The closest Trump comes to a rigid set of political principles is on the issue of trade. He has been making the same protectionist arguments about trade for more than 30 years. And despite the fact that the GOP has, at least rhetorically, been a party of free trade since Ronald Reagan, Trump seems to have won that argument in a rout. No doubt there are Republicans who disagree with Trump on trade, but for the most part they’re keeping their opposition to themselves.
Obama came into office wanting to be a transformative president. He almost certainly failed — many of his prize accomplishments likely won’t survive the next GOP Congress. And even as he argued against partisanship, and advanced the idea that a president can, nay must, decide every issue on a case-by-case basis, he always pushed a liberal agenda.
Trump, though, really might try the case-by-case approach, which we’ll soon find is more disorienting than refreshing. His “flexibility” on numerous issues — infrastructure, entitlements, industrial policy, daycare, and who knows what else in the years to come — means we won’t know what to expect.
For good or ill, then, Trump could be the “transformative” president Obama always wanted to be — the president who gets us past partisan ideology by doing away with principle.
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