Bad Takes: Are there (gasp!) some Trump administration proposals that make sense?

As the new administration experiences “the tinglings of a merited shame,” to quote novelist George Eliot (she/her), perhaps we’d do well to remember the constancy of pendulum swings in US politics. Only President Richard M. Nixon, it was said in 1972, “could go to China.” In other words, only a zealous McCarthyite could strike a trade deal with Mao Zedong without getting blacklisted as a commie-lover. On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps only President Bill Clinton, in 1996, could “end welfare as we know it.” Meaning only a staunch Democrat could scrap the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, one of the hard-won achievements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to help alleviate child poverty.