How the Swamp Drained Trump
tulc(hopes President Trumps base really likes the taste of swamp water, they made the swamp in to the government)A year later, it seems clear they didn’t need my services—they figured Trump out all on their own.
For all his anti-establishment bluster, Trump has proven to be a paper tiger as president. Instead of cracking down on Wall Street plutocrats, he’s appointed them to his cabinet and given them tax cuts. Instead of browbeating world leaders, he’s let them flatter him into submission with theatrically obsequious state visits. Instead of locking out the sneering media elites, he’s pantingly courted the approval of New York Times reporters and book-writing dandies from Manhattan. And while he hobnobs in Davos with the globalist glitterati, the ragtag team of loyal lieutenants who set out in 2016 to upturn the established order with Trump has been largely shoved to the sidelines or purged altogether from his White House.
In some ways, of course, those initial fears of anarchy have been validated. The first year of Trump’s presidency has been defined by chaos. But more often than not, it’s the kind of chaos that threatens the vulnerable while sparing the powerful. When the federal government shut down on the anniversary of his inauguration, some of the president’s boosters tried to cast it as a heroic stand for Trumpism—the populist disruptor bending Washington to his will. In truth, it was the product of the same infighting, dysfunction, and galloping incompetence that have kept the 45th president from advancing the transformative agenda he promised.
Indeed, while Trump’s “populism” has manifested itself primarily in performative spasms of culture war, the most substantive policy victories of his first year in office have gone to the donor-class conservatism of Paul Ryan and his fellow swamp creatures in the congressional leadership. As it turns out, all they had to do was ask nicely.
It is perhaps the central irony of the Donald Trump story: The Queens-born billionaire who could never win the respect of the taunting insiders on the other side of the river led a bitter revenge march to the White House, ranting and raving and railing against the “haters”—and then giving them what they wanted the moment they said please.