Mediaboss Marketing

The rhetorical flourish struck a nerve, in part because it spoke to a fundamental truth about his campaign. Trump backers were all-in and there seemed to be nothing, no ugly revelation or gaffe, damaging enough to loosen the grip.

Questions surrounding his baseless March 4 accusation that President Barack Obama "wire tapped" Trump Tower before the election might have dissipated or given way to another controversy in the furor of a campaign season. But Trump is president now, and while his base still loves him, his claims have put congressional allies in a bind.

The wiretap episode represents the latest in a series of controversies created by Trump's rogue tweeting -- by his own words -- and stoked by the White House's attempts to deflect or deny the President had meant what he said. White House press secretary Sean Spicer has provided a range of explanations.

In response to a question from CNN earlier in the day, House Speaker Paul Ryan conceded the same.

"The intelligence committees, in their continuing, widening, ongoing investigations of all things Russia, got to the bottom -- at least so far with respect to our intelligence community -- that no such wiretap existed," Ryan said.

Trump during the campaign and just before his inauguration made a series of bold promises about his plans for the future of health care. In tweets and remarks about Obamacare, he pledged a complete overhaul and comprehensive replacement.

"Obamacare's going to be repealed and replaced," Trump said, calling the law a "disaster."

Pressed to explain what he would replace it with, the candidate was characteristically bold.

"I am going to take care of everybody," he said. "I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now."

In the run-up to his campaign and through the primary debates, Trump also distinguished himself from Republican opponents with a vocal defense of programs like Medicare, which he vowed not to cut.

"I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid," he tweeted on May 7, 2015, a little more than a month before he entered the race.

"There is no three-step plan," Cotton told radio host Hugh Hewitt. "That is just political talk. It's just politicians engaging in spin."

In this fight, Trump looks less the part of a typically compromised politician, hemmed in by campaign promises he is struggling to keep after being elected. And while he has, to date, maintained his support for the legislation drawn up by Ryan, Trump risks paying a real political price if the final product is so obviously different from what he sold the public for more than a year.

This week, courts in Hawaii and Maryland blocked the implementation of the White House's second effort at a travel ban for six majority-Muslim nations, in both cases effectively dismissing administration efforts to clear legal hurdles by citing Trump's past stated desire to close the door on Muslim immigrants.

Justice Department lawyers zeroed in on the question of intent and argued that Trump's past remarks should not be held against him, saying in their Hawaii brief that it was not the role of the courts to go poking underneath "the veiled psyche of government officers."

"The remarkable facts at issue here require no such impermissible injury," he replied on Wednesday, saying "there is nothing 'veiled' about the (Trump campaign's December 2015) press release: 'Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.'"

Still, they felt compelled to register their discontent with Trump's "personal attacks" on US District Court Judge James Robart after his February decision to temporarily stop the ban.

"Such personal attacks treat the court as though it were merely a political forum in which bargaining, compromise, and even intimidation are acceptable principles," the judges wrote. "The courts of law must be more than that, or we are not governed by law at all."

Link:
Donald Trump's words are catching up to his presidency - CNN