Before last week’s Republican convention, Donald Trump seemed to be moving away from the populism that characterized his 2016 campaign. “This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power,” Rogé Karma observed in The Atlantic. “He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing C.E.O.s.”
When Mr. Trump named Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate, though, pundits quickly concluded that he was doubling down on populism. Mr. Vance has been a leading critic of Reagan-Bush policy orthodoxy in the G.O.P., has expressed skepticism of further corporate tax cuts and has even voiced approval of President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, whose aggressive antitrust enforcement has angered big business. In his convention speech, Mr. Vance denounced NAFTA and China trade deals and promised to prioritize American workers over multinational corporations.
On the other hand, in a long interview with Bloomberg (conducted in late June) that came out after the announcement of Mr. Vance’s selection, Mr. Trump hardly sounded like a firebrand economic populist. He floated the idea of reducing corporate tax rates to 15 percent and said he’d consider the JPMorgan Chase C.E.O., Jamie Dimon, as a potential Treasury secretary.
Mr. Trump’s own convention speech hardly clarified his policy priorities. He simultaneously promised to cut taxes, leave Social Security unchanged, reduce the deficit, raise tariffs and lower inflation.
Mr. Trump’s Republican Party thus presents a paradox. On the one hand, Mr. Trump has clearly succeeded in uniting the party around him. At the same time, the Republican policy conversation has only grown more diffuse — if not confusing and cacophonous. In other words, Mr. Trump’s consolidated control of the Republican Party has had the surprising effect of making its policies more, not less, unsettled.
We saw plenty of evidence of this throughout the Republican convention and in the party platform. Speakers on the first day alone ranged from anti-union, pro-free-trade, low-taxes Senator Ron Johnson to Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, who excoriated Amazon, Uber and other giant corporations for exploiting workers and selling out national interests.
The party’s official platform offers divergent planks without any attempt to reconcile them. Commentators have already highlighted a number of apparent contradictions: Tighter labor markets resulting from a crackdown on illegal immigration and “the largest deportation operation in American history,” coupled with more tariffs, would, at least in the immediate term, seem to conflict with the goal of lowering inflation. According to some analysts, including at times Senator Vance, the call to “keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency” might inhibit the goal of turning the United States into a “manufacturing superpower.”
Since 2016, pundits and politicians have divided the Republican Party into pro-Trump and anti-Trump, or populist and establishment, factions. These factions are said to have fundamentally different constituencies (the party’s working-class base versus major donors, corporate lobbies and establishment institutions) that pursue fundamentally different ends (MAGA nationalism versus global neoliberalism). The trajectory of the Trump 2024 campaign, however, suggests it may be time to retire, or at least revise, this framing.
G.O.P. factional quarrels still occur, but the combatants no longer contest the party’s first principles or ultimate aims. Mr. Trump cannot be seriously challenged in setting the goals of the party; those who continue to reject him, like Liz Cheney, have simply become irrelevant to Republican politics.
Instead, factional battles are largely confined to disputes over the means to achieve Trumpian goals. Additionally, the lines between factions are blurring. Senator Vance is enthusiastically supported by the party’s economic nationalists, but he is also a favorite of Silicon Valley donors, including Elon Musk, a group otherwise known for libertarian and socially liberal instincts.
In this sense, the Trump G.O.P. is increasingly coming to resemble the Democratic Party of recent decades (leaving aside the convulsions of the current moment). Paralleling Republican fault lines, centrist Democrats can be distinguished from progressive populists, but the two sides seldom question each other’s basic legitimacy in the way that Never Trumpers once sought to purge MAGA populism.
Both Democratic factions, each with its own respectable and sometimes overlapping donor base, typically claim to share the same worldview and primarily debate the means to realizing it. Centrists as well as progressives, for example, claim they want to reduce housing costs for low earners, but centrists tend to argue that relaxing zoning restrictions and environmental permitting reform are better policy tools than rent control and subsidization.
