The Freedom Caucus’s watershed “victory” of blocking the House AHCA bill was damaging on multiple fronts. Most significantly, in my opinion, is that President Trump now must pay heed to his rock bottom approval ratings. Had the GOP banded together to enact one of the most economic growth-friendly agendas in modern American history, Trump could have overcome poor approval ratings as his high-powered policy agenda bore fruit over time.
I vastly overestimated the extent to which the GOP recognized this likely once-in-a-generation opportunity to simultaneously unleash American growth and to bury the political “Left” for a generation. How wrong I was: In their “victory” the Freedom Caucus merely proved A) why I personally am a hardcore political “Independent”, B) why American politics is starving for the return of political centrality, and C) why the political “Right” is no better than the political Left. But I digress…
With the GOP now operationally neutered, Trump must consolidate a bipartisan governing coalition, starting from within. The highly pragmatic part of the West Wing led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn is a fantastic place to start, as Politico recently outlined. And yesterday’s news of Bannon getting the NSC boot is yet another positive step toward improving Trump’s approval rating and working across the aisle.
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[…] policy implementation beneath the surface” framework. But as noted in yesterday’s post, this strategy was only tenable if said legislative agenda bore fruit and drove up Trump’s […]
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