Just moments ago the media universe was forecasting the demise of the Republican party, riven as it was by dissension between the moderate and the extreme, and split in third by a rogue independent who had rented the Party name to catapult himself into the presidency.

Instead, suddenly finding themselves victors, Republicans of all stripes are scrambling to fall in line, seeing their chance to enact every reform in their
wish list. Winning the trifecta of the presidency and control of both Senate and House has given Republicans a nearly clear path to overturning just about everything Obama accomplished in the last eight years.

Just before the election, confident that Democrats would upend the Republican majority in the Senate, a pair of Democratic senators wrote in a fund-raising e-mail that it is time to get rid of the filibuster — the ability for the opposition to block anything that attracts less than 60 votes — and to allow a simple majority for consenting to a president’s Supreme Court nominee. That would extend the so-called “nuclear option” of 2013 that struck down the 60-vote super-majority requirement for approval of all judicial and cabinet agency appointments engineered by then-majority leader Democrat Harry Reid.

They should have been more careful in what they wished for. The tables have suddenly turned. The question is whether, at the very moment of the Senate convening on January 3rd, when rule changes are typically considered, the triumphant Republicans will adopt their own nuclear option and strike down the 60-vote rule to block the Democratic filibusters, retaliating against the Republican refusal all year even to meet with Obama’schoice of judge Merrick Garland, that will greet any choices for filling Antonin Scalia’s empty seat.

The bigger question is whether, while they’re at it, Republicans will move to knock down the 60-vote filibuster rule altogether, attracted by the lure of four years or more of clear passage for every every measure in their canon.

In late October Donald Trump issued his 100-day plan. Herewith a few of his intentions:

Supreme Court: Trump was simply handed a list of candidates which he has spoken of as admirable without knowing any of them. It is an example of how the outsider, who plans to overturn embedded Washington cronyism, will be manipulated by the insiders after all.

Across the next four years, Mr. Trump may have the opportunity to fill more than Scalia’s seat. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83, Anthony Kennedy is 80, Stephen Breyer is 78. That eventuality would lead to seven hard right conservatives on the bench deciding the laws of the country for a generation.

Obamacare: Trump adopted the party line of repealing the Affordable Care Act early on. It is reviled by conservations and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said repealing the law is something that’s “pretty high on our agenda.” Accordingly, “repeal and replace” is part of Trump’s first 100 days plan.

The Act was passed in 2010 when the Democrats controlled Congress using a process in the Senate called “budget reconciliation”, available only to financial bills and needing only a simple majority to pass a measure. That blocked the certainty of a filibuster by Republicans. Not
At The Weekly Standard they haven’t forgotten that his middle name is Hussein

a single member would go on to vote for Obama’s historic attempt to solve America’s chaotic healthcare “system” that presidents from Harry Truman onward had been unable to pull off.

By the same token, Republicans will be able to use reconciliation to effectively repeal Obamacare. In fact, they already have. After some 60 votes in the House, a repeal bill made it through the Senate by reconciliation and landed last January on Obama’s desk for a veto. It wasn’t an outright repeal because “budget reconciliation” can only be used for changes that directly affect the federal budget, that is, measures that cost or save money. But that bill eviscerated the key provisions needed for Obamacare to work. It eliminated the subsidies that help people pay for insurance, did away with the mandate that required people to buy coverage or face penalties, and cut off funding for state expansion of Medicaid. As seen in our related article, Obamacare is facing collapse on its own.

The moment Donald Trump takes office, Congress can pull that bill off the shelf and send it over to the White House for Trump’s signature. But the new regime will likely face a backlash. An indication was that on the day after the election there was surge of people — 100,000 — rushing to sign up on the healthcare exchanges, fearful that Obama’s plan will be taken from them. Some 23 million Americans now have health insurance, the majority with subsidies to help them afford it. They will be told yet again that they must scramble their lives and adopt some new scheme. Congress will need to come up with a plan that appeases their disruption. Features that Republicans have in mind are sketchy and so far suggest that their trademark is likely to be “You’re pretty much on your own” (see companion story).

