ONE YEAR LATER: AN ACCOUNTING

One year ago, Republican Donald Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential contest, defying the expectations of just about everyone who’d been paying attention. Los Angeles Times Opinion asked liberals, moderates and conservatives, polit

Bernie Sanders Empty promises

When Donald Trump campaigned for president, he told the American people that he would stand up for the working class and take on the political and economic establishment. One year since his election, he has repeatedly reneged on his promises by supporting the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working families.

During his campaign, candidate Trump said that he was going to “drain the swamp.” Now that he is president, Trump has brought more billionaires into his administration than any president.

While campaigning, Trump told the American people he was going to provide health “insurance for everybody.” As president, he supported a disastrous bill that would have thrown millions off of health insurance, substantially raised premiums for older workers and defunded Planned Parenthood.

As a candidate, Trump said he understood the pain of working families. His budget would slash funding for affordable housing, college financial aid and Head Start.

And while Trump wants to make devastating cuts to programs that working families desperately need, he is working overtime to provide a massive tax break to billionaires like himself.

During the campaign, Trump promised to invest $1 trillion in our nation’s infrastructure to create millions of jobs. Instead, Trump’s budget would cut funding to repair our roads, bridges, railways and water facilities.

As a candidate, Trump promised he would not cut Medicare or Medicaid. Now he supports a budget that calls for $473 billion in cuts to Medicare and more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid.

On the campaign trail, Trump said he would stop the pharmaceutical industry from “getting away with murder.” Trump’s pick to head the Food and Drug Administration received millions of dollars from pharmaceutical corporations and is strongly opposed to lowering drug prices.

During the election, Trump promised to “stop Wall Street from getting away with murder.” As president, Trump signed an executive order to deregulate the same financial institutions whose illegal behavior caused millions of Americans to lose their homes, jobs and life savings.

In other words, Trump as a candidate promised the American people one thing, as president he is doing the exact opposite.

But simply stopping Trump’s agenda is not enough. We can join every other major country and guarantee healthcare to all as a right. We can demand that the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations start paying their fair share of taxes. We can create millions of decent-paying jobs by rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. We can reform our broken criminal justice system and pass comprehensive immigration reform. We can raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and make public colleges and universities tuition-free.

Together we need to build a government and an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.

Maria Bustillos There is no reboot

You know the “Blue Screen of Death”? The way your PC screen turns blue when the Windows operating system goes kaput? During the Clinton administration, the cause of a BSoD was liable to be hardware-related — owing, say, to a failed motherboard — so the bluetastrophe was lethal. Irreparable.

The disaster that befell the Democratic Party a year ago is exactly this kind of fatal blow, a political BSoD.

We Democrats believed that things were moving, slowly, in the right direction; that our Republican friends and relatives would see sense, somehow, eventually — no way were they really that racist, or that hypocritical. We believed our Democratic leaders would play fair, and prove worthy of our trust; that their loyalty to rich donors would diminish, that progressives would gain power within the party.

But we were blind to the truth, and blindsided by the catastrophic ineptitude of our leadership. Against all sense, at a time of dangerous polarization and unrest, Democrats were pressured to back a candidate of legendary unpopularity. The party’s chair was ousted at a critical moment because she abused her power on behalf of that candidate.

All that was very depressing, but the breakdown that caused the Democrats’ Fatal Exception really began many years earlier.

Thirteen summers ago, Barack Obama gave the speech at the Democratic National Convention that would seal his fate, and the nation’s. He told us not what was true or real, but instead, a tissue of beautiful lies that so many of us wanted desperately to hear.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America.”

We mustn’t forget that Obama’s stirring speech concluded with the optimistic prediction that John Kerry would win the 2004 election. Spoiler: He didn’t.

Hope! Hope all you want, hope until you are blue in the face; hoping didn’t make it so. In real life there was and is a liberal America and a conservative America. To pretend otherwise was, and is, a mistake.

We have to stop running candidates like Hillary Clinton, who we are told, against all evidence, will appeal to red America. If 2016 taught us anything, it’s that it’s a dog fight out there and the only way to win is to build up from our populist liberal base.

Troublingly, the Democratic National Committee, led still by the same corporatists who supported Clinton, and who made sure that leftist Rep. Keith Ellison (DMinn.) was denied the top spot, is as clueless as ever. In October, DNC Chair Tom Perez purged popular leftists from the ranks of party leaders.

The Democratic establishment caused the Blue Screen of Death. We need a new computer with a freshly installed operating system, and pronto. There is no reboot or Safe Mode available. The only option is to throw out the broken machine.

