The budget:
How Democrats rolled Trump
“President Obama finally got a Republicancontrolled Congress to fund his domestic budget,” said Russell Berman in TheAtlantic.com. Turns out, “all it took was having Donald Trump in the White House.” Last week, President Trump signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that totally reverses long-standing Republican demands for steep cuts to domestic spending. In fact, it increases funding for some programs, such as the Department of Education, Pell Grants, Head Start, and federal housing assistance by more than Obama requested in his final budget. Why? Democrats successfully used their leverage in the Senate to wring huge concessions from Republicans, who needed their votes to pass a budget with the huge spending increases they wanted for the military. We’re now seeing a very strange spectacle play out on Capitol Hill: “Democrats celebrating legislation enacted under complete GOP control of Washington.”
Die-hard Trump supporters “might be starting to realize how thoroughly he has played them for suckers,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Not only is the budget bill stuffed with liberal priorities like keeping federal funding for Planned Parenthood and public broadcasting, it contains “basically nothing” for Trump’s big, beautiful border wall except a few dozen miles of additional fencing and barriers. The tough negotiator who wrote The Art of the Deal was nothing but a fraud. It’s sad, but true, said Brandon Weichert in Spectator.org. Many of us hoped Trump would have enough intestinal fortitude to hold the line on spending and halt the tide of illegal immigration. But after briefly threatening to veto the bill, Trump signed it anyway. “Face it,” my fellow MAGA-ites, “Trump sold us out to the Swamp.”
Trump will never admit it, though, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. The president and his allies are already pushing the narrative that he was “stabbed in the back” by feckless Republicans. The truth is Trump and his aides were part of the budget negotiations from the beginning and approved the framework for the deal in February. The lie that he was surprised and horrified by all that spending “lays essential groundwork for Trump to escape blame if the GOP loses the House in the 2018 midterms,” setting him up to run against the Swamp again in 2020. In Trumpworld, the president can never be at fault, and all blame lies with “those backstabbing blackguards of the Beltway.”