With the dumping of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, President Donald Trump has done what the lifelong Democrat set out to do with his run for the presidency — Trump has divorced himself from the Republican Party.
The “Republican President” has fired the semi-official Republican Party from the White House.
Priebus came to the White House after long service as Republican National Chairman. He set fundraising records and handed over to the Trump campaign millions of dollars, an impressive data/digital organization and experienced people, few of whom Trump had in his organization. He brought a number of GOP professionals with him.
{mosads}The Republican Party — apart from the Congressional GOP — was well represented in the new Trump Administration.
While Trump diehards detest the official Republican Party as do a band of conservatives in the House of Representatives, they all owe their very existence to the official GOP. Neither Trump nor his daughter or son-in-law know enough people to fill thousands of appointive federal government jobs.
In other words, the GOP “Establishment” is what makes an administration work — thousands of local, state and federal office holders who govern everyday are the team the GOP has working 24/7.
The GOP “Establishment” has been around since Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the presidency in 1860 and his victory over two Democrats that did the country a favor by splitting Democrat pro-slavery votes.
As much as Trump and his base supporters hate the “Establishment” and its backbone, what Trump followers call “RINOS,” he cannot succeed as president without it. Throwing them out of the White House sets up Trump’s administration for failure.
Need proof? Look at the healthcare disaster that has bogged down the entire government.
Trump base supporters pride themselves in hurling their pejorative “RINO” — Republican in Name Only — at any Establishment people whom they define as anyone who wasn’t tooting Trump’s horn and wears a baseball cap imprinted with “Make America Great Again.”
If you weren’t for Trump running in and winning the Republican Primary from the very first day of the campaign, you were the enemy RINO.
The real RINOs aren’t the Reince Priebus’ of the world, they are Donald Trump and his base supporters. Let us recall that Trump’s own children couldn’t vote in the New York primary for their father. They were not registered Republicans. Daughter Ivanka and her husband, both in the White House, couldn’t vote for Trump in the Republican Primary.
The same is true of many Trump voters in the states that elected him — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Blue collar Democrats elected him by fewer than 79,000 votes.
Trump lost my congressional district by thousands of votes and almost dragged my Republican congressman Darrell Issa down with him.
What we see is the “Republican” Jimmy Carter in the White House, at least through the first 6 months. That is not the fault of Priebus who as chief-of-staff did not have the power to run things as Chiefs usually do.
So he is gone.
Here enters Lt. Gen.l John Kelly who has been Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Kelly has spent the past six months implementing Trump’s views on crime and immigration. Trump truly believes in an immigrant crime wave and stays awake at night sweating about immigrant “criminals,” “rapists,” and not “the best” of Mexicans Trump states the Mexican government is ordering to come to the U.S.
FBI statistical data show crime has fallen over the past 20 years especially in areas heavy with immigrants from south of the Rio Grande.
Newly sworn-in Chief of Staff John Kelly is far better grounded in reality than President Trump; he is, perhaps, as described by the National Review’s Jim Geraghty — Kelly is the right man to save the sinking Trump Administration because he is the “hard-nosed military disciplinarian who’s brought in to coach a wacky band of White House misfits.”
Can Kelly save the Trump Administration from itself and the White House’s “wacky band of misfits” up to and including the President?
We’ll see.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is the author of “The Armenian Lobby & American Foreign Policy”and “The Mexican Border: Immigration, War and a Trillion Dollars in Trade.” His work has appeared in the New American News Service of the New York Times Syndicate.
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