Trump Agenda Is Beset by Opposition on Many Fronts
Scope of opposition so early in his term is remarkable for a new president
President Donald Trump is confronting more opposition than any he faced in his campaign, or anything seen in the first weeks of a modern presidency, with protests, legal challenges, congressional opposition and parts of the federal bureaucracy mobilizing to resist.
After issuing a blizzard of executive orders that fueled expectations he would be a dominant force in Washington, Mr. Trump risks seeming more like Gulliver, the giant tied down by an army of resilient, if smaller, adversaries.
The anti-Trump resistance has helped block his immigration policy, slow his health-care agenda and cabinet nominees, force out a top adviser and a cabinet choice, and make many of his public appearances occasions for raucous protests.
The scope of opposition to Mr. Trump is remarkable for a new president. Others have faced protests and legal disputes, but none of the magnitude and persistence that Mr. Trump has encountered so early in his presidency.
Even George W. Bush, who took office after an emotionally contested election decided by the Supreme Court, didn’t face massive street protests the day after his inauguration, immediate legal challenges to his executive actions and such extensive attempts to block his cabinet nominations.
Mr. Trump this weekend is escaping the Washington battlefield for his seaside mansion in Florida. He plans to hold a political rally in Melbourne, Fla., today.
With the rally, as with his frequent public reflections on his electoral victory, Mr. Trump will likely get a taste of the simpler days of the presidential campaign. The rally also will help him remind Washington of the source of his power—his ability to draw thousands of passionate supporters.
During the general-election race, he faced a single adversary, Hillary Clinton. Now he is up against a federal bureaucracy including many who are opposed to his efforts, Democrats in Congress, media he has called in a tweet an “enemy of the American people” and a nationwide network of liberal activists who have been mobilized by his presidency in a way that they weren’t by his campaign.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, whose state sued the Trump administration over the travel ban that has now been blocked by the courts, said in an interview Friday, “I think he’s going to learn: In Yorktown, Va., we beat back the British and got rid of the king. And 236 years later, we’re not having a new king.”
“He’s got to work with the courts. He’s got to work with the Congress. He’s got to work with the governors,” Mr. McAuliffe said.
Mr. Trump has said that protests and legal challenges to his policy represent the clamor of sore losers who don’t want to acknowledge that elections have consequences.
At the Thursday news conference, called because of his frustration with negative media coverage, Mr. Trump said he had made “incredible progress” in the face of what he called an “entrenched power structure.”
“I am here to change the broken system so it serves [Americans’] families and their communities well,” he said.
Asked to comment on the numerous forms of opposition to Mr. Trump, a White House official said: “Democrat officials are being whipped into a frenzy by their far left base to oppose this President in unprecedented ways.”
The disparate Anti-Trump opposition threatens to tie the president down from multiple directions.
The most potentially corrosive resistance may come from within the federal bureaucracy itself. On the domestic front, current and past officials of the Environmental Protection Agency had been publicly urging defeat of Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the agency. The Senate voted to confirm Mr. Pruitt on Friday.
In national security, Mr. Trump has accused federal officials of leaking classified information about his talks with foreign leaders. Even members of Mr. Trump’s own party on Capitol Hill are pushing to investigate contacts between Moscow and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired this past week for not fully disclosing those conversations to Vice President Mike Pence.
With many key positions still unfilled and some bureaucrats opposed to his agenda, some Trump allies worry his agenda could be slowed or undercut from within the executive branch.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a strong Trump backer, warned that the “bureaucracy is more hostile than any in modern times.” He said the storm surrounding Mr. Flynn is “a warning of how hostile their bureaucratic and media opponents will be.”
“The president isn’t an emperor,” said Derek Chollet, who worked in the Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council in the Obama administration. “The president doesn’t sign things and they get implemented. The system has to enforce that. And if you don’t have processes and enforcement mechanisms in place, it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.”
Craig Fuller, who worked in Republican Ronald Reagan’s White House in the 1980s, said in an interview, “A number of people come to fight Washington, but in those battles Washington usually wins.”
Many of the president’s supporters and allies remain optimistic that he will regain his footing and rack up important victories in the future, like confirmation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and passage of tax reform. But to do so, even Mr. Trump’s allies say his White House could use some tighter management by chief of staff Reince Priebus, including a crackdown on leaks.
“Priebus needs to set a trap and catch the leakers,” said Scott Reed, senior political adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He said the White Houseneeds to “get discipline back into the operation,” adding, “Trump and the Republican Congress have a unique, one-every-40-year opportunity to make real change.”
Mr. Trump, at his Thursday press conference, praised Mr. Priebus’s performance at the White House: “You take a look, he’s done a great job.”
The main locus of the institutional Trump opposition is the Senate. Democrats’ power there is limited, but they have used what clout they have to slow confirmation and intensify scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees, including Labor Secretary designee Andy Puzder, who eventually withdrew his name from consideration in the face of dwindling Senate support.
House and Senate Democratic leaders have organized rallies around the country to demonstrate support for the Affordable Care Act, the health-care law Mr. Trump has vowed to repeal and replace. Even before he was inaugurated, thousands turned out for pro-ACA rallies across the country in early January. Similar rallies are planned for the beginning and end of next week’s congressional recess, by House members this weekend and by senators on Feb. 25.
Broader opposition to Mr. Trump will mobilize during next week’s recess from decentralized, grass roots sources. An array of progressive groups—including a new group called Indivisible and established liberal groups Moveon.org and the Working Families Party—are continuing to urge people to attend Republican lawmakers’ town hall meetings. Recent efforts to do so have forced Republicans to confront angry voters opposed to the health-care repeal.
“The opposition to Trump is organic, but not disorganized,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of Moveon.org.
Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, said Friday it would partner with Indivisible in a digital ad campaign to promote GOP town halls for activists to attend.
Social media has made it much easier to mobilize protesters now than it was against presidents in decades past, and it complicates Mr. Trump’s efforts to travel for public appearances. In Ohio this week, Democrats used Facebook to plan a protest for an expected Trump visit. The White House said the trip was never locked in and ultimately called it off. Democrats, though, believe the prospect of large protests is making Mr. Trump less eager to travel.
Also organized in part via Facebook were big airport rallies protesting Mr. Trump’s executive order barring entry into the U.S. by refugees and people from seven majority Muslim countries, which he described as a measure to curb the risk of terrorists entering the country.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit that produced the first judicial ruling against the Trump policy. Another source of legal opposition to Mr. Trump are the nation’s Democratic state attorneys general, who have been coordinating legal strategies including other challenges to the travel ban that have stymied implementation of the policy while the matter is litigated.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-agenda-is-beset-by-opposition-on-many-fronts-1487447408
My comments: CHRISTIAN you are witnessing the godless, Socialist, Secular Humanist CABAL, attacking President Trump IN FORCE. And this will continue for the next Four Years. It is the same CABAL that would have helped Hillary establish a godless TYRANNY.