President Donald J. Trump Proclaims January 16, 2018, as Religious Freedom Day
said this:
No American — whether a nun, nurse, baker, or business owner — should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.
What gives?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-year-in-trump-has-broken-all-the-rules…
In the year since he took the oath of office, Mr. Trump has shown that he simply isn’t bound by what had been seen as the previous conventions of the role he is playing. Other presidents have sought to avoid or tamp down controversy; he is as likely to stir up or make a beeline toward controversy, seeing it as a tool in effecting change. Past presidents have tended to speak off-the-cuff sparingly and carefully; Mr. Trump does it every day on a social-media platform never before deployed this way. …
“He’s now changed the argument in Washington, which for the last 70 years was: Build a global world order based on uneven trade deals, create global economic interdependence and rising middle classes around the world, (and that) will keep the world at peace,” says Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump backer who served briefly as White House communications director. “The U.S. will be a benevolent superpower to a world at peace and our economy will grow. That was the paradigm. Trump wants to do all that, but even out the trade deals—make the trade deals more fair—because he believes that will benefit the American worker and the middle class.”
More than most recent presidents, he acts more like a chief executive officer of the government than its chief operating officer. Rather than present his own detailed policy proposals, he has relied on fellow Republicans in Congress to work out the details of a health plan, a tax cut and an immigration overhaul, preferring to position himself instead as a leader who retains the flexibility to close the deal rather than one who seeks to determine its precise contours.
It remains unclear how effective this new presidential style is. It has produced a historic tax cut, a broad loosening of government regulation and a significant change in the kinds of judges sitting on federal courts.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455453/president-trump-undoes-oba…
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity. In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States. Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration. In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. Republicans have not seriously attempted to roll back the administrative state since Reagan. On key issues of climate change, entitlements, illegal immigration, government spending, and globalization, it was sometimes hard to distinguish a Bush initiative from a Clinton policy or a McCain bill from a Biden proposal. There was often a reluctant acceptance of the seemingly inevitable march to the European-style socialist administrative state. Of course, there were sometimes differences between the two parties, such as the George W. Bush’s tax cuts or the Republicans’ opposition to Obamacare. Yet for the most part, since 1989, we’ve had lots of rhetoric but otherwise no serious effort to prune back the autonomous bureaucracy that grew ever larger. Few Republicans in the executive branch sought to reduce government employment, deregulate, sanction radical expansion of fossil-fuel production, question the economic effects of globalization on Americans between the coasts, address deindustrialization, recalibrate the tax code, rein in the EPA, secure the border, reduce illegal immigration, or question transnational organizations. To do all that would require a president to be largely hated by the Left, demonized by the media, and caricatured in popular culture — and few were willing to endure the commensurate ostracism. Trump has done all that in a manner perhaps more Reaganesque than Reagan himself. In part, he has been able to make such moves because of the Republican majority (though thin) in Congress and also because of, not despite, his politically incorrect bluntness, his in-your-face talk, innate cunning, reality-TV celebrity status, animalistic energy, and his cynical appraisal that tangible success wins more support than ideology. And, yes, in part the wheeler-dealer Manhattan billionaire developed real sympathy for the forgotten losers of globalization.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455453/president-trump-undoes-oba…
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