Donald Trump not a nice person, Megan McArdle discovers
Well, he isn’t. As Megan explains, following the announcement by Texas Republican Representative Will Hurd, the sole black Republican in the House, that he is retiring:
All of which [Hurd’s intelligence, honesty, and decency] makes Hurd’s impending departure the perfect symbol of what has happened to the Republican Party over the past few years. It has stopped trying to build a broad coalition, and instead is simply catering to the angriest partisans in deep-red districts.
Well, yeah, but that should have been obvious as far back as the summer of 2016, when Trump was tromping all over the Republican field, when he was accusing the Mexican government of sending us rapists, when he was complaining that when the U.S. invaded Iraq we should have stolen their oil, when he was threatening to torture the families of suspected terrorists. But I guess Megan didn’t want to get too far ahead of the curve.
Donald Trump not a nice person, Ramesh Ponnuru discovers
Well, he isn’t. “How Long Can Real Conservatives Make Excuses for Trump?” demands Ramesh, following the whole “Go back where you came from” shtick. Well, I don’t know, Ramesh, but it seems to me that you were doing a pretty good job of it as recently as, well a week ago, when you opined/gushed the following regarding The Donald:
Reform conservatives were among the groups on the right most hostile to Donald Trump in 2016. Yet in some respects we have been more successful since his election than we were in the years before it.
Hey, and how about that tax cut?
The tax cut, while not ideal from the perspective of either one of us [Michael R. Strain], followed the advice reformicons had been giving for years: Concentrate less on cutting the top income tax rate and more on cutting the corporate tax rate and expanding the tax credit for children.
It's hard to imagine a more candy-assed ass-covering than that. Did the “reformicons” want a massive giveaway to the rich that would add some $1.5 trillion to the deficit over ten years? Because that’s what this fabulous tax cut did, massively cutting the corporate tax while not correcting any of the many loopholes that turned the “official” 35% tax rate of the old law into something more like 15%, as well as handing out new loopholes for those unfortunate rich folks who otherwise wouldn’t have benefited from the “reform” because they weren’t “corporate”. The tax bill was of the lobbyists, for the lobbyists, and by the lobbyists, as New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall explained at the time: “You Cannot Be Too Cynical About the Republican Tax Bill”.
Ramesh Ponnuru, short-term memory loss at its most convenient.