Climate vs. Energy: Trump called climate change a hoax, indeed a Chinese hoax “in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive”, he once tweeted. He aims to lift all burdens from U.S. industry, beginning with canceling “every unconstitutional executive action” instituted by Obama, presumably without benefit of a court’s deciding what is and isn’t constitutional.

That would first and foremost include rescinding Obama’s entire Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by U.S. power plants. He would go in the opposite direction, lifting all restrictions on “job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal”. The Keystone Pipeline will be approved. Trump would even “cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs” and, although not mentioned, billionaire climate skeptic Myron Ebell, who Trump appointed to head his E.P.A. transition team, says he would disentangle the U.S. from the the emissions reduction pact consummated last year in Paris, an America betrayal that would make this country a pariah among the 200 nations that signed.

Trade: Anger over the loss of jobs caused by foreign competition was, along with unchecked immigration, the cornerstone of Trump’s populist appeal. He opened his campaign with the declaration that he would slap a 45% tariff on Chinese goods and called “what China has done to our country…the greatest theft in the history of the world”. He called NAFTA “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere”. During the campaign he said, “Our jobs are being sucked away from our country, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore, folks”.

He intends to “direct my Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator”, “renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205”, and withdraw the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership. These are steps he will have to take to some degree, and very visibly. His base will expect him to deliver, or will denounce him as the demagogue that the left calls him.

The results of his talking such actions will be very disruptive. China will retaliate (even more than it already has) against U.S. companies, upending their inroads into the enormous Chinese market that they have spent the last decade developing. At stake on this continent are the extensive supply-chain networks that U.S. industry has constructed with Mexico and Canada that have succeeded in making products such as automobiles and appliances competitive against global imports.

Too heavy a hand could well lead to more American jobs lost than gained. Instead, Trump would be much better advised to tighten oversight of foreign competitors — to come down hard and rapidly on perceived violations and let the matter be resolved after-the-fact when counterparty countries. And, commendably, that is indeed the fourth plank in his trade platform — ” to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately”. In the case of China, waiting for the World Trade Organization to adjudicate disputes too often results in American companies driven out of business in the interim. It is our relationship with the WTO and its rules that should be renegotiated.

Immigration & Refugees: There was first the accusation that Mexicans are rapists and murderers (only “some of them are good people”) and the intention to deport all undocumenteds (“We got to move ’em out, we’re going to move ’em back in if they’re really good people” — July 2105 — and “You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely — November 2015.) As recently as September he had not backed down: “We are going to triple the number of ICE deportation officers.” The 100-day plan would “begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas [issued to] to foreign countries that won’t take them back”. That would indeed require a deportation force. It also raises the question of how would “criminal” illegals be identified? We are likely to see arbitrary removal of families with little concern for “criminal”.

He intends an End Illegal Immigration Act that “funds the construction of a wall on our southern border with the full understanding that the country Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such wall”. Because Mexico scoffs at any notion of paying for the wall, Trump at one point proposed to finance the wall by taxing money that Mexican citizens working in the U.S. send home. The cost of the wall has been estimated in the vicinity of $25 billion, with the gauge of Congress appropriating the money reading zero. Here again is a promise to his base he must act on; how can he turn to them and say, “Sorry, Mexico won’t pay and neither will Congress”? This could test just how authoritarian Trump might become.

As for refugees, he once intended to ban all Muslims from entering the country. That has become suspension of “immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur”. Trump has repeatedly insisted on extreme vetting, refusing to acknowledge that there has been extreme vetting all along (see related story) so as, apparently, to make his base think the government is lax.

