How’s that going?
Trump said he would turn the GOP into the party ‘of the American worker’
Just over a month into his presidency, Donald Trump strode into a hotel ballroom for the annual assemblage of the most fervent Republican activists and conservative leaders in the country and declared his takeover of the Republican Party — on behalf of the “forgotten men and the forgotten women.”
“The GOP will be, from now on, the party also of the American worker,” Trump said, to wild cheers. Among the changes: No more bad trade deals. Wall off immigrants. Avoid foreign wars.
Fast forward six months.
Trump has increased troop deployments to Afghanistan and threatened military action against North Korea and Venezuela. He has pressed, though unsuccessfully, for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act that would increase the number of uninsured by 32 million people and reduce Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars, contrary to his campaign vows. He proposed a budget that would slash government services including housing, transportation and education.
Trump has written neither his promised tax-cutting plan nor his trillion-dollar, job-creating infrastructure initiative. For all his talk of tax cuts for the middle class, Trump’s tax pitch last week in Missouri could have been delivered by House Speaker Paul Ryan, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney or any number of traditional Republicans as he called for big breaks for corporations and investors that would be a boon for the nation’s top earners.
Those working on the tax and infrastructure plans are former Democratic donors and Wall Street princelings — Gary