Opinionated summary:
- Despite Republican assurances, Trump called the CHIPS Act “horrible” and pushed for its scrapping, creating chaos for an industry already struggling with uncertainty.
- The Trump administration has already sabotaged the program by laying off key staff and considering changes to the projects, showing its disdain for U.S. industrial growth.
- Industry leaders, who have already committed billions to U.S. chip production, are now left in limbo, thanks to Trump’s shortsighted, destructive rhetoric.
I’ll go a little bit further than that, because this mindset started long before Trump came to power.
Mitch McConnell has been championing this mindset for decades. Anything, anything that Democrats are in favor of, Republicans must be against at all costs. How many times have we seen McConnell lead a charge for Republicans to suddenly be about-face on one of their own policies because it started getting Democrat support? The man once filibustered his own bill because it got Democrat support.
Trump is just the manifestation of that mindset brought to its logical extremes. It was always going to end up here. At worst, Trump just sped the process up. But this is where we are now. Any Democrat initiatives are bad by default must be dismantled solely on the basis that a Democrat supported it in the first place.
You’re absolutely correct, and it’s important to point this out because people need to understand that Trump is not behaving in ways that are unusual for Republicans. He’s just an extreme manifestation of the mindset they all share.