WASHINGTON – The prosperous Republicans who in past years flocked to fundraisers on Buffalo’s Middlesex Road and Salvatore’s Italian Gardens in Lancaster are looking at a drastically changed Republican Party today. President Trump has totally flipped it in the last 11 months.

The GOP’s traditional concern for a balanced budget and keeping the national debt under control is like ashes in the mouth. In little more than a week the GOP Congress decided to add at least $1.5 trillion to the current $20 trillion national debt. There’s no recession. We are not paying for a war. We are not bailing out banks.

There’s no financial crisis, except at the average American kitchen table, when the moment comes to pay back college loans, the mortgage, extraordinary health costs, winter fuel bills. Nearly of all of it goes to pay American and international owners of big corporations.

Some will get a small tax cut, but this will be quickly sucked up by states like New York whose revenues are under attack by this new snatch and grab federal Republican tax law.

“A big beautiful Christmas present,” Trump says of this new law. For him? We can’t find out. It was hurled together, and amended literally in the dark of night.