US PRESIDENCY
SIMON BARBER: Trump's bipartisan acts may be a flip-flop too far
‘Donald Trump is discovering that next to reforming the tax code … replacing Obamacare should have been child’s play’
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen.... Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts every thing you said today. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." So wrote the thoroughly inconsistent Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay entitled Self-Reliance. Donald Trump appears to have been channelling the 19th century American transcendentalist. As he approaches the symbolic 100-day mark of his presidency, his pirouettes have both dazzled and baffled. CNN’s political staff reported: "Hazarding a guess at the mercurial president’s plans is roughly as fruitful as predicting an earthquake, a person in close touch with the White ...
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