Jonah Goldberg The show goes on

The most remarkable thing about the Trump presidency is how little has changed since the campaign. That’s not normal. Usually the heat of the election subsides, former opponents shake hands and move on. The conversation shifts to Capitol Hill fights and maybe a little White House intrigue. Now all that seems like a minor subplot to the “Trump Show,” which began a lifetime ago when he came down that escalator in Trump Tower.

I am quite serious when I refer to the “Trump Show.” Over the last decade or so, television has entered a new Golden Age as series such as “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” pursue a novelistic narrative arc over many seasons. Trump owes his success more to the rise of another, lower-quality genre: The reality show. The scale of his celebrity can be attributed in no small part to his role on “The Apprentice,” and to this day Trump follows the laws of show biz rather than governance. He broke the blood-brain-barrier between entertainment and politics, and it may never be repaired.

Activists of a certain bent believed — and continue to argue — that Trump won the presidency on the strength of his ideological agenda: “Build the wall!” and so forth. While it is true that some of those promises helped deliver him to victory, skeptics understood that Trump had a thumbless grasp of public policy. But what few people appreciated, Never Trumpers and Always Trumpers alike, was that candidate Trump’s policy dis-fluency on the campaign trail would endure after the election.

Whether in his executive suite at Trump Tower or in the Oval Office, the man’s lodestar remains the same: His staggering selfregard and self-absorption. Like the actor who always wants more screen time, more close-ups and more flattery, the differences between “Apprentice” Trump, Candidate Trump and President Trump all have to do with how people and institutions respond to him. He holds constant.

No wonder, then, that the defining attributes of his campaign remain the defining attributes of his presidency. He must command the news cycle. People must acknowledge his greatness. That is the real Trump agenda as far as Donald Trump is concerned. That is why he is most comfortable talking about football players and Confederate monuments: It makes him the center of attention. Talking about tax or healthcare policy, by contrast, reveals the thinness of his knowledge. Talking about himself is the dead center of his comfort zone. Thus he reserves his greatest wrath not for senators who vote against him on policy grounds, but for senators who may vote with his policies but also have the temerity to criticize his “leadership” style.

In short, he remains in campaign mode, because he has no other mode. Waiting for the presidential pivot is like waiting for Godot. And that’s what distinguishes the “Trump Show” from the Golden Age of television or even from most reality shows. There may be a narrative arc, but there is no character arc. He can’t change.

Victor Davis Hanson He keeps winning

Donald Trump presides as he campaigned. He is proving a Nietzschean figure in the sense that “what does not kill him makes him stronger.”

Each time the media, Republican enemies and the Democratic opposition seem to have Trump on the ropes, the president emerges far less wounded than his critics. The list of felled detractors includes: the National Football League, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Kathy Griffin and John Podesta.

Former FBI Director and Trump critic James Comey has imploded his career. In “Alice in Wonderland” fashion, the president’s sloppy tweet about having his “wires tapped” in Trump Tower “by Obama” eventually may prove true in the sense that Obama administration officials swept up Trump and others on the pretext of investigating purported collusion.

Hillary Clinton, who a year later insists that Russian collusion helped lose her the election, is now, in Greek tragic fashion, vulnerable to similar charges. (See the Uranium One scandal.)

In late 2016, news celebrities informed the American people that the so-called Steele/ Fusion GPS dossier was fatal to Trump. In fact, its unproven smears are beginning to boomerang on those who in highly partisan fashion once insisted that they were accurate.

Trump has also found himself in crude feuds with those in his own party, specifically Sens. Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and John McCain.

The first two have now decided not to seek reelection, ostensibly for principled reasons. But in truth, both would have almost no chance of winning their primaries given their harsh opposition to Trump and his legislative proposals.

Why does Trump, who suffers poor approval ratings, seem to always land on his feet while his critics do not? Three reasons come to mind. 1) Trump is at home in bare-knuckle brawling; his opponents are often not. When they try to slog it out, they seem sadly out of character, while Trump appears at ease.

2) The hysterical hatred of Trump blinds his critics to empiricism and disinterested inquiry, which might have otherwise warned them there was little hard evidence of — for example — Russian collusion and other smears in which they have trafficked.

3) Trump has some solid achievements. For example: conservative judicial appointments, an improving economy, a top-notch national security team, deregulation, radical decreases in illegal immigration, the routing of Islamic State, a robust stock market, increased consumer and business confidence, low inflation and unemployment, booming energy production. These “wins” compensate for his personal unpopularity.

