Trump Replaces John Kerry as Flip-Flop Gold Medalist

Guest Post by Gary North

Trump’s voters are watching the Washington Establishment capture Donald Trump.

His reversals are now heralded by the mainstream media. The Washington Post has continued to attack him 24×7, yet it admits he is taking centrist positions. The BBC has also noted it.

He campaigned against ObamaCare. He failed to promote repeal. The accent was on “replace.” Paul Ryan’s compromise was a disaster. The Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives blocked it. Trump declared war on them. But he has no clout in their districts. Most of them pulled better than he did last November.

The Export-Import Bank has subsidized big businesses for decades. Candidate Trump said he was against it. Now he says he supports it.

Then there was China, the currency manipulator. China was forcing down its currency. How, he never said as a candidate. Well, that’s water under the bridge. China, it turns out, is no longer a currency manipulator. No, no, no. The problem now is that the dollar is too strong.

How about the Federal Reserve. As a candidate, he criticized the FED’s low-interest rate policy. It hurt savers. Not now. The FED’s policy is A-OK.

The latest defection is on NATO. NATO was obsolete. Not now. NATO is A-OK now.

What about tax cuts for the middle class? He has yet to introduce a bill.

What about the wall between the USA and Mexico? He has yet to introduce a bill.

What about expelling illegal immigrants? He has yet to introduce a bill. The Administration says there will not be mass deportations. As a candidate, he said he would expel 2 million to 3 million illegal aliens who are criminals. That would mean over 2,000 immigrants a day for four years to expel 3 million. The cost will be about $25,000 per expulsion. The Obama administration deported 333,000 in 2015. This figure has not changed.

Some of the changes, they said, will take time to implement because of the costs and because some of the policies must be announced through the federal register. Officials declined to estimate the costs for the additional personnel, including more immigration judges to speed up hearings, as well as significant new detention housing for unauthorized immigrants awaiting their court proceedings.”This will not happen tomorrow,” the DHS official said.

When will it happen?

What about new tariffs against imports? He has yet to introduce a bill.

What about NAFTA? No major changes are proposed. In fact, reported Vox on April 11,

But a draft proposal from the Trump administration that’s been circulating in Congress recently doesn’t appear to push for a radical transformation of NAFTA, or portend its destruction. In fact, it actually sounds … constructive.The draft proposal sounds strikingly sunny about the importance of free trade with the US’s NAFTA trading partners, Canada and Mexico, acknowledging their “shared interests” and “common values.” It contains plenty of fairly conventional language on market access and reducing trade barriers that accompany typical letters of this kind. And while there are a number of provisions that Canada and Mexico are likely to object to, there’s a noticeable absence of the kinds of protectionist proposals that would have guaranteed the accord went down in flames.

The following is especially important to the New World Order. It is left untouched.

The US calls for the removal of one of three major dispute settlement processes under NAFTA, known as Chapter 19, which allows for the creation of international tribunals to help sort out disagreements over measures designed to penalize trade cheating. But it doesn’t call for the elimination of the most controversial one — the investor-state dispute settlement system that allows investors to sue governments in private trade tribunals and basically gives corporations the status of countries under international law.

I have long argued that Presidential elections are part of a Punch and Judy show. Most of the campaign promises do not come to pass after the election. I have seen nothing so far that calls my theory into question. As Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell said a few years before he went to prison, “watch what we do, not what we say.”