'I Alone Can Fix It' Becomes 'It's Not My Fault' - By Jonathan Chait
August 25, 2017
2:35 pm
“I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves,” said Donald Trump in the acceptance speech at his nominating convention. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” None of those claims have turned out to be true. First, helping the powerful beat up on the defenseless has turned out to be the overriding thematic goal of his agenda. Second (and mitigating the first), everybody knows the system better than Trump — at least everybody in politics. And he has proven so unable to fix it he is already shifting his message toward assigning the blame elsewhere.
Trump is encountering the classic populist dilemma. Populists define political problems as very simple, denying the existence of complex tradeoffs. They envision the political system as pitting a unified people (or, in certain herrenvolk varieties of populism, as a unified racial subset of the people) against a nefarious elite. The dilemma is that the promise of easy solutions can help win an election, but it does not translate into governing. Populists generally either radically depart from their platform, resort to authoritarianism to consolidate their power, or fail. Trump is heading for door no. 3.
The failure to repeal and replace was a party-wide populist dilemma years in the making. Republicans in Congress promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something that would give everybody access to coverage, at less cost, while lowering taxes. When Trump promised, “You’re going to have such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it’s going to be so easy,” he was merely echoing Republican rhetoric. Any Republican president was bound either to pass a plan that deprived millions of Americans of their access to medical care, or else failed to achieve the stated goal of repealing Obamacare.
Trump’s distinct contribution to the dilemma is his response to the failure. He could work with Democrats to tweak the law, bringing down premiums, call the tweaks “repeal and replace,” and reap the credit for improvements in insurance markets. Alternatively, he could stick with his tactic of following the Republican line, which in this case means moving past health care to focus on taxes. Instead, Trump has followed a novel strategy of lashing out at his own legislative partners, repeatedly reopening the wound of the repeal failure.
Trump inexplicably believes he can save his own political standing by detaching himself from the majority party in Congress. One White House adviser tells the Washington Post that, if Republicans lose control of the House, Trump will be able to say, “See, I told you these guys wouldn’t get anything done. I’ve been saying this for months. They’re not following my agenda.”
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/i-alone-can-fix-it-becomes-its-not-my-fault.html
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Fugg the Constitution 
