Trump’s Republican Party may attract white working-class votes with its cultural messaging, but the excited promise of 2016 of a “working-class party” can be disregarded. The working class will be stripped of its Medicaid coverage. It will again be exposed to the worst practices of the pre-2010 healthcare status quo. The coming tax cut that will absorb the resources shifted away from healthcare subsidies looks likely to be tilted even more radically to the wealthiest in society than those of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, the House’s next priority after Obamacare repeal and the tax cut will not be the roads and bridges that Trump promised his voters, but amendments to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill to allow big banks to engage in riskier transactions.

The Trump administration and the Trump White House will never be “normal.” The personality and character of the president precludes that. But its domestic economic policy looks increasingly conventional. Any hope or promise that Donald Trump might augur some departure from the dead-end plutocracy of the post-2010 Republican Party has been quashed. Candidate Trump declared at the Republican convention in Cleveland: “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” Now he’s cheerleading a bill that restores the ability of insurance companies to price people with pre-existing conditions out of the marketplace.

Paul Ryan and the House Republicans had to swallow a lot of toads to reach this day. They will surely have to swallow more toads in the days ahead. They may never actually achieve their hopes for a giant tax cut financed by healthcare cuts. But if they fail, they will fail because of the self-preservation of the Senate, not because of the principles of the president. Trump may sometimes talk like FDR. But his words do not connect with his actions or with each other. He’s original only in his disdain for ethics and democratic norms. When it comes time to decide who gets what—he’s as reactionary as any mink-coated Republican who ever hissed Roosevelt at the Trans-Lux.

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