“Party leaders thought the hardliners were a spent force. “The Freedom Caucus gains new potency with Trump setback,” claimed a headline in Saturday’s Financial Times. This shows Trump’s and Bannon’s perhaps fatal misunderstanding of the character of the Freedom Caucus. “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something,” one member replied, “I was 18 years old. As it always had in the past, this was “the swamp” demanding that the rustic provincials fall in line with the Eastern establishment. This was old Washington talking again, much like it always talked down to the rubes from the red heartland states that most of the House Freedom Caucus members identified with. “You have no choice but to vote for this bill.” This is not a debate,” Bannon told members of the House Freedom Caucus. During the Super Bowl, he was chatting it up with with Vice President Mike Pence in the owner’s box. Bush’s administration in the middle of the war on Iraq-seems to be keeping an eye on the Trump White House. Bush’s secretary of state, and who dramatically intervened on George W. Baker III-Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, George H.W. Right at the end there had been a few very bad calls in what The New York Times columnist and said-to-be Trump friend Maureen Dowd called “a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere.” The worst likely came from “Manichaean anarchist” Steve Bannon, Trump’s closest advisor, who Dowd contrasted with “classy operator James Baker.” Incidentally, classy operator James A. Possibly, it has suddenly passed like a morning fog on the Potomac. It’s not clear at the moment if anything can be metabolized out of Trump’s exotic crew or if he will have to clear house entirely and replace them all with more conventional “establishment” administrators pulled from “the swamp” that he promised to drain. But now it may be more difficult for him to corral the votes needed for other vital issues-like tax reform. The momentum that followed in his wake spread across Europe and parts of Asia. From July 2015 to now, it had been impossible to slow Trump’s ascent. He might have reached another such turning this past Friday when he presented Congress with an ultimatum and then failed to convince the House to pass his health care bill. “I’m not sure if anyone has put it together yet,” I wrote back then, “but if Donald Trump does not go quietly into the good night within the month or so, then we will have reached a turning.” The press should have predicted his victory at that moment. America was ready for something completely different, and Trump was bringing it. Clearly, the heroes of an earlier generation no longer had the relevance they exhibited before. The next day, against all expectations, Trump ticked slightly upward in the polls.
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