Sadly, we have become largely inured to misleading, dissembling and dishonest statements from President Trump. Fact-checkers catalogue them by the hundreds. Yet one lie that I consider particularly egregious has received relatively little attention. The president has repeatedly referred to his plan “to let ObamaCare implode.” This locution casts the president as a mere observer,…
Newly installed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci began what will no doubt be a long series of errors, misstatements and outright lies with this whopper: Recent polls, he claimed, “indicated to me … the president is really well loved.” President Trump is not at all beloved. As I detailed here last week, he was…
In what ways is President Trump unique? “So many,” you say. I won’t rehearse them all now, but his uniqueness also extends to the ways in which the public perceives him. First and foremost, President Trump is uniquely unpopular. He had the lowest approval rating of any president in the history of polling at his…
A debate’s broken out among Democrats about the right strategy for 2018. Honestly, it’s the wrong debate. One side argues we should be focused on President Trump’s failures—a target-rich environment. He’s performed “about faces” on scores of key policy positions. He’s failed to focus on what he claimed were his priorities and failed to make…
Last week, I examined two of the three strands of conservative thinking — aversion to government and aversion to change — which Donald Trump melded together in his successful effort to capture the White House. Here I’ll focus on the third — aversion to difference — which mostly lay dormant in recent years, until Trump ignited these…
It’s possible the Trump presidency will implode while congressional Republicans fan the flames of public outrage by their handling of healthcare, the budget and taxes. Midterm Democratic victories may only require us to stand and watch. We’d be foolish to count on such an eventuality, however. While an improved economic message is part of the…
Otto von Bismarck never said, “Politics is the art of compromise.” His actual statement conveyed a similar, but not identical, sentiment: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” However, the first statement, often misattributed to Bismarck, is no less true for having failed to cross the…
Donald Trump loves being treated like a king and he suffers terrible insecurities about the legitimacy of his election. The former was evident is his response to Saudi Arabia; the latter is on self-destructive display in his reaction to everything Russia. Trump’s obsession with the investigations reveals his deep-seated concern that his Kremlin cohorts may just…
An oft repeated talking point holds that Donald Trump’s supporters remain firm in backing the president. It’s neither as true, nor as electorally important, as it sounds. In November, Trump garnered a minority of the votes cast—46.4 percent — while 53.6 percent voted for someone else. Just after his inauguration Huffpost Pollster’s average put approval of…
Just how unpopular is the Republican healthcare plan? It’s more unpopular than any major piece of legislation in the last 30 years. That means it is more unpopular than ClintonCare, more unpopular than ObamaCare, even more unpopular than the bank bailout. Professor Christopher Warshaw of MIT compiled data on 14 key bills since 1990. None…
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