> there is no way they would support him simply for competency and rationality reasons It's disappointing, to say the least, that this turns out to be untrue f

> there is no way they would support him simply for competency and rationality reasons It's disappointing, to say the least, that this turns out to be untrue for the Republicans. The staid, rational, methodical, conservative Republicans are gone. The nihilists and paperclip maximizers have moved in. >> the "Global Gag Order" > Certainly he has a strong reaction to people criticizing or disagreeing with him; he wouldn't tolerate that from within the executive branch. Definitely, and it's his biggest exposed lever. But while "global gag order" colloquially describes what he's doing right now (silencing workers, ordering facts, data, inconvenient policy "disappeared"), "Global Gag Order" is actually a specific thing: a policy that projects the GOP's abortion stance onto the rest of the world's NGOs by conditioning the receipt of $9.5 Billion in aid on policy alignment. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/trump_s_global_gag_rule_is_even_worse_than_it_seemed.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... Trump was a longtime pro-choice New York Democrat with no religious or moral framework. There's no way he cares about this; nor does he care enough to not sign it, as it doesn't affect him. He's indifferent, a blank page on which his outer circle of attendants, each the honed tip of the sharpest ideological spears, can write policy that Trump will sign with a "whatever" and a dour glare. Even more dangerous, once signed, he integrates these policies as his own -- because he now has skin in the game. If his name is on a policy, he'll relentlessly hammer it home. Writ large, this means the Trumpist policy stance will be a bag of the loudest and most radical initiatives -- for him, a set of weak opinions strongly held. Virulently held, as we see from his redoubling on the voter fraud conspiracy theory and crowd size hobbyhorse.