Taxes: The Trump tax reform plan again follows the mythical Republican doctrine that says cutting taxes produces such growth and income gains that tax revenues will exceed what the government took in before the cuts. Apart from the illogic of this phenomenon, it has not happened in fact, witness the examples of the Reagan and (George W.) Bush tax cuts. Those two administrations produced deficits that went well beyond defense and war spending.

In fact, Trump’s steep tax cuts are estimated to produce deficits in the range of $3 to $5 trillion across 10 years. Yet Trump expects his tax reforms to generate 4% growth, a huge gain thought to be impossible given the new world order in which our goods are produced everywhere else and at low cost. The plan depends on “trade reform, regulatory relief, and lifting the restrictions on American energy”. This, says Trump, will create “at least 25 million new jobs through massive tax reduction and simplification, in combination”. “, Mr. Trump says at the end of the document, “This is my pledge to you”, but he also deploys “truthful hyperbole” which he defends as “an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion”. With his tax reform plan, you are being promoted. For example, there are nowhere near 25 million Americans available to take those jobs. The joke is that he will have to recall those Mexicans he will have deported.

Iran Deal: During the campaign Trump called the nuclear pact a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated” with the implication that he would renege on the United States’ obligations. In its strange propaganda war against the pact, Trump and those on the right are incensed over the return to Iran of its own money, frozen in banks around the globe as part of the sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. This would resurrect Iran’s economy enabling them to build nuclear weapons, goes the argument — but (a) the actual funds are about a third of the $150 billion once other Iranian obligations are settled and (b) freedom to resume weapons development is 10 years off, which is the objective of the deal if it holds. That is, its strategy is to buy time from a sovereign nation that is otherwise free to do as it pleases. Those objecting to that eventual freedom, as if more could have been negotiated from a country that would yield no further, willfully choose to obscure the fact that Iran was months away from developing a bomb, and if the deal collapses, would presumably resume where they left off.

Something seems to have gotten through to Mr. Trump. Curiously, while almost everything else is crammed into the symbolic 100 days, there is no mention of cancelling the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated with Iran by the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany, and the European Union and implemented in January this year. The word “iran” occurs nowhere in the document.

The days-long assault on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado that peaked from 3:20am to 5:00am one morning underscored to what lengths Donald Trump will go for vengeance. It amplified concerns for how that character trait is
likely to burst forth when transported to the affairs of the Oval Office. Bill Maher reminded viewers of “Hillary’s ad from 2008, ‘Who do you want answering the White House phone at 3:00am?’ How about someone who’s not already enraged in a hissy fit?”.

At the same time, Trump is at pains to persuade us that “my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament. I have a winning temperament”.

Most feared is the intemperate Mr. Trump having access to nuclear weapons, which Sen. Tim Kaine brought up in the vice presidential debate when he alluded to Ronald Reagan’s dread of

“…someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us.”

It is not an outlandish conjecture. Trump seems to view nuclear weapons as little different than other weapons; he seems not to grasp Reagan’s understanding that they threaten the annihilation of civilization. To Chris Wallace on Fox News, Trump said,

“It’s not like, gee whiz, nobody has them. So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea.”

Wallace asked, “With nukes?”. Trump answered, “Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes”. He urged South Korea to do the same.
“Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?”, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked. “Saudi Arabia, absolutely”, Trump replied, then reversed himself, but continued:

“It’s going to happen, anyway… you have so many countries already, China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia, you have so many countries right now that have them”.

None of that relates to his temperament except that, matching his disregard of the existential threat nuclear proliferation poses to no less than the planet itself, he is equally rash about putting them to use. He would use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East. Trump said to Chris Matthews, “Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?”. And when challenged by Matthews, Trump asked, “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”. Joe Scarborough, former congressman and co-host of “Morning Joe”, was told that at a foreign policy briefing Trump asked three times in an hour, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”. Trump confirmed his willingness to go nuclear against ISIS in an interview with Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics.

