The One Way Trump Hasn't Changed the G.O.P.

Asharq Al-Awsat

03-06-2025

By general consensus, if the policies of President Trump's first administration were a compromise between his impulses and the doctrines of the pre-Trump Republican Party, then Trump 2.0 is Trumpism in full. The old order is dissolved, the Bush and Reagan Republicans are exiled or subjugated, and Trump alone sets the agenda for the G.O.P.
There are clearly areas where this is true. Trump's foreign policy can be described in various ways — as a form of Jacksonian-inflected realism, as a deal-making blitz, as an immoral attempt to promote a more authoritarian world order — but in each description you can see the outline of something coherent and clearly specific to Trump himself.
Likewise the Trumpian culture war, which began with internal bureaucratic battles and now seeks to humble Harvard University, may be reckless or punitive or dubiously legal, but it's easy enough to tell a coherent story in which crushing the strongholds of cultural liberalism is a uniquely Trumpist goal.
But the budget battles that delivered the passage of a House tax bill last week feel like a notable exception to this rule. Here the old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas still dominant. Here Trumpism as a transformative force is relatively weak, in part because Trump himself doesn't know exactly what he wants. And here it's hard to make the way the Republican majority intends to tax and spend cohere with other elements of the administration's agenda, on trade and immigration above all.
In its broad strokes, the House tax bill could have been passed under any Republican president of my adult lifetime. Prioritizing low top tax rates and corporate tax cuts? That's the old song of supply-side economics. Combining those tax cuts with cuts to Medicaid and discretionary programs? That's Paul Ryan's Republican Party. Finding that your spending cuts don't pay for your tax cuts? That's the familiar deficit-financed conservatism of the Reagan and Bush presidencies.
Of course, there are aspects of the tax bill that are specific to Trump and his coalition. The Ryan-era G.O.P. was open to trimming Medicare and Social Security; the Trump-era party won't go there.
Now, one could counter that since Trump supports the 'big, beautiful' bill, it's Trumpist by definition. Maybe he just is an old-guard Republican on taxes and transfers.
But I don't think that's quite right. Trump has lots of economic instincts that differ from the old consensus. That's why he pushed the party leftward on Medicare and Social Security. It's why he recently warned congressional Republicans not to mess with Medicaid.
That default, in turn, does not cohere with the other elements of Trumpism. It doesn't cohere politically with his populist appeals because it offers relatively little to the president's downscale base. And it also doesn't cohere as economic policy because it doesn't match with the priorities implied by the president's big trade and immigration moves.
Both of those big moves reject the logic of 1990s and early 2000s globalization, the assumption that the freest possible movement of goods and people would necessarily benefit the United States.
On trade, for instance, the Trumpian idea that there is a particular interest in building up the American manufacturing base, whether for the sake of increasing blue-collar employment or the sake of national security, strongly implies that the government should be trying to act comprehensively to boost American industry and innovation in at least partial imitation of the Chinese model.
The Trump administration has ideas in this area, and its deregulation strategy.
My suspicion is that in the next year we'll get some talk about a Trump infrastructure or industrial policy bill but that, as in the first term, it will founder because House Republicans aren't interested and Democrats don't see any upside in bipartisanship.
On immigration, similarly, the Trump theory is that America can prosper with much lower rates of low-skilled immigration, thanks to some combination of tech breakthroughs (maybe the robots are finally coming) and higher wages that coax male work force dropouts back to factory jobs.
But in the longer run, if you have a much lower immigration rate, you need a higher domestic birthrate.
Of course, it's possible that the Trump administration and America will be fortunate, that deregulation alone will clear a path for technological breakthroughs that happen independently of government support, that cultural ferment will yield a more rapid renewal of family formation than any program of baby bonuses or child tax credits.
But in the realm of fiscal policy, amid debt and inflation risks, there will never be a Republican agenda oriented fully toward populist goals without a Republican president willing to break a conservative taboo that Trump has mostly left in place, by finding some way to be right-wing and also tax the rich.
The New York Times