vindicated. By winning the election, he also triumphed in the Republican civil war.

 

The president has always been right about one thing — politicians are craven. Now the so-called establishment that fought so hard to stop Mr Trump serves as his shield, refusing to condemn even his worst acts.

 

There are still some holdouts refusing to accept defeat. Two senators, Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, both spoke out stridently against Mr Trump recently. But what do those guys have in common? They are retiring, and will never face the voters again.

 

Lucky them, because there are two huge groups of voters salivating at the prospect of turfing out mainstream Republicans: Trump supporters who see them as disloyal to the president, and everyone else, who thinks they are too loyal to him.

 

If you criticise Trump, you’re screwed from the right. If you don’t criticise him, you’re screwed from the left. Either way, you lose.

 

The inevitable result is the kind of electoral bloodbath we saw in the swing state Virginia yesterday, where Republicans suffered defeats on a historic scale.

 

Many Republican politicians genuinely despise the president, but you won’t hear them admit it in public. They are terrified of Mr Trump’s base — as they should be.

 

Those voters have rejected the old conservatism. When Mr Trump is gone, they won’t simply flock back to it. The politicians can either come to terms with that fact and adapt, or ignore it and face extinction.

 

It is the party of Trump now, and there is no going back.

 

 

Source

Iggy and Puddin like this

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Tiddy-bits:

Some "Class A" journalism in that piece. The hyperbole, rhetoric, and yellow journalism is right on key for the journalist integrity (or lack there of) in today's media. I especially love when "journalists'" push OP-ED's as hard news.

 

(SBB) Storm and Sunstriker7 like this

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Well, it's an evaluation of the US-presidents accomplishments. Naturally some forms of judgments towards his previous actions should be expected.

It also says "COMMENT" (thats not provocative formulated, it literally is in caps lock) in the first line on the source's page. Might be an Editor's error to miss that part.

 

And tbh, I find that article fairly neutral formulated. It could have very well gone with a much harsher wording.

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14 hours ago, tarikja said:

Well, it's an evaluation of the US-presidents accomplishments. Naturally some forms of judgments towards his previous actions should be expected.

It also says "COMMENT" (thats not provocative formulated, it literally is in caps lock) in the first line on the source's page. Might be an Editor's error to miss that part.

 

And tbh, I find that article fairly neutral formulated. It could have very well gone with a much harsher wording.

Weps is still absolutely right. There's very little solid facts and definitely no sources cited in the entire thing. The guy also uses the word "I" at the very beginning of the second paragraph. This isn't a news article; it's a blog post. The author seems to have no journalistic training whatsoever.

 

Which is a shame, coming from a site by the name of news.com.au.

 

I will admit it was pretty neutral though.

Weps likes this

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3 hours ago, Sunstriker7 said:

I will admit it was pretty neutral though.

 

I think they really wanted to appear neutral and probably set out to be when they started typing the piece, but the bias is peppered in here and there. It's especially prevalent in the first little quip about the living in constant"fear" of the  threat of nuclear apocalypse, the continued reference to the President as "Mr Trump", then later on in the commentary concerning the "transformation" of the Republican party, then a bit more in the finishing commentary paragraphs. 

I suppose I should be happy there was at least an effort on part of the author to try to maintain a level of neutrality, but that was kind of shot to pieces with the poorly researched and badly (non-)sourced comments concerning the Presidents accomplishments and fulfilled promises. The one that threw me the worst was the comment concerning the "wall", when it has been clear the wall is being built, prototypes have been erected and there's been a flurry of articles about it, with one prominent Reuters article published a full eight days prior to this one, commenting about the amount of poverty stricken Mexican nationals in dismay over the "rise" of the President's promised wall. 

Edited by Weps

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3 hours ago, Sunstriker7 said:

Weps is still absolutely right. There's very little solid facts and definitely no sources cited in the entire thing. The guy also uses the word "I" at the very beginning of the second paragraph. This isn't a news article; it's a blog post. The author seems to have no journalistic training whatsoever.

 

Which is a shame, coming from a site by the name of news.com.au.

 

I will admit it was pretty neutral though.

 

You have to distinguish between an informing article, the objective reporting of an incident or situation, and an opinion forming article, the authors position towards something.

Both can be published in news media.

 

Usually (or ideally) the type of reporting is highlighted or is obliged to do so by a governmental body.

 

This article may not be news in its classical sense but it also isn't 'bad journalism'.

So no, he is not absolutely right.

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