No one should count on President Trump. He is inconsistent and unpredictable. The reason: he lacks full knowledge and because of that simply doesn’t know what he’s doing.
‘Trump betrays everyone’: The president has a long record as an unpredictable ally, -- The Washington Post.
Trump only cares about Trump and "making more money, getting more power, getting more attention, and getting even." It supersedes all other considerations.
“When Donald J. Trump set his sights on the presidency in the 2000 election, he pursued the nomination of the Reform Party, a home for disenchanted independents. “The Republican Party has just moved too far to the extreme right,” he explained. “The Democrats are too far to the left.”
“In the end, he dropped the campaign and the Reform Party, the leftover construct from Ross Perot’s two independent presidential candidacies during the 1990s. It was one of at least five times that Mr. Trump would switch party affiliations over the years. “I’m the Lone Ranger,” he once said in another context.
“Now in the White House, President Trump demonstrated this past week that he still imagines himself a solitary cowboy as he abandoned Republican congressional leaders to forge a short-term fiscal deal with Democrats. Although elected as a Republican last year, Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.”
He’s independent to the extent of what serves his self-interest best.
The notion that Trump is ending 150 years of two-party rule is absurd. America has 6 parties right now:
1. Establishment Republicans (large corporations, Wall Street, major funders, who most of all want their taxes cut).
2. Anti-establishment Republicans (Tea Partiers, Freedom Caucus, and libertarians, who most of all want a smaller government with shrinking deficits and debts).
3. Social conservative Republicans (evangelicals, rural Southern whites, and white supremacists, who mostly want America to return to “white Christian” values).
4. Establishment Democrats (upper middle-class professionals, whose biggest issues are the environment and government competence).
5. Anti-establishment Democrats (younger, grass-roots movement types, and progressives who still call themselves Democrats, whose biggest issues are widening inequality, racism, and the undermining of democracy by big money).
6. Donald J. Trump (whose biggest issues are making more money, getting more power, getting more attention, and getting even).
By Peter Baker
