Trump Shocks, And Needs, The Establishment

The president-elect’s success will depend on his ability to sell GOP conservatives in Congress on his spending plans.

- Peter Coy With Erik Wasson

The one safe prediction about Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president is that there will be brawls. Between Democrats and Republicans, of course, but also between conservative and moderate Republicans; between iconoclasts newly appointed to oversee federal agencies and the career civil servants who work under them; and among members of the cabinet, who disagree over issues ranging from budget deficits to Iran.

Emceeing the donnybrook: the president, grinning from ear to ear. Says Marc Sandalow, associate academic director of the University of California Washington Program: “If part of Trump’s agenda was to shock Washington and make the political establishment’s hair stand on end, he’s already accomplished his goal.”

For Trump, the hard part will come when he has to stop terrorizing the Washington establishment and start working with it. He won’t be able to navigate between Democrats on one side and hard-line Republicans on the other without support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. He needs congressional insiders to confirm his cabinet of outsiders, repeal and replace Obamacare, overturn the Dodd-Frank financial regulation act, fill the open seat on the Supreme Court, roll back Obama-era regulations, and cut trade deals.

Producing a budget could be Trump’s toughest challenge, because it will expose him to attacks from both the Left and, perhaps more important, the Right. He campaigned on a platform that, if enacted, would add $7 trillion to the national debt over 10 years by one estimate. At campaign rallies, he promised repeatedly not to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. “You’ve been paying in it for a long time, and a lot of these guys want it to be knocked to hell,” he said at one campaign stop last spring. “It’s not going to happen, OK? Remember that. It’s not going to happen.”