We Must Normalize Trump to Beat Him

Since President Trump’s inauguration, it’s become popular to demand that we not normalize Trump’s presidency. Politically, this means constantly drawing attention to all the things that Donald Trump does that separate him from past presidents. To that end, the left has focused on a suite of character and corruption-oriented issues:

Trump’s tax returns
Trump’s possible ties to Russia
Trump’s tweets and style of communication (rude, bigoted, or post-fact)
Trump’s conflicts of interest (nepotism, lack of blind trust, Ivanka involvement)
Trump’s history of screwing people over (Trump University, bankruptcies, cost of Trump Tower security & Mar-a-Lago trips)
Trump’s untruthful or corrupt henchmen (Spicer, Kushner, Conway, Bannon, Flynn, Sessions, etc.)

This is all a mistake. To beat Trump we need precisely the opposite approach–we must treat Trump as just another establishment Republican president and attack his administration for failing to help the people it promised to protect. Here’s why.

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Why the Republican Healthcare Plan Doesn’t Work

We’ve finally got the full text of the Republican healthcare plan. Unfortunately, the plan is likely to leave everyone dissatisfied–the right will be frustrated, because it leaves the basic structure of Obamacare intact, while the left will be furious, because the changes the Republicans have proposed weaken that structure rather than reinforce it. Here’s what the new bill does and why it works so poorly.

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We Don’t Need to Increase Military Spending By $54 Billion

It’s been announced that President Trump will seek to increase military spending by $54 billion, taking this money out of the budgets of other federal departments (the specific programs these departments would cut has not yet been decided). This is a significant amount of money–it’s enough to build the Trump wall twice over, and it’s nearly three times the size of the NASA budget. It’s nearly enough to pay for tuition-free college, which costs $70 billion. The cuts are still in the proposal stage–congress must pass a budget which incorporates these changes before they would become law. Nevertheless, it’s worth taking a moment to emphasize just how unnecessary and wasteful this is.

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So Far Trump Has Been No Worse Than Expected–It’s Senate Dems Who are the Problem

Immediately after the election of President Trump, I wrote a post about what Trump was likely to do once in office. Many people this week have seemed surprised by Trump’s executive actions, but they conform remarkably well with what I anticipated. In this post I want to summarize what we’ve seen so far and what it indicates about where things are going.

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Obama’s Legacy: The Evidence Beyond the Punditry

As President Obama’s term draws to a close, every political writer under the sun is offering a hot take on how he’ll be remembered. These can be fun to read, but they don’t tell you very much about what really happened while Barack Obama was president. So today I’d like to look at some of the evidence and data we have on this president. Let’s see how he stacks up next to past presidents and America’s friends and rivals.

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