Trump’s Policies Are a Result of On-the-Job Training

This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on April 17, 2017 The me­dia and crit­ics on the Left are hav­ing a field day at­tack­ing Pres­id­ent Trump’s rather nu­mer­ous and of­ten dra­mat­ic changes of heart on policy—wheth­er China ma­nip­u­lates its cur­rency, the ne­ces­sity of the U.S. Ex­port-Im­port Bank and NATO, and the U.S.’s stra­tegic pos­ture in Syr­ia. And then there is the ques­tion of wheth­er health care re­form is really easy or really hard. The New York Times on Sunday ran an in­ter­est­ing graph­ic of Trump’s past and cur­rent state­ments on vari­ous is­sues. On NATO, the evol­u­tion star­ted on March 23, 2016, when he told Bloomberg Polit­ics, “I think NATO may be ob­sol­ete.” He re­it­er­ated the claim on April 4, 2016 to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, again on ABC’s This Week on Ju­ly 31, and to The Times of Lon­don on Jan. 16 of this year. But at a news con­fer­ence last week, he took a very dif­fer­ent tack. “I said it was ob­sol­ete,” he said. “It’s no longer ob­sol­ete.” Trump re­peated the same pat­tern on China’s cur­rency. “They’re de­valu­ing their cur­rency