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NEWS ANALYSIS
Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of Two-Party Rule
By PETER BAKER SEPT. 9, 2017
WASHINGTON 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 Perots 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. Im 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.
In recent weeks, he has quarreled more with fellow Republicans than with the opposition, blasting congressional leaders on Twitter, ousting former party officials in his White House, embracing primary challenges to incumbent lawmakers who defied him and blaming Republican figures for not advancing his policy agenda. On Friday, he addressed discontent about his approach with a Twitter post that started, Republicans, sorry, as if he were not one of them, and said party leaders had a death wish.
While some conservatives complained about the apostasy of cutting deals with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, others applauded his assault on establishment Republican leaders like Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. By the weeks end, pundits speculated about whether Mr. Trump might seek re-election in 2020 as an independent.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/us/politics/trump-republicans-third-parties.html
greeny2323
(590 posts)This silly analysis piece is rightly getting roundly criticized:
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Screen cap this one. We'll be mocking it ten years from now. and ten days from now. and ten hours from now.
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I see that everyone's crapping on the NYT piece. Which they should. But the issue in my mind at least isn't that in some sense it praises...
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2/ Trump or could be interpreted as doing so but that it's just so analytically silly. It's just idiotic analysis. The fact that it ...
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3/ tends to white wash all the terrible things he's done and is doing is bad too. But it simply misjudges all the relevant facts.
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Precisely. Analysis piece about man who beats his wife. "Revival of Martial Arts in Small Town"
ismnotwasm
(41,965 posts)I mean, Trump is their baby.