The biggest surprise Donald Trump has provided as president-elect is just how conservative a cabinet he is putting together. \u201cThis is a more conservative cabinet than Reagan assembled in 1980,\u201d says Ed Feulner, a key Trump transition adviser. As president of the Heritage Foundation at the time, Feulner provided guidance for Reagan\u2019s choices. The conservative cast of the nominees thus far is somewhat unexpected, given Trump\u2019s well-known reputation as a non-ideological thinker who has often backed big-government solutions. Plus, Trump was a registered Democrat until 2009. Indeed, Trump\u2019s entire family is largely non-ideological. It was only last August, in a meeting with New Jersey governor Chris Christie, that Donald Trump Jr. ticked off a list of his father\u2019s new positions and said, \u201cWell, I guess that means we\u2019re conservatives!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If they get through the Senate, it’ll be that rare example (as King and Ed pointed out over the weekend) of the cabinet being to the right of Congress.<\/p>\n
And if they don’t? \u00a0It’ll be an epic chanting point for the 2018 mid-terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trump is no conservative. \u00a0He’s a big-government former Democrat who, previewed solely on his own record, merits and statements, looks as if he could be a bigger spender than George W Bush, if not Obama himself. But his cabinet, so far, is well to the right of the Congress, which is moving to the right, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-republicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61344,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61343\/revisions\/61344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}