4 days ago
The One Way Trump Hasn't Changed the G.O.P.
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. The top tax rate in the House bill is higher than the top rate under George W. Bush — reflecting a concession to fiscal reality and the desire to spare Medicaid from deeper cuts. And there are various provisions, from the tax cuts on tips and overtime to the increase in the child tax credit to the proposed tax increases on big foundations and universities, that seem to fit with the blue-collar coalition that votes Republican in 2024.
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