President-Elect Donald Trump Gets to Work Betraying His Backers - By Joy-Ann Reid
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Trump is now part of a global ring of ethno-nationalist leaders of far-right parties in thrall to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. National security experts are shuddering at the demeanor of the people surrounding the next president who are busy mounting what Republican leakers are calling a “Stalinesque purge” of the insufficiently loyal. With the transition team in chaos, and experienced hands reluctant to join such an administration, who knows what kind of bizarre cabinet he’ll wind up assembling.
Meanwhile, to the extent that he is doing something other than trying to figure out what a president does Trump—or rather the people around him who know how to take advantage of an opportunity—are preparing to stack his team with Wall Street and big-business friendly insiders and establishment cronies poised to raid the treasury on behalf of the one percent.
Working-class voters who thought they’d elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who live in golden penthouses are rarely populists, and even more rarely heroic. Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania. No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who’ve left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots.) Even if he manages to slap massive tariffs on Chinese-made goods, the only outcome will be much higher prices at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, anyone still wondering why Paul Ryan quietly slipped on his MAGA cap during the election will soon understand. On the off chance Trump pulled off an improbable win, Ryan knew he would be on track to enact his life’s dream: turning Medicare into a voucher program and forcing future of the most popular government program since Social Security into private insurance HMOs. According to Josh Marshall, who cites Ryan’s own website, the “phasing out” of Medicare begins in March.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/17/president-elect-donald-trump-gets-to-work-betraying-his-backers.html
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