On trade, particularly with China, two of Arkansas' potentially more reasonable Republican enablers of President Trump reached in recent days to retrieve remnants of their souls.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, proud shepherd of a half-dozen Chinese investment deals in the state, said over the weekend to Talk Business and Politics that it would be a mistake for Trump to follow through on his anti-China bellicosity and attempt to end summarily all American financial dealings in China.
"Our economies are intertwined and have been for decades," Hutchinson said. "It's one thing to try to equalize our trade. It's another thing to withdraw from trade with China. I think that would be a mistake."
Headline: Asa finally calls an error on his ever-blundering president.
U.S. Rep. French Hill, a conventional conservative banker who understands the transactional realities of international economics but has tried hard to speak in consistently supportive tones of his reckless and Arkansas-popular president, told the business publication, also during the weekend, that he shares the president's disdain for Chinese practices. But he went on to acknowledge that trade negotiations need to be done with multinational leverage--with partners--rather than by lone American presidential fiat.
While avoiding any comment on Trump's autocratic tweet seemingly presuming to order American businesses to get out of China, Hill said he favors congressional authority to restrain some of the executive tariff authority Trump has been exercising under a national security law from 1962.
"I continue to oppose a unilateral approach by the U.S.," Hill said. "I believe that the European Union and Japan should actively be engaged in publicly pressing the Chinese regime for timely, constructive change."
Headline: Hill dares to question even narrowly his blundering president's expressed despotism.
Hutchinson and Hill merely exhibit adulthood and attention to official responsibility--Asa as governor and Hill as a member of relevant financial committees in the House of Representatives. What's remarkable is that it's remarkable ... that two Republican officeholders in our Trump-decayed state would speak with views countering those of the blustery tweet monster.
Though Hutchinson and Hill are the likeliest prospects among state Republican officeholders to dare to speak as grownups in conventional conservative terms that might conflict with the Trumpian madness of the moment, each man has endeavored for nearly three years to finesse disapproval.
Consider health care.
Hill stood in the Rose Garden and publicly celebrated with Trump the passage by the House of a bill undoing coverage for pre-existing conditions, a bill that Trump himself--living typically in a different universe weeks later--eventually called "too mean."
Trump thus sold out Hill and the House acolytes. And they just took it. And Hill got re-elected comfortably over a competent Democratic challenger who tried to make health insurance the issue.
Then Hutchinson, after taking full ownership of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, professed his support for Trump administration attempts to get the Affordable Care Act fully repealed in court. Hutchinson explained that away in the only way he possibly might, with Clintonian creativity and elasticity.
He gathered up the mental dexterity and flexibility to say that a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act would allow Republicans to replace it with a state option for Medicaid expansion that would permit him to impose the work requirement he's thus far been denied in federal court--because it's not permitted by present law. As if Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats would ever stand for that.
Apparently, business health conditions are more compelling than personal health conditions for these men. That's because they choose only in regard to trade to venture out of the Trump vortex to say ever so cautiously that these presidential pronouncements on trade and on China may be a tiny bit impractical, a matter of heroic intention, but, alas, specific complication.
In the end, Hutchinson and Hill may be spared alienation from their clown-in-chief because, not atypically, Trump is being advised that he needs to scale back the latest nonsense.
In France at the G-7 meeting, Trump said--as if he hadn't said the opposite hours before: "We're getting along well with China right now."
As to whether he had any second thoughts about his tweet storm, Trump said, "I have second thoughts about everything."
Lest you think the president was becoming more introspective and thoughtful, be aware that the White House subsequently clarified that he was saying that his second thoughts were that he ought to be have been even tougher on the Chinese.
Maybe this is a standing joint statement Hutchinson and Hill might offer: We will not disagree with our wonderful president at this time because we expect him to express the opposite position within hours, at which time we will speak in the laudatory agreement our political situations require. And that agreement will apply when he changes his position back to where it was before.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/29/2019