What about using them in Europe, Fox News’ Eric Bolling asked. “I’m not going to take cards off the table. Europe is a big place”. On “Face the Nation” he said about nuclear weapon use, “You want to be unpredictable”.

third world leader

In the second debate Mr. Trump said to Hillary Clinton, “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation”. When she countered with, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country”, he jumped in with, “Because you’d be in jail”. Much as how politics is conducted in the backwaters of the world, Trump has thus openly said he would take steps to send his opponent for the presidency to prison.

arrogating power

If he makes it to the presidency, maybe the enormity of the responsibility will sink in. Those around him might succeed in keeping his finger off the button, but what will restrain his temperament at home? There’s an unanswered question of whether Donald Trump is committed to the separation of power.

He shows little appreciation for, and perhaps not even understanding of, the checks and balances of the Constitution’s three branches of government. James Madison worried about the collapse of that division in Federalist Nr. 47:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Perhaps it is just harmless bombast, but with first person declarations he speaks as someone who expects to hold all the power of government: “I am your voice” and “I alone can fix it” and “When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country” — this is the language of a dictator.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “He’ll have a White House counsel” to reign him in and Sen. John McCain assured us we have the institutions of government that would restrain someone who seeks to exceed his constitutional obligations, but the mere fact that these major congressional figures are worried enough to make such statements about their own party’s candidate for president is eye-opening.

Trump has made no mention of working with Congress to accomplish his objectives. Taking notice of President Obama’s use of executive orders, he has boasted that he will use that path to assert power. “He’s led the way, to be honest with you,” he said in January on “Meet the Press”. “But I’m going to use them much better, and they’re going to serve a much better purpose than what he’s done.”

He was asked on “Good Morning America” whom he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Trump answered he would “probably appoint people that would look very seriously at” Hillary Clinton’s “e-mail disaster because it’s criminal activity”. Apart from his apparently not realizing that the Supreme Court neither investigates nor prosecutes, that says his litmus test would be to choose justices who he thinks would be complicit in going after opponents.

That’s in accord with Trump having already shown that he is contemptuous of the rule of law — except as it benefits him. There was his attack on the judiciary in the person of Federal District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel in retaliation for his denying a motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit against Trump University. Trump called Curiel a “hater” and questioned whether he could receive a fair trial from the Indiana-born judge because he is a “Mexican”, insinuating that the judge’s ruling was payback for Trump’s racial slurs against Mexicans as criminals and rapists. Trump’s slanders are absent forethought, much less research. He might have first discovered that in the 1990s Curiel had led a joint task force in California against a Tijuana drug cartel, his life threatened to the extent of the U.S. Marshalls Service having him live in a Navy base for a year.

“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary”
said David Post, a retired law professor who writes at Volokh Conspiracy, a right-leaning law blog quoted in the The New York Times..

Trump seems possessed of an insecurity that no one has been able to explain. It is hypothesized as the cause for his lashing out out at every slight. He turned on the only female Hispanic governor in the nation, New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, for not showing up at his rally there, never mind how problematic that would be for her among her Latin constituency, or how demeaning for her personally, for that matter.

mute the press

Donald Trump would hardly be the first president to be irked by the prodding and poking of the press. An adversarial relationship is its job in order to pry open the secrets of government. But not yet in government, Trump already harbors a corrosive animus toward the fourth estate. “I gotta tell you, the media is [sic] among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met”, Trump said in February. “They’re terrible”. He has said that most reporters are “absolute dishonest, absolute scum”. Two nights after the election he was back to tweeting that the protesters were “professionals…incited by the media”, when the media in fact was cooing over another peaceful transition of power.

He once mailed a columnist a copy of a negative article she’d written about him with her picture circled and the words “The face of a dog” written in the margin. McKay Coppins, writing for Buzzfeed, made the faux pas of calling the Trump Organization’s palatial estate, Mar-a-Lago, a “nice, if slightly dated, hotel”. Trump sent him enraged tweets as much as several times a day calling him a “dishonest slob” and his work “true garbage with no credibility” in a fusillade that cropped up repeatedly for over two years.

