Our new president is a different kind of MAGAmaniac Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue and they had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.) However he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end. The activist base that had recently fashioned itself as the Tea Party after Obama’s election in 2008, quietly reinvented itself as the MAGA movement and lost all interest in fiscal austerity the minute Trump came on the scene. But there has always been some restiveness among the right wing ideologues in the House and Senate who really…