Analysis: Trump borrowing from past presidents he has long lambasted

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump shared the head table at an exclusive Washington dinner Saturday night with George W. Bush. It was fitting, considering the 47th president has increasingly been borrowing from the playbooks of predecessors he’s long criticized.

While Trump’s second-term penchant for stretching or obliterating laws and traditions other administrations respected has been unprecedented, he’s at times taken action similar to past chief executives.

Take his fellow head table guest at Saturday night’s swanky, invitation-only dinner hosted by the Alfalfa Club.

Trump’s military operation to arrest and remove former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has drawn comparisons with the 43rd president’s war in Iraq — especially since Trump has made no bones that his top objective was to gain access to the oil-rich South American country’s reserves.

“We’re getting along very well with the leadership of Venezuela, and they’re doing a really good job. We’re going to be selling a lot of oil,” he told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One. “And we’ll take some and they’ll take a lot. And they’re gonna do very well. They’re gonna make more money than they’ve ever made. And it’s gonna be beneficial to us.”

A few minutes later, he said China was “welcome to come in and would make a great deal on oil.” India, he added, was “going to be buying Venezuelan oil, as opposed to buying it from Iran. So we’ve already made that deal, the concept of the deal.”

Trump has also been much more of an interventionist like Bush than many in his “Make America Great Again” base would have preferred. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — a staunch Trump supporter turned vocal critic — said last week that she believes Trump’s “America First” talk “was a big lie for the people.”

“What MAGA is really serving in this administration, who they’re serving, is their big donors,” the former Georgia lawmaker told radio host Kim Iversen. “It’s the foreign countries. They are running the show here. It’s the major big corporations and what is best for the world. That’s really what MAGA is.”

The surprising global focus of Trump 2.0 puts the president in the same class as predecessors he’s long pilloried: Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

One also could toss in the younger Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney. Trump had nothing positive to say about the hawkish Cheney after he died late last year and wasn’t invited to his funeral service at Washington National Cathedral.

But as the right-leaning Center for the National Interest noted in a Jan. 29 report, getting involved in other countries’ affairs has sometimes presented more risks and strategic losses than rewards for Washington.

“It is not enough for the United States to flex its muscles in a public demonstration of ‘peace through strength,’ cut some deals on oil and rare earth minerals, hold a signing ceremony for a peace agreement at the White House, and remind everyone that we can return at any time we please and do it all over again,” according to the think tank, founded in 1994 by former President Richard Nixon. “The White House will struggle to contain the problems that will inevitably arise from the conflicts it thought it had helped to contain. That is already plainly evident in Ukraine, where no amount of negotiation seems adequate for brokering a settlement.

“It could prove true in Venezuela as well, where oil companies will demand security, regulatory and financial assurances before they agree to major long-term investments. Above all, however, it is in the Middle East that the ghosts of neoconservatives past will come to haunt the White House,” the report added.

One historian said Trump’s parallels with past presidents don’t end with the more recent interventionists.

“There’s also some comparisons to be made, in terms of hubris, with Lyndon B. Johnson,” Edward Lengel, a former chief historian for the White House Historical Association, said in an email. “LBJ pushed aggressively on his Great Society projects and in foreign policy, including Vietnam.”

But “rising domestic social unrest and hatred directed against him, and the Vietnam quagmire, dragged him down,” Lengel added, questioning whether Venezuela could become a similar problem for Trump.

The Center for the National Interest warned that Trump’s global approach was “not a strategic vision for building long-term relationships and maintaining our influence in the world.”

“And it might start to wear a little thin with the American public over the next three years, as they see our foreign policy successes appear increasingly fragile and uncertain,” the report added.

‘Never had anything like that’

For months, Trump has appeared to dismiss voters’ economic worries, evoking memories of his immediate predecessor. Biden flew from event to event touting his economic agenda, “Bidenomics,” which never caught on with voters and eventually cost Democrats the White House.

“Every one of our numbers … we’ve never had anything like it. We have over $18 trillion coming into our country. We’re building thousands of plants and all sorts of businesses all over the United States. It’s never been anything like it,” he said Friday in the Oval Office. “We have a record we just set, as you know, the S&P 500 just set a new record, 7,000. Nobody thought that was possible (in) this quick (of) a time.”

(That achievement proved fleeting, with the stock index since falling below 7,000 as traders exited tech stocks, CNBC reported.)

“They thought maybe at the end of four years or five years or six years, but we did it in the first year,” Trump boasted Friday. “So the economy has never been like this.”

However, majorities of voters don’t think “this” is a particularly positive economic moment.

As of Tuesday afternoon, a RealClearPolitics average of recent polls showed Trump underwater with voters over his handling of the economy, with an average of 55.2 percent disapproving and 41% approving. In four of the included surveys, approval for Trump’s economic stewardship had dipped into the high-30s.

That could be why the White House leaked, and then canceled, plans for Trump to participate in a demonstration of the government-run TrumpRx website for discounted medicine. MS NOW reported last week that the president would participate in such an event on Jan. 30 in the White House complex’s South Court Auditorium.

But when Trump’s public schedule for that day was released, the demonstration had been scrubbed. That evoked memories of Obama’s second term, when he took tons of political heat after the website for the Affordable Care Act stumbled out of the starting gate.

Three Democratic senators last week wrote to the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general to warn that they did not believe the IG’s office “has adequately addressed whether TrumpRx and affiliated (direct-to-consumer) platforms will be compliant with federal law, including the Anti-Kickback Statute.”

“We believe the characteristics of the TrumpRx website require further HHS OIG review prior to launch of this government program,” Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Peter Welch of Vermont wrote in a Thursday letter. “Legitimate concerns about inappropriate prescribing, conflicts of interest, and inadequate care have been raised about the exact types of DTC platforms to which TrumpRx would route patients.”

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