How Trump remade the Republican Party in his image
This is going to be a post framed from a partisan Republican perspective. The nomination fight over Supreme Court Associate Justice made the Republican Party close ranks to rally around their embattled nominee. In the end, Donald Trump came out the big winner here, as he has now taken over the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel. Here’s how he did it.
The Nativist Rockefeller Republican
Let’s go back to the presidential election. After a bitter election battle, first in the Republican primaries against Never Trumpers and then against the ultimate establishment Democrat Hillary, Donald Trump emerged victorious. Here’s how I described the chance for Trump to reshape his party after he secured the presidency in November 2016:
With the Republicans taking both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, the potential for Trump to reshape the party in his image is immense. The question now regarding the Trump economic platform is how much he will bend to the will of the Republican establishment and how much will Trump remain focused on his blue-collar and middle class base of support.
I see Trump as a sort of nativist and populist version of the Rockefeller Republicans…If Trump wants to be successful, he will need to tend to his base and not the Republican establishment. And that means reincorporating New York Rockefeller Republicanism into the party…
I would suggest that to do as he wants, he will have to force the Republican Party out of one of its default economic positions. There are four:
- Less government is good
- Deficits are bad
- Lower taxes are better than higher taxes
- Free trade is good
The circle that has to be squared is the one that involves the inherent contradictions of the first three planks of Republican orthodoxy as much as if not more than the fourth, where Trump has concentrated his election speeches. You can’t lower taxes and reduce deficits at the same time unless you dramatically reduce the size of government. And you can’t reduce the size of government without harming the beneficiaries of government – the famous 47% that Mitt Romney talked about. The fact is that everyone in the middle class depends on the government. And if you want to be a reformer that gives something tangible to the people, going about it by slashing government spending is like walking through a minefield. One false step in slashing the wrong government program without sufficient offset from the tax base or job growth and you’ve blown yourself up.
This is the problem with establishment Republicanism.
Trump has delivered for his base on the economy
Trump is coarse. He is reckless. He lies constantly. And he has been a divisive cultural warrior. Moreover, until late last year, he hadn’t delivered on his economic platform either. You could have argued persuasively that means he failed as a president. But, if you are thinking about his base alone, and since the tax cuts in December, Trump has delivered.
Look at the four planks of Republican orthodoxy I mentioned. With the tax cuts, Trump has blown up deficits in a gargantuan way, well into the business cycle. That’s goosing the economy as intended – in exactly the same way it did for Ronald Reagan the Keynesian, early in the business cycle 35 years ago. The tax cuts are completely skewed toward the rich and corporations. But so what?
If you are a Republican partisan, what matters is that Trump delivers prosperity to the economy and to the middle classes. By the way, the unemployment rate is now 3.5% for high school graduates who have no college study at all. That’s lower even than the 3.7% headline unemployment rate.
Source: BLS
But you protest that these are low quality jobs? Maybe. Average hour earnings are rising 2.8% and the economy as a whole is projected to gain over 4% according to the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker. That’s after a year of 3%+ growth. It’s hard to say Trump hasn’t delivered, when everyone is receiving a tax cut, the economy is growing and unemployment is at 5-decade lows.
Moreover, as tortured as Trump’s NAFTA negotiations have been, he has scored a victory, bettering terms for the US. He has pulled the US out of TPP, ostensibly to protect US jobs. And he has threatened Europe over steel and cars. In the media, you hear people talking about the ill effects of all that protectionism. But that’s not what people are seeing in their paychecks or feeling in the economy. So, for the Republican base, all of Trump’s protectionist moves are just what the doctor ordered – a President looking out for ordinary workers after years of the Republican and Democratic orthodoxy screwing them with free trade.
Cultural wars the base likes
Less government is good, especially if slackers are the ones receiving the benefits of government largesse. Isn’t that the mantra of the Republican Party? Trump has stuck to that mantra. And his base is fine with that. They love it, in fact.
Now, maybe you gave Obama a chance. You might have even voted for him. But he betrayed you. He bailed out the banks. He made all sorts of liberal cultural choices you’re uncomfortable with. And he didn’t even deliver on the economic front. The economy was weak during his presidency and unemployment was high. In eight years, he didn’t fix it. After one year, Trump did.
On the cultural wars, think of it this way: if you’re an average American, going to work, centering your life around your family, friends and community, then that doesn’t leave a huge amount of time to worry about Muslims, affirmative action, terrorism, or immigrants crossing the border. But if the President frames the issue as “less government is good” or “national defense”, why would you stand in the way of that. Sure he goes too far, like the whole family separation thing. But, on the whole, he’s sending a message and keeping these people out.
So you have no problem with the government helping Asians break down affirmative action at schools like Harvard. You have no problem with Trump’s seeking to prevent Mexicans and Central Americans from crossing the border. Does that make you a racist as Democrats would say? No. After all, you did vote for Obama. In fact, this whole racism stuff is deeply offensive.
Brett Kavanaugh
So, everything is on the up and up. And life is getting better. Trump is coarse and he’s impulsive in some pretty bad ways. But you’re happy with his policies. And you’re offended that people are calling you a racist just because you support your president.
And now, with the Republicans on the verge of putting someone on the court who is going to rule issues the way you see fit, Democrats pull out a series of sexual harassment allegations at the last second. It’s a clear attempt to smear the man for political reasons, just as Susan Collins said. If anything, the whole affair makes you angry and more likely to vote to keep these Democrats out.
Judge Kavanaugh, with his experience in the heart of the George W. Bush administration, is far more a Republican establishment figure than is the president who nominated him. Indeed, he was chosen by Mr. Trump at the urging of the party’s conservative legal establishment, and fully embraced by the party’s Senate caucus.
Then, when the nomination ran into serious peril, these two sometimes-divided forces—the Trump army on the one hand, and the mainstream Republican Party on the other—came together to save it.
Even more than the passage of a big tax cut last year, that experience has bonded the president and the party that once didn’t want him. And the effects of that experience could be far-reaching.
“The Kavanaugh nomination has brought together the Republican Party in a way that no other fight could,” says Ron Bonjean, a longtime Republican strategist who helped guide the nomination of Mr. Trump’s last choice, Neil Gorsuch. “The feeling within the newly bonded GOP is that Democrats unfairly pulled out all the stops and used every creative political tactic they could to try and topple our nominee. At the end of this process, Republicans know deep down that it is better to have our side in power with the ability to make judicial nominations than actually lose it and watch the process from the sidelines.”
So that’s where we are. Trump has delivered on his promises economically. This is the best economy in at least a decade, the best unemployment rate in 50 years. And you’ve been willing to go along with his over-the-top nativist impulses because, at heart, directionally he’s right, if extreme. And when push comes to shove on reshaping America the right way, he delivers. First, it was Gorsuch, now it’s Kavanaugh.
The Democrats are just playing politics.
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