He mocked a reporter by imitating his physical disability for his having questioned Trump’s thoroughly debunked claim to have seen “thousands” in Jersey City celebrating the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

He uses the legal system to intimidate, regularly suing those who cannot afford to defend. In 2006 he sued the author of a book who claimed Trump greatly exaggerated his wealth. Trump said in an interview that he knew he wouldn’t win but pursued the suit for five years anyway to make a point. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

He has now threaten to sue The New York Times for the misdemeanor of reporting, demanding that the paper retract their interview with two women who said Trump had “touched them inappropriately”. He thinks its hould be “off limits” for the media to investigate his behavior.

For Trump. blame is always elsewhere. The system is rigged. The media is biased. That same media that gave him what was valued at over $2 billion in free access by the time of the Republican convention. That same media that, as for no one before him, welcomed the New York chutzpah of his phone calls into live television programs, patched in by the control room in the hope that Trump would make news with yet another headline grabbing howler.

Only too willing to make that Faustian bargain for ratings, the press finally turned contrary over the question of where had the $6 million gone that Mr. Trump claimed he had raised for veterans in a telethon this past January. Weeks of questioning prompted Trump to rage against the “dishonest” press coverage of his campaign and to call a press conference in late May where he read a list of charities to which the money had been distributed. Only then, as reporters discovered, did the exposure cause him to cut a check for the $1 million he had personally pledged over four months earlier. For catching him out he called the press “disgusting”, one reporter “a sleaze”, and another “a real beauty”. The media “make me look very bad”, he complained. “For Trump the only honest reporter is one who reports the news exactly as Trump wants at that exact moment”, was the appraisal of Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe

After the press conference, which had been contentious, Trump was asked if he will continue to berate and insult journalists. “Yes, it is going to be like this”, he answered. “You think I’m gonna change? I’m not going to change. I am going to continue to attack the press. I find the press to be extremely dishonest. I find the political press to be unbelievably dishonest”.

He revoked the press credentials of The Washington Post, thereby banning its reporters from attending campaign events. The Post had run the headline, “Donald Trump Suggests President Obama Was Involved With Orlando Shooting” after Trump had said on Fox News that Obama doesn’t understand Islamic terrorism, or “he gets it better than anybody understands. Look guys, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or has something else in mind”.

Post editor Marty Baron said, “Donald Trump’s decision to revoke [our] credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press. When coverage doesn’t correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished”. Trump had already barred from his events Politico, BuzzFeed News and The Huffington Post.

Post owner, multi-billionaire Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, is in Trump’s gun sights for that indiscretion. ”The fact is, the Washington Post is being used by the owners of Amazon as their political lobbyist so that they don’t have to pay taxes and don’t get sued for monopolistic tendencies that have led to the destruction of department stores and the retail industry,” read a statement from the Trump campaign. Mr. Trump said in February:

“He wants political influence so Amazon will benefit from it. That’s not right. And believe me, if I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems. One of the things I’m going to do if I win…is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected. You see, with me, they’re not protected, because I’m not like other people, but I’m not taking money, I’m not taking their money. We’re gonna open up those libel laws, folks, and we’re gonna have people sue you like you never got sued before.”

That has become a principal concern with Trump: a vengeful president who use the powers of the federal departments and agencies — the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS — to bring low his enemies and in particular to snuff a free press. At the very moment that the media face an existential economic threat from the digital world, along comes a president who has little to no belief in the First Amendment, who admires and envies despots Putin and Erdogan for having the power to shut down newspapers and jail journalists in their countries. With Trump will we see an attempt to make seditious libel — the act of criticizing him or the government — a crime?

A president who doesn’t get the point that the First Amendment counts more than he — who opposes the role a free press plays in a democratic society — will be a dangerous and regrettable choice for the job.