What the commentators said

Trump promised “to be a different sort of Republican”, said Martin Wolf in the FT. He isn’t. He has junked the idea of rebuilding US infrastructure; his trade protectionist plans look “halfhearted”. His main policy thrust is now deregulation and tax cuts. More’s the pity. Trump’s proposed cuts are “astoundingly regressive”: they’d hand the “top 0.1%” an average 14.2% cut in post-tax income, compared to an average of just 1.8% for middle income households. And it’s “magical thinking” to imagine this won’t lead to a ballooning of the government deficit. Like Reagan, only far more so, Trump won votes by reaching out to ordinary Americans on cultural issues, but legislates for the upper 1%. This is “pluto-populism”: an effective but highly dangerous strategy. Trump “is playing with political fire”. We’ve seen enough of Trump to know he’s as bad as feared – “delusional, dangerous, dishonest”, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. The only good news is that legal challenges and public protests have ensured that Obamacare remains in place and that the travel ban on immigrants from Muslim countries has been halted. The lesson must be that “resistance is not futile”.

Trump has no cause to worry just yet, said Jonathan S. Tobin in National Review. A recent poll found that 96% of those who voted for him would do so again. That’s because Trump appeals to a vast but forgotten chunk of inland America, said Justin Webb in The Times – the people outside the big coastal cities and Chicago, the places where jobs, wealth and “anything modern and zingy” are concentrated. By contrast, the Democrats seem to despise their former base in the socially conservative working class, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. All they do is obstruct the administration. “We loathe your president and all of you who put him into office”, is the message sent out to millions of voters. To strike a blow against Trump in next year’s mid-term elections, they’ll need to change their tune. Fast.