After the stove is touched

I wrote plenty during the rise of Trumpism that would hold up very poorly today, but one thing I was right about was that claims that Trump represented the disjunctive end of the Reagan coalition misunderstood the political situation. Unless anybody is delusional enough to still be in the Josh Hawley Is A Real Populist Fantasy Club, there’s no longer any doubt that the Trump administration represents a more orthodox Reaganism than Reagan [gift link]:

And yet the most salient detail about Trump as an actual officeholder is that he is a Republican politician committed to the success of the Republican Party and its ideological vision. In this way, he is little more than a vehicle for the policy agenda of the most conservative Republicans, willing to sign whatever they might bring to his desk.

We saw this in his first term, with his signature legislative accomplishment, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Was this his promised transformation of the American economy, the populist blow for those Americans left behind by the nation’s failed political and economic leadership?

No, it was a massive upper-income tax cut designed to pay huge benefits to the wealthiest Americans, including the president, his family and their friends. In Trump’s first go at government, in fact, his entire administration was geared toward the rich and connected. His Environmental Protection Agency worked in the interest of industry; his Department of Labor worked in the interest of bosses; his Department of Health and Human Services worked hard to undermine Medicaid and other federal health programs; and his Department of the Interior was more interested in using land for resource extraction than protecting it for current and future generations of Americans.

In short, Trump governed like a Republican. And it is not a stretch to say that much of his first term was, on the domestic front, more or less indistinguishable from a hypothetical third term for the previous Republican president, George W. Bush. Trump even ended his term, as Bush did, with a rolling set of crises and disasters, each exacerbated by his mismanagement.

Trump has so far governed as a mostly orthodox Republican — not as some heterodox populist — in his second term as well. He spearheaded an assault on the federal administrative state, fulfilling a dream that dates back to conservative opposition to the New Deal, and has put his presidency behind large and unsustainable tax breaks for the rich as well as vicious cuts to the social insurance state.

If signed into law, the Senate version of Trump’s policy bill would slash $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and $186 billion from anti-poverty food assistance to help pay for trillions in tax breaks, including more than $564 billion in business tax cuts. By one estimate, these changes would result in at least 17 million people losing their health insurance over the next decade, as well as millions losing SNAP benefits, with some states possibly even ending their programs. All this so that the top 1 percent of households can receive an estimated average of a few tens of thousands of dollars each year.

But as irresponsible as this bill is, there is a dog-bites-man element to its existence. If we understand that Trump is, in most respects, an ordinary Republican president, then it is not news to learn that a Republican president wants to cut social services for the poor to sustain a large tax cut for the rich.

To follow up on Paul’s post earlier, while the passage of the Defund America Especially the Hospitals Act is a disaster for the country and it would be far better if it had not passed. But it also represents real political peril for the Republican Party. Arguably the person most responsible for Trump’s 2024 win — and as little consolation as this is, it was a narrow win with no coattails in an extremely unfavorable environment for incumbents — was John McCain, who stopped Republicans from passing a heinous and unpopular attack on the welfare state. A critical factor behind Trump’s ability to attract both marginal voters and much more favorable press coverage than he got in 2016 or 2020 was the general sense that Trump winning would just bring things back to 2019. This time Senate Republicans folded, and the horrible effect of these cuts is really going to hit hard in 2028. Voters should have been aware of what was going to happen, but most marginal voters almost certainly weren’t.

That’s not to say that this isn’t also an extremely perilous moment for the Democratic Party and democracy. Trump got away with an attempted autogolpe, making 2028 elections a very dicey proposition. We don’t know if Democrats will find a good candidate, and it’s far from clear if there’s any plan to get a Senate majority even if Trump’s approval completely tanks now that he’s fully committed both to Ryanomics and the least popular parts of his anti-immigration agenda. But Trump’s legislative centerpiece is the action of a “we better do this while we can” party, not a “we’re building a permanent majority coalition” party.

This guy represents a Republican +3 district. Pride goeth before etc.