2016 ELECTION/GOP/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “A few weeks after Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked Trump voters why they went for the man who had just shocked the world.
Four in 10 Trump voters said one of the primary reasons was that he would change business as usual in Washington. By contrast, only one in 10 said they picked Mr. Trump because they thought he would pursue traditional Republican policies.
Those two numbers explain why now-President Trump probably is on safe ground in his sudden pivot to wooing Democratic leaders in Congress, while openly scorning those of his own Republican Party.
A large share of Trump voters picked him because they thought he would rattle the status quo—and by that they meant the status quo of both parties. Mr. Trump wasn’t a true ideological conservative, and his supporters knew that.
He was barely a Republican, and his supporters also knew that. In the first moment of the first Republican primary debate, after all, Mr. Trump alone among the candidates refused to say he’d support the eventual GOP nominee or forswear running as an independent if he didn’t get the nomination.
In sum, Mr. Trump ran as a virtual political independent. He used the Republican Party apparatus when he had to, particularly when he rented it as a substitute campaign infrastructure. But the party’s congressional leaders had no love for him, and he none for them. After he won, he stood on the steps of the Capitol on Inauguration Day and delivered an angry address that attacked the entire Washington power structure arrayed around him, without regard to party.”
-Gerald F. Seib, “Why Donald Trump Is Free to Show Independence From GOP,” The Wall Street Journal online, Sept. 11, 2017 10:32am