Marco Rubio on White House drama: "People got what they voted for"

Fact check: Mostly true. That’s a core problem with the “25th Amendment solution” for removing Trump. He can’t be “incapacitated” if he’s the same guy now as he was during the campaign. Unless you believe that American voters would have handed 306 electoral votes to someone whom they believed was incapacitated, they’ve already rendered their verdict on his fitness for office. This is the sort of presidency they wanted, now they’re getting it. Right, Jeb Bush?

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“When I ran for office, I said he is a chaos candidate and would be a chaos president,” Bush said on Friday.

“Unfortunately, so far chaos organizes the presidency right now,” he said, speaking at the annual SALT hedge fund conference, which is headlined by bigwigs from the world of politics, finance, sports and entertainment.

Bush said it appears the Trump administration is “living in the tyranny of the moment” instead of “executing on a clear agenda.”

I don’t know that they have an “agenda,” properly speaking. What’s their agenda on health care, apart from “something besides ObamaCare”? Trump got elected as a populist with heavy rural support yet the House bill would gut Medicaid for poorer Americans and the new subsidies scheme would risk shafting older, rural voters. There’s no agenda beyond “sign anything that can get through Congress.”

That’s why Rubio’s statement is only “mostly true.” The bargain struck by Trump voters was that they’d tolerate a certain amount of chaos in government if it came with a whirlwind in policy reform — an upgrade on ObamaCare, stronger immigration enforcement, more protectionist trade policies, a more conservative Supreme Court. Trump delivered bigly on SCOTUS and illegal immigration is down for the moment, but there’s no wall yet, health-care reform is frozen, and Trump has made aggressive noises on trade without doing much to upset the status quo since keeping his promise early to withdraw from TPP. As Trump superfan Ann Coulter put it, “We knew that Trump would have a tough road to hoe, but he was supposed to go down and be a bull in a china shop. We’re still waiting for the bull in the china shop.” Voters are willing to let the bull destroy some of the china they like so long as it stampedes all of the ugly stuff. Right now the ratio isn’t where it needs to be.

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By way of illustration, Trump’s job approval has slid to a new low of 38.8 percent in the FiveThirtyEight tracker after spending most of the first four months of his term bouncing between 42-44 percent. A small but significant chunk of people who’d stuck with him through the ups and downs of the first hundred days have peeled off lately under bombardment from Comey/Flynn/Russia news. He needs to get them back. Destroying a little more of the bad china would help.

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Jazz Shaw 2:00 PM | March 26, 2024
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