Which Campaign Promises Will Trump Keep?

Many Trump voters have 2-digit IQs and lack the ability to think abstractly. That's the way it goes. But plenty of Trump voters were as intelligent, more or less, as anyone else. As they cast their ballots for him (and, in some cases, against Hillary) they knew Trump is a predator, pillager and plunderer. They are so consumed with hatred for the establishment that when they voted for him, they didn't imagine they and their families might be the victims of his and his cronies' pillaging and plundering. Some may have been chanting "lock her up" as a fun game-- but a helluva lot weren't.

Many were disappointed when it was widely reported that Trump said he didn't want to hurt the Clintons. It was like he broke a campaign pledge. Some of his voters wanted him to because they just hate women and think she's a bitch (like it says on their t-shirts) and others see the Clintons as an emblem of a status quo that has done them wrong and left them behind as roadkill and spat in their face, calling them deplorables. (They don't see themselves as deplorables even if they are.)

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that he had no intention of pressing for an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server or the financial operations of her family’s foundation, dropping the “lock her up” pledge that became a rallying cry for his campaign for the White House.

Mr. Trump, who branded his rival “Crooked Hillary” and said she would go to jail if he were president, said in an interview with reporters and editors at the New York Times that he was no longer interested in pursuing Mrs. Clinton, in part because he wanted to heal the wounds of a divisive campaign.

“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Mr. Trump said during the interview. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious.”

...The decision angered some of his most fervent supporters, who immediately criticized his seeming change of heart.

“Broken Promise,” blared the headline on Breitbart News, a conservative news site that has strongly backed Mr. Trump.

Politicians break campaign promises. We're used to it. But do they renege on the whole premise of a campaign? And is that what Trump is doing now that he unexpectedly wound up as President-elect? When Michael Flynn, the crackpot general now Trump's national security advisor, met with Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga and other Japanese officials in Tokyo a couple of weeks before the election, he tried to reassure them by claiming "Trump's controversial campaign-trail remarks were merely part of the rhetoric needed to secure an election win."



Trump painted himself-- no doubt "merely part of the rhetoric needed to secure an election win"-- as a savior of the white working class, but now what does he do as the GOP comes up with their litany of anti-worker agenda items? Chuck Schumer says he wants to work with Trump on some legislation they can both get behind-- primarily cutting corporate taxes-- but Paul Ryan has far more radical plans for what he wants out of a government with a Republican House, Republican Senate and Republican White House. He's not afraid of the consequences of overreach, even if some of his members are. He sees this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to reach the golden grail-- dismantling Social Security and Medicare and turning back the regulations on business that protect consumers. Will Trump be able to stand up to him (if he even wants to)? The rogues' gallery administration he's putting together suggests that he will neither want to nor have the capacity to.