The Flakes and Corkers of this world essentially have two problems with Trump:
- They concur with the description of the president’s personality that appears on a daily basis on this blog. They find him unprincipled, thin-skinned, narcissistic, autocratic, and profoundly ignorant of policy. They hate his tweets, and his affinity for dividing the country. Regardless of his image, they believe he is a poor and uninformed negotiator and leader. They think he’s likely to run their party, and the country as a whole, into the ground.
- They disagree with his white nationalist worldview, and all of the implications that come with it.
These sentiments are probably shared by most of the GOP members of Congress. Where the dissidents do not have a problem with Trump, however, is on most specific matters of policy, largely because Trump has been content to farm out these issues to the legislative leadership; he’ll sign anything as long as he can call it a “win.” And so, while Trump did nothing to bring the various GOP factions together, you really can’t blame him for the delays in tax reform and the failure to repeal Obamacare; those are on Congress, not him.
Where is this going? So far, most of what the dissidents object to has been noise, not action. We haven’t started a nuclear war in Iran or North Korea, or pulled out of NAFTA, or sold the country to the Russians. Yet. All of these things are still possible, and if calamities result, the trickle of objections will become a roar. If, on the other hand, nothing really bad happens, then nothing will change.