The G.O.P. increasingly replicates these dynamics. As the convention speeches indicate, middle-of-the road Republicans like Senator Tim Scott are now generally happy to follow Mr. Trump’s lead in calling for a revival of U.S. manufacturing and other populist goals. Look closer, however, and there remains a divide over how to get there. Some stick to a conventional conservative tool kit of tax cuts and deregulation; others urge more interventionist measures like tariffs.
But the Republican factional divide differs in key respects from the Democrats’. On the Democratic side, most of the party’s technocrats align firmly with the centrist faction. When it comes to the unglamorous business of governing and staffing bureaucracies, this gives centrist Democrats a significant advantage over both their progressive and Republican rivals. Centrist liberals still tend to think of themselves — and are still often perceived as — the adults in the room. Agree with their policy positions or not, they typically emphasize pragmatism and responsibility over progressives’ moral and ideological purity, and policy rigor over populist bluster.
Among Republicans, by contrast, there are not many competent technocrats in either faction. To be sure, there are more intellectuals and organizations on the populist right than there were eight years ago, and the staffing of a second Trump administration would almost certainly be better organized than in 2017. But populist Republicans still lack institutional depth.
Legacy conservative institutions remain well endowed, but their number of serious policy scholars with credibility among both Republican officeholders and the wider intellectual elite is vanishingly small.
This problem is visible in the party platform, perhaps the clearest indication to date of Mr. Trump’s own policy preferences and the G.O.P.’s center of gravity.
The platform’s 20 bullet points feature many populist economic commitments (“seal the border,” “stop outsourcing,” “no cuts” to Social Security and Medicare). Perhaps surprisingly, the platform does not call for making all of the 2017 tax cuts permanent, mentioning only the expanded standard deduction and child tax credit. But the ensuing 10 chapters of explanatory gloss are light on specifics — the whole document is only 16 pages — with details on the more populist elements virtually nonexistent. There is a vague mention of tariffs, but little in the way of a plan to “turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower” or “modernize our military,” which might involve industrial policy measures or defense procurement reform.
A common response to such omissions is that Mr. Trump has always been a “fake populist,” out to dupe gullible voters with deceptive sloganeering. This explanation seems too glib. Would Mr. Trump, at this point, lose any support for dropping or softening talk of re-shoring and tariffs? It seems unlikely — Republican economic nationalists have nowhere else to turn, while many donors would cheer — and yet these items remain.
Mr. Trump did not hesitate to support softening longstanding G.O.P. commitments to a federal abortion ban or traditional definitions of marriage in this year’s platform. It seems difficult to argue, then, that Mr. Trump’s economic populism is totally insincere, though it remains questionable whether he and his inner circle are capable of developing a coherent agenda, much less carrying out one.
On this point, the Reagan-Bush old guard would still like to claim for itself the mantle of policy seriousness and administrative competence. But its ideological adherence to fundamentally discredited policy positions undermines its credibility. Tax cuts, at least in recent decades, have not paid for themselves. The erosion of the U.S. industrial base is a major problem.
Whether or not one agrees with the solutions offered by right-populists, they are responding to real problems, and on issues such as Social Security, they have also displayed more political realism and flexibility than, say, Bush-era Republicans. Nevertheless, they have not quite established themselves as a new center — among Republicans or in the nation as a whole — and many seem to prefer to cast themselves as insurgents and outsiders rather than assume the responsibilities of a governing establishment.
Here, the G.O.P.’s crosscutting policy impulses arguably reflect deeper challenges that go beyond partisan dynamics. With the rise of China as a peer competitor, increasingly assertive and aligned with Russia, we face a new geopolitical and geoeconomic order. The tailwinds supporting consumption and financial asset appreciation that arose from the unipolar moment after the Cold War — and which covered over U.S. industrial decline — are slowly fading.
America faces many difficult choices in the years ahead that will be costly for any party or politician to confront. More and more, these incoherent policy positions simply point to problems with no easy solutions, and decisions that no one wants to make.
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