So a Republican gets into office after a campaign that was not in good faith, misleading the public on his nature and intentions, then targets the usual establishment Republican policy positions that he didn’t really run on, or even stated he was against, acting like he has a mandate after a contested election in which he didn’t win the popular vote.

His popularity naturally dips.

We go to war and the country rallies around him and re-elects him.  (Then they turn on the war and him, too late.)

Karl Rove sold George W. Bush as a “compassionate conservative,” a moderate who could work with people.  A guy you’d want to have a beer with.  Once in office they went hard right, lead by Rove and Cheney on domestic, foreign and social policy to pay back their conservative supporters.   9/11 exposed them further as narrow minded ideologues who ignored the warnings from the Clinton administration.  They made their own reality, or so they claimed, in initiating a neo-con wet dream of military actions.  They manufactured consent for the wars by manipulating the media the public and lawmakers with cherry picked intelligence.  Then after 4 years of failure, claiming, “hey we’re at war, you have to keep us on.”

Trump is a businessman who railed against foreign entanglements but is dancing around with a who’s who of anti-Iran, anti-Muslim, Middle-East hawks like John Bolton, John Woolsey and Frank Gaffney. In the meantime, he’s shown no signs of disavowing Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the establishment Republicans he decried during the campaign, as they gear up to privatize Medicare and pass a whole wish list of establishment Republican legislative items.

The track record says they’ll do trickle down on steroids, try to privatize and/or cut the safety net, cut regulations like a mad slasher and capture regulatory agencies like they did under Bush. Deficits, that are always the worst things in the world under Democrats, will suddenly not matter.  In other words, act just like an establishment Republican administration. Which will be unpopular with everybody other than the hard core Republicans out there.

So we’ll go to war to paper over that unpopularity.

Yeah, it’s early.  But why be caught by surprise?  These people never surprise us. It’s our fellow Americans and how they swallow GOP bullshit whole that always surprises/disappoints us.   I think underestimating American gullibility is probably done too.