Trump 'overplayed his hand' on two core promises — and is 'failing utterly': analysis
Donald Trump has recently made two bold political plays — and both went horribly wrong for his administration, a political analyst has claimed.
The president has failed massively on the immigration and manufacturing front, two major points of his second term. But The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky believes Trump has tried to do too much, and has little in the way of results. Podcast host Greg Sargent asked, "Mike, if you had to pick two pillars of Trumpism, they would be: one, empty the country of immigrants, and two, usher in a manufacturing renaissance with protectionism.
"I think it’s notable that Trump is either deeply unpopular or failing utterly at the two things most associated with Trumpist nationalism. Where do you think we are right now?"
Tomasky replied, "Notable is one way to put it. It’s striking and amazing and something I’m not sure I would have predicted. But he overplayed his hand on both things badly, horribly—as a result, I think, of the bubble that he and his people live in. He talks to aides who are complete sycophants.
"Nobody ever gives him any bad news. They shield him from the bad polls. He hangs out at Mar-a-Lago, eats his well-done steaks with people who tell him how brilliant he is. And he just never hears anything bad. He won’t let it into his environment.
"But it’s almost all bad. As you know, he has good marks on one thing: cracking down on border crossings, and that he has done—those are way down, and so the public approves of that. But everything else is south, and those are the two pillars: that he was gonna bring back manufacturing and that he was gonna round up undocumented people and put them somewhere."
Though Trump has made two failed plays on immigration and manufacturing, the effects of the admin's failure go beyond these two issues.
"But it goes way beyond that," Tomasky explained. "It goes beyond that to prices; it goes beyond that to other aspects of the economy—the deficit, the debt, the Epstein files, which aren’t going to go away. There’s almost no good news.
"The one piece of good news was that the Dow hit 50,000, and they’re bragging about that like that’s some amazing thing. Well, the day he took office, the Dow was 44,000 and something. And for the Dow to grow 6,000 points in a year, in 13 months, that’s not really an unusual thing."