A conservative columnist explained in a Wednesday op-ed that Donald Trump is a typical Republican president -- in spite of tropes about him from the 2016 election.
Washington Post columnist JJ McCullough wrote in an editorial for the conservative National Review magazine that Trump is "not a one-man show, and he is mostly adhering to tried-and-true GOP priorities."
McCullough noted that in spite of Trump being an anti-establishment, black sheep candidate when he won in an upset against Hillary Clinton, his first cabinet was comprised of both a Republican National Committee chairman as his chief of staff and a four-term GOP senator as his attorney general.
"During his rise as GOP leader, Trump amassed a similar assortment of mainstream Republicans in his 'kitchen cabinet' of hangers-on, including Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee — whose daughter would become Trump’s second press secretary (following Sean Spicer, former RNC spokesman)," the writer noted.
While the argument that those who joined the Trump administration in official and unofficial capacities were "not the best the 2016-era Republican party had to offer" could be made, McCullough noted that there's no evidence that shows "Trump came to the White House unconnected from his party’s establishment."
"The sheer size of Trump’s extended cast similarly undermines the notion that his administration can be honestly called a 'one-man operation,'" he wrote, adding that Bob Woodward's seminal work about the Trump White House, "Fear" shows how "courtly" and vast the scene of Trump hangers-on is.
"Judged by his actual deeds and statements," McCullough concluded, "what we find is a Republican president who, for good or ill, mostly adheres to stereotypical Republican preoccupations — tax cuts, robust defense spending, Federalist Society judges, LGBT skepticism, strong support for Israel, stable relations with Saudi Arabia, resource extraction, raising the national debt, and so on."
Read the entire column via the National Review.