The president’s critics may score points, and he’s not personally popular, but most of Trump’s agenda polls over 50% with voters. So far, denigrating Trump the messenger has been offset by Trump’s far more popular message.

Trump’s eventual fate lies not in his tweets and tiffs, but in the economy and crises abroad. If he achieves economic growth and avoids optional wars, his party will do well in the 2018 midterm election and he will have a good shot at reelection. If not, he won’t.

Erin Aubry Kaplan A failure to represent

Of all the blows dealt to our political culture by Donald Trump, the most damaging has been his corruption of what it means to be president. I’m talking about representation.

It used to be that a president, whatever his party or ideology, understood that he represented all Americans, and it was assumed he spoke for us all in his public remarks. When Trump speaks, or tweets, we know he’s addressing his core supporters — white, resentful and disproportionately powerful: the base.

For the moment, and possibly the future, these voters — and not the forward-looking, neo-rainbow coalition that first elected President Obama — define the American electorate. Trump can brazenly play to a fraction of the population, in the crudest language possible, with no fallout. Despite his historic wins, Obama had to appeal to as many constituencies as possible, and he was still vilified by the white right as the other, an outsider.

Trump’s base is being legitimized, normalized. In saner times, “base” was just a term for those who embraced a party’s bread-and-butter values and ambitions, a supply of reliable votes. Increasingly, however, Trump’s devotees are driving — and running over — the Republican Party. They cultivate the very worst American impulses, from xenophobia to knownothingism to disdain for social necessities such as public education and clean water. Nothing in the best of the democratic imagination — call it our better angels — is sacred to this base. And its signature quality is racism.

A year in, and still the media, on both right and left, remain reluctant to judge these voters for what they are. Though plenty has been said and written about Trump’s victory, about all that went wrong for Hillary Clinton, very few mainstream pundits have truly called these voters to account. Instead of seeing the base as a white movement that cuts across economic lines, the media individualizes and sympathizes with poor heartland folks who’ve been “left behind.”

Why? Because white America, including its journalists and commentators, is loath to see itself as racist, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Racism may make the list of contributing factors for this or that analysis, but it only tops the list when there is no other choice — think white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va.

This ingrained restraint is not noble, it’s harmful. The irony is that even this worst of all possible bases isn’t actually represented by Trump. He flaunts their support; he exploits them and he has injected their primal fears into our political consciousness. But he is pathologically self-centered. A year ago this week, we elected a president who represents nobody but himself, a party of one.

Norman Ornstein GOP in turmoil

President Trump has publicly and privately attacked Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), belittled Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). He has blamed his co-partisans for their failure to pass any replacement plan for Obamacare, and has warned that he will go after congressional Republicans if they fail to pass tax reform by the end of the year. Trump’s former advisor and, from all appearances, current right-hand man, Stephen K. Bannon, has made it clear that all Republican incumbent senators, along with the party’s establishment leaders, are in his crosshairs, and he has actively been recruiting radical candidates to run against them in 2018. Sources as disparate as CNN, National Review, the Hill and the Week have recently referred to “the Republican Civil War.”

One year after the election that brought Trump to power, that’s where we are.

Trump’s narcissistic and sociopathic behavior is, of course, responsible for much of this chaos. But Republican establishment leaders are not innocent victims here. The disarray in the GOP — which should not be separated from its radical antigovernment and anti-science agenda, its embrace of policies that divide by race and ethnicity, its plutocratic tilt and its willingness to explode norms of governance at all levels — was set in motion by Republican leaders going back at least to Newt Gingrich in the late 1970s.

If Trump’s presidential campaign got little initial support from elected Republicans or party leaders, they created the conditions that enabled him to emerge, and then to get elected. Playing on the fears and resentments of tea party voters, and opposing everything President Obama proposed without offering ideas of their own, had given the GOP establishment big victories in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. But they have not managed to control their angry base. As I note in my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, JFK’s famous phrase applies to them: “Those who ride on the back of a tiger often end up inside.”

Leaders such as McConnell and Ryan have gained some things from Trump’s election, including a radical right Supreme Court justice and executive actions to support big business, billionaires and fossil fuels. But the price is fearsome: a Republican Party at war with itself, defined by a reckless president and an empty set of policies; a swamp monster instead of a swamp drained; a coalition no longer suitable for governing or problem-solving. And there is little on the horizon to suggest that lessons have been learned, or that they’re on a course to correction.

And that is tragic — not just for the once proud GOP but for a country and constitutional democracy that needs two functional parties to survive.

Norman Ornstein is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author, with E.J. Dionne and Thomas Mann, of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported.”