HuffPo - Donald Trump Had Democrats In A Trap. He Let Them Out.
I actually think that the premise of this story is wrong. If Trump had actually tacked toward the middle, Ted Cruz and the like would have happily attacked him from the right, and although Democrats might have been willing to play ball with him on stuff like infrastructure, they would not have lifted a finger to save him from opportunistic Republicans. So, instead, Trump stays in his comfort zone, and caters to the racist, right wing, which then forced Republicans in Congress to circle the wagons around him, because he is playing to the Republican base the way he did during the campaign.
Of course, by going the orthodox Republican route on the environment, abortion, financial regulations, etc., he makes it easy for even Joe Manchin in a pro-Trump state to oppose him.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-democrats_us_589e393be4b0ab2d2b15452c
Trump has made the politics for the opposition party easy. “The pundits were imagining a scenario where the president was going to put us in a bind by offering progressive policies. Unfortunately for the country, we have not been presented with that dilemma,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told The Huffington Post. “And more than that, there’s an understanding that it’s not just about losing on public policy now. It’s about institutions being attacked, it’s about the foundation of American-style democracy being attacked, and so it’s been clarifying for us. It’s not the main thing, but one impact of this kind of ferocious, systematic, belligerent attack on the things we care about is that it’s unified us almost totally ― and that makes for good politics.”
To get a picture of how unified Democrats are against Trump, one needed only to scan the crowd of the recent rally on the steps of the Supreme Court. There among the demonstrators was Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator up for re-election in 2018 in West Virginia, a state Trump won by a whopping 42 points.
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But he followed up his verbal assault on the drugmakers by hosting pharmaceutical CEOs at the White House and backtracking on his suggestion that the government negotiate for better drug prices. He’s pushed his travel ban against several majority-Muslim countries, but hasn’t found time to deal with the carried-interest loophole exploited by private equity giants and hedge funds. And he’s vowed to “do a number” on the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, by rolling back Wall Street reforms in a manner expected to dole out billions to financiers.
Consumer protections, meanwhile, are under assault. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which guards customers from companies looking to rip them off, is being gutted. The administration is working to snuff out the enforcement power of the Federal Communications Commission, which could result in a very un-populist increase in your cable bill, among a slew of other consequences. An industry-friendly operative is being placed atop the Securities and Exchange Commission. A rule requiring financial advisers to pledge not to work against the interests of their clients is on the chopping block, which would open up 401(k)s to be fracked like so much natural gas.