The Trouble with the Trublicans

In 2016 the punditry class told us of the takeover, even the hijacking, of the Republican Party by Donald Trump.  As Trump progressively dropped his competitors in the GOP primaries, won the party’s nomination, and defeated Hillary Clinton in the general election, his presumptive takeover became complete.  The party was now his, for worse or worse yet.

This story had considerable street cred.  After all, his GOP primary opponents and the traditional Republican Party “establishment” sharply denounced Trump for almost everything:  his (lack of) credentials, his extravagant lying, his crudeness (if less so his misogyny), his violation of longstanding political norms.  No one, they asserted, was less prepared or less fit for the presidency. The party’s most recent standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, urged during the 2016 primaries that “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.  His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.”

But the takeover narrative was wrong, false from the outset.  The seeds for the Trump candidacy and election were planted long ago, so long ago that they now constitute the core of the party’s DNA.    And since the election Trump’s policies and standard Republican priorities have increasingly merged.

Trump is not an excrescence from GOP fundamentals.  He is their full flowering.  Rather than having been taken over, the party “owns” Trump.

This has become ever more apparent through the first year of Trump’s presidency.   In this post I examine this political symbiosis in terms of Republicans’ domestic agenda.

The faux populism of Trump’s campaign–promises to restore good incomes and jobs to working- and middle-class voters, and to provide “great” health care insurance for everyone at lower cost than “Obamacare”–has been swamped by Trump’s actual legislative agenda.  Rather than drain the swamp of special interests, he has taken a swan dive into it and found the tainted water just fine.

His first major betrayal of his political base came when he supported Republican legislation that would have forced many millions of Americans off their health insurance, legislation that would effectively repeal without “replacing” the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  This had been the goal of congressional Republicans since the law was passed in 2010, and the president put his full support behind the proposed legislation.  But in the face of widespread popular opposition, the bill was defeated.

However, the GOP, again with Trump’s enthusiastic support, soon accomplished much of this goal with the passage of its major tax bill the week before Christmas.  The legislation eliminated the ACA’s individual mandate, the requirement that individuals have health care insurance or pay a fine.  This move means that many healthy individuals will forego purchasing the insurance, causing premiums to increase.  The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the result will be 13 million more people without health care insurance by 2027.

Trump’s support for the tax bill puts him firmly in the GOP tradition of tax cuts for the wealthy.  The party and the president tried to sell the bill as a major tax cut for working Americans, in keeping with his populist appeals, but it is anything but.  The bill makes deep and permanent cuts to the taxes of corporations and the wealthiest Americans, including the president and his family, while offering modest and temporary tax cuts to the middle and working classes.

The president embraced the longstanding Republican fiction that cuts in business taxes would benefit working Americans in the form of better jobs at better wages as corporations invested their tax savings in job growth and higher incomes.  But past experience provides no support for this belief and most economists reject this “trickle down” theory of economic benefits.  Neither is it supported in the anticipations of major American business leaders.  In a gathering at Yale University in December of chief executive officers of top corporations, only 14 percent said they planned to make major capital investments upon passage of the tax bill.  And 60 percent worried that the tax reform law would hurt the nation’s health care system.

Contrary to his campaign pledges to improve substantially the economic prospects of “forgotten” workers and their families, Trump has supported traditional GOP policies of wealth redistribution upward in the nation’s class system.  As one analyst put it, the new tax law threatens to “turbocharge” inequality in a nation already one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.

It remains to be seen how long Trump and the GOP can continue to pull off their populist illusion.  On the one hand, recent polling finds that two-thirds of Americans believe the tax bill helps the wealthy more than it helps the middle class, and only 35 percent approve of Trump’s performance in office.  On the other hand, that 35 percent appears to represent the president’s consistent base of support among those who voted him into the White House.

And as the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently confessed (his term):  “I don’t expect the G.O.P. to be hurt by the decision to stiff its own voters.  The historical pattern is clear: The less Republicans do for workers, the more alienated the workers become and the more they vote Republican.”

We’ll have another look at the proposition in the 2018 elections.