"The great election-eve middle-class tax cut began not as a factual proposal, but as a false promise," say Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker in The Washington Post. "Yet Washington's bureaucratic machinery whirred into action nonetheless — working to produce a policy that could be seen as supporting Trump's whim."
But "the mystery tax cut is only the latest instance of the federal government scrambling to reverse-engineer policies to meet Trump's sudden public promises — or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods," the Post adds. "Just this week, Vice President Pence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House all rushed to try to back up Trump's unsupported claim that 'unknown Middle Easterners' were part of a migrant caravan in Central America — only to have the president admit late Tuesday that there was no proof at all."
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