Skip to content
For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time. Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.
No matter what you think about this policy, it’s going to make life harder for Trump. First, it’s Trump’s biggest political blow since taking office. There are already a spate of legal challenges that will grab headlines for weeks. It’s splitting his party — only a handful of Republicans have spoken out against him but privately, a large number of GOP lawmakers are grumbling. If congressional Republicans were for this policy, they could pass legislation to codify it into law. They haven’t and probably won’t. They had no heads up from their president this was coming, and now they’re under pressure to defend this.
42% to 51%
According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, President Trump’s approval rate is now 42% to 51%, which means it only took eight days for the majority of Americans to disapprove of Trump’s performance as president.
We can’t stress this enough: Watch closely the specific, substantive moves of the Trump White House. Try to block out the white noise of outlandish statements and unforced errors, and the hyperventilating they provoke. … Otherwise, you miss the big — and in some cases, radical — changes coming our way. In fact, White House officials tell us they welcome what seem like needless distractions, because it allows them to jam through transformative, disruptive ideas and orders without focused public scrutiny of any